Anti-choice blogger Jill Stanek calls me a pinhead for saying, in an old post, that “I am pro-choice because I believe that if we outlaw a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, there is no legal argument against forcing a woman to terminate a pregnancy, or disallowing certain people from reproducing.” Here’s what Stanek says in response:
What Jill means is if we outlaw a woman the right to say yes or no to abortion, the government can force her to abort.
I don’t know any other way to say this. Jill, frankly my dear shared name, you’re crazy. You must have ventured too close at the Pro-Choice Carnival to the guy in the sideshow who sticks pins all over his body and yourself become a pinhead.
Outlawing slavery, the closest analogy, did not contradictorily give the government or anyone the right to own slaves, for heaven’s sakes. Outlawing anything for that matter does not translate into forcing what was outlawed onto the public. Get real.
But specifically, any and all plans to outlaw abortion are solely based on the fact that the entity being aborted is a human being, a legal person, eradicating the legality of a China abortion syndrome in the U.S.
As for forced sterilization, it was your side, the eugenics movement, that forwarded that during the late 1800s/early-to-mid 1900s, Jill. In fact, your heroine, Margaret Sanger, and her friends were proponents of forced sterilization. Thankfully, that was long ago outlawed and has nothing to do with abortion.
She also seems to dislike our banner.*
Stanek must have missed the part of my post where I made it clear that I was addressing legal arguments. So, to clarify: As it stands, the right to terminate a pregnancy is based on a combination of constitutional rights which collectively amount to a right to privacy. This right to privacy covers the rights to access and use birth control; the right to terminate a pregnancy; and the right to have sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of your own home. A cornerstone of the pro-choice argument is that the government should not have the right to force us to carry pregnancies to term, and that when the government does legally compel women to continue their pregnancies, it is an unjustified intrusion on our bodies, our health, and our lives. The pro-choice legal argument is premised on the idea that privacy is a fundamental right, and that such privacy should not be subject to government intrusion.
Now, when you destroy that right to privacy, you set a standard that the government has a right to dictate our private sexual and medical decisions. Once that right to privacy is stripped away, the government has the right to tell women that we must carry pregnancies to term or face legal consequences. My argument in the post Stanek links was that if women lack the rights to sexual and reproductive privacy and autonomy, that not only means that the government can force us to give birth birth against our will, but that, in theory, they could force women to terminate against their wills. Am I saying that anti-choicers are lining up and trying to force women into abortion? No. But they are trying to force women into childbirth, and I wonder, if the right to privacy was taken away, what legal standing women would have to refuse abortion or birth control. And, yes, I know Stanek and other anti-choicers would argue for a Human Life Amendment which would define personhood from the moment of conception, but such an idea would be nearly impossible to execute.** As it stands, the one thing standing between governmental intrusion and a woman’s right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term is the constitutional right to privacy that Stanek et al would like to eliminate.
Stanek brings up China, saying that:
But specifically, any and all plans to outlaw abortion are solely based on the fact that the entity being aborted is a human being, a legal person, eradicating the legality of a China abortion syndrome in the U.S.
She is right that most anti-choicers premise their moral arguments on the idea that a fertilized egg is a person, and should be embodied with all of the same rights that you and I have. But that argument runs into a slew of problems, a few of which I’ve discussed here, here and here. If Roe was overturned tomorrow, many states would immediately outlaw abortion — but others wouldn’t. My point isn’t that some states would implement forced-abortion laws immediately; I don’t think that such laws would fly. However, we do have a very ugly history of forced and coerced sterilizations, and of deeming certain classes of people “unfit” to reproduce. There are organizations that still coerce “unfit” women (mostly poor women and women of color) into permanently removing their reproductive capabilities. So this is not just “history.” This is not just happening in China — although China does provide an illustrative example of what can happen when you allow a government to control its citizens’ reproductive rights (so does Romania under its Communist dictatorship).
