Georgia puts women at risk through its abortion policies. Though it doesn’t go whole-hog and ban the procedure like South Dakota, it chips away at it substantially. The Georgia senate just passed three bills which require any pregnant woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound that she is required to pay for; allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for medications that they believe terminate a pregnancy even if their belief is totally at odds with medical fact (emergency contraception and birth control pills never terminate an established pregnancy); and criminalize the killing of an “unborn child” at any stage under the guise of an anti-domestic violence measure, but define “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb.”
The legislators couldn’t care less about protecting Georgia women from abusive husbands and boyfriends. If they did, they would fund more domestic violence shelters and mandate violence prevention programs in schools.
Under its broad definition of “unborn child,” the bill threatens that women who undergo an abortion could someday face murder charges, which is what the extreme anti-abortion forces want. Because if Georgia law brings double-homicide charges against a suspect in the killing of a woman pregnant even with a pinprick-size embryo, then why shouldn’t women who end their pregnancy through abortion also be considered murderers?
The AJC editorial board is right: Right-wing lawmakers don’t give two shits about domestic violence, and members of the Republican party practically make sport out of rallying against things like the Violence Against Women Act. As for why women who have abortions shouldn’t be considered murders, well… that’s the eventual goal, isn’t it? This is just setting down the groundwork.
Now I’m all for increasing the penalty for assaulting a pregnant woman if that assault damages or kills her fetus. I’m for increasing that penalty to the same degree as it would be if the killing of that fetus were considered murder. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to define a fetus or zygote at any stage as a full-fledged human being when our Supreme Court and our Constitution say otherwise.
Of course, lawmakers in the Senate wouldn’t go that far in an election year. They still believe there are a few moderate Republicans who support safe, legal access to abortion. And the GOP doesn’t want to rankle them.
That’s why all three anti-abortion measures stop just short of making life too difficult for affluent women. It’s poorer, rural women who will be most affected.
Asked about the expense of the pre-abortion sonogram, state Sen. Nancy Schaefer (R-Turnerville) said insurance will pick up the cost. Hardly, since many poor Georgians lack health insurance. And a metro Atlanta woman rebuffed by a pharmacist who won’t fill a prescription, citing the new conscience clause, can just cross the street to another store. But that’s not the case in rural Georgia, where there may be only one pharmacist
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Right. Since most minimum-wage jobs provide insurance benefits, and Medicaid covers the cost of abortions and abortion-related expenses.
I love the hypocrisy here: The GOP has effectively ended state-sponsored medical coverage of abortion, contraception and abortion-related expenses; has cut welfare benefits for women who do choose to have children; and has made preventing pregnancy more difficult. They target these policies toward low-income women, who are disproportionally immigrants and women of color. They complain that middle-class white Christian women aren’t doing their civic duty by out-birthing those brown folks. They cut programs that help women and their children, like Head Start, subsidized daycare and pre-school programs. They raise the costs of having children, and they raise the barriers to pregancy prevention. And then they act like they want to end abortion because they love babies. I get dizzy trying to follow it all.
In recent weeks, state legislatures in South Dakota and Mississippi denied women the right to an abortion, voting to outlaw abortions in almost all cases. The Georgia GOP opted to chip away at that right one invasive law at a time.
The ultimate outcome will be the same: Women in Georgia will no longer have access to safe and legal abortion. A pregnant 15-year-old will either travel to states in the Northeast where abortion remains legal, or she will risk her life in a back-alley abortion. Either way, the Georgia Legislature doesn’t care.
Word.
Oh, and if there was any question that anti-choice laws are designed at least in part to require white Christian ladies to make babies, check out the views of one anti-choicer who supports the Georgia restrictions:
I bring this up to point out a little-known, or at least little-trumpeted, benefit of the laws against abortion that were overturned in 1973. These laws were passed from 1860 to 1880 to counter an epidemic of induced abortion among married Protestant women. Physicians, led by Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer, were directly involved in the passage of these laws. On May 3, 1859, Storer brought the American Medical Association into the crusade.
Abortions rose sharply after these laws were overturned in 1973. From their first passage in 1860, the laws undoubtedly were saving large numbers of children from abortion. The millions of children saved typically grew up, married, had children and thus became the ancestors of virtually everyone in the United States who has Protestant roots. One could argue (and I do) that Storer was the most important person of the 19th century.
Now, this is a pretty stupid argument — I don’t think all Protestants owe their roots to anti-abortion laws any more than I owe my roots to the Holocaust, without which my grandparents would never have met. Without Australia’s immigration laws, my parents would have never met because my dad would have been raised an Aussie. That doesn’t make the Holocaust “good,” or laws barring the physically handicapped from immigrating “good.” Some people get born. Some don’t. Whether you get born or not depends on a whole slew of situations and actions and little bits of fate — you exist almost entirely by chance. What if your parents hadn’t decided to have sex that night? What if the fertilized egg that eventually became you hadn’t attached to the uterus? What if the egg had let a different sperm in?
The argument of “But what if your mother aborted you?” is one of the least cogent anti-choice statements anyone can make — and indeed, one of the most narcissistic. Because guess what: The universe doesn’t give two shits about you and your existence. And just because something could have prevented you from being here doesn’t mean that such a thing is bad; just because something enabled your existence doesn’t make it good.
One of my good friends exists because her mother had an illegal abortion some years before her birth. I know two little girls who are on this earth because their mother had an abortion when she got pregnant at 19. There are millions of other people like them. Without those abortions, these people wouldn’t exist. The idea that it’s an either-or proposition — either you have an abortion and quash your family line, or you have children and continue it — is a false one.
We could completely ban contraception, including condoms, and we’d have a lot more people. We could go the way of the former Romanian dictatorship and require women to undergo gynecological examinations every month to make sure that they weren’t messing with their child-producing duties. We could eliminate laws against rape because hey, without rape some women wouldn’t get pregnant, and then entire familial lines won’t exist. We could rally against the “rhythm method” that many observant Catholic women utilize to control their fertility, because that method means that you don’t get pregnant constantly. All these things would “save” large numbers of potential children. But at what cost? Where do we draw the line? And since when is this even a rational argument?
I’ll end with pointing out that the author of this piece is very clear in saying that anti-abortion laws were initially intended to force a particular class of women to give birth. They weren’t about saving lives, but making sure that society has enough white Protestant people in it, ostensibly to outnumber the “unwanteds” (immigrants, blacks, Catholics, etc). That particular justification hasn’t changed much. It’s still about control.
Only tangentally related, but I have to read this book: Absolute Convictions.