All of this should make one thing clear: Infringements on reproductive freedom are not just about abortion. Reproductive freedom is about the right to be pregnant as much as the right to not be. This is what Jill Stanek and other anti-choicers overlook or outright ignore — Stanek goes so far as to say that forced sterilization “was long ago outlawed and has nothing to do with abortion.” I would argue that forced sterilization has everything to do with abortion, as it’s impossible to separate abortion rights from other rights to sexual autonomy.
But it’s telling that Stanek is so ready to separate the two in her mind. It’s telling that for all of her “pro-life” activism, she isn’t all that concerned about the lives of poor women, women of color, and other women who have their rights to reproduce stripped away — unless they’re having abortions. She, like many other anti-choice conservatives, doesn’t seem all that concerned with babies after they leave the birth canal. She isn’t concerned about the women having the babies, and she certainly isn’t concerned with privacy rights or bodily autonomy or health care; she doesn’t seem to have much of an affinity for accurate information, logic or common sense, either.
Forced and coerced sterilization and birth control may be “long ago” history to Jill Stanek, but they aren’t history to the women who continue to undergo them. They are very much in the present. They are infringements on reproductive freedom that women in this country face every single day.
But they are only attacks on women. Unsurprisingly, the fetus fetishists could care less.
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*They always do. Really, what is it with conservative readers and hating on the shotgun girl? It’s a joke, people. It’s funny. Ironic, even. There is no deep significance. It is about neither the Second Amendment nor phallic symbols nor shooting your dick off. Move along now.
**Would the embryo get a social security number? Would every tampon have to be checked for evidence of a human death? Could a woman be tried for negligence or homicide by child abuse if she didn’t know she was pregnant and miscarries after, say, going skiing or playing sports? What if she did know and she went anyway? Perhaps I’ll write another post on this one, but suffice it to say it would be extremely difficult to ever institute such a policy.
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UPDATE: Jivin, dude, read.
Jill at Feministe tries to defend her reasoning that if abortion is made illegal then there will be no legal argument to prevent laws against forced abortions. The problems with her argument are many. First, it fails to note that if the unborn are granted the right to life (which is what prolifers want in the long run) then that would be a strong legal argument against forced abortions since killing them by forced abortion would violate their right to life.
Actually, I did address that when I wrote, “And, yes, I know Stanek and other anti-choicers would argue for a Human Life Amendment which would define personhood from the moment of conception, but such an idea would be nearly impossible to execute.**” Those two little stars connect to a slightly longer explanation.
Second, it assumes the entire right to privacy would be overturned if the courts overturn the right to legal abortion. Jill assumes the entire right to privacy would be “destroy(ed)” instead of the justices merely ruling that killing your unborn child isn’t part of the right to privacy. Jill also seems unaware that in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court changed their reasoning for the justification of legal abortion by using arguments for “liberty” and discarding Blackmun’s “privacy” reasoning and trimester framework.
Actually, I’m quite aware of the Casey ruling, and I would suggest that you re-read it. At no point does it dscard the privacy reasoning. It does re-evaluate the trimester framework, but it doesn’t throw out privacy in exchange for liberty; it embraces both of them.
Another problem I see with her reasoning is: Is there any legal argument to stop forced abortions after viability? If abortions are illegal after viability (as pro-choicers claim) then wouldn’t Jill’s position entail there aren’t any legal arguments against forced abortion after viability?
Um, no. Because women are invested with the rights to bodily privacy and autonomy, a forced post-viability abortion would be an infringement on those rights; it would also be some form of assault. Since women are not mere incubators, we can’t do whatever we want to them. My argument is basically this: If we presume that a woman’s body is not her own once she becomes pregnant — if we presume that the government has the right to demand that she use her body as a human incubator, and that she is little more than a tool to achieve the government’s aims — then it doesn’t seem quite so crazy to presume that the government would be able to decide that its aims involve only certain women being required to carry to term, and other women required to terminate.
Again, I understand that the goal of the anti-choice movement is to pass some sort of human life amendment wherein personhood would begin at conception. But that brings up a whole slew of problems which I’m going to address in another post.