In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Abortion

Now, if you’ll just get the father of your fetus to sign on the line here

Oh, how I love living in Ohio. It gives me such marvelous pieces of legislation! Like House Bill 287. What is this lovely piece of legislative craftsmanship, you ask? A bill requiring paternal notification and consent before a woman can obtain an abortion.

A friend of mine who works for the ACLU sent me a copy of the letter from Representative Adams seeking co-sponsors back at the end of May. Here’s his lovely synopsis of the bill:

1) Prohibit a person from performing or inducing an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the father of the unborn child.

2) Require a pregnant woman seeking to abort her pregnancy to provide, in writing, the identity of the father of the unborn child to the person who is to perform or induce the abortion.

3) Prohibit a pregnant woman seeking to abort her pregnancy from providing to the person who is to perform or induce the abortion the identity of the man as the father of the unborn child if the man is not the father of the unborn child.

4) Prohibit a man from giving the consent required to perform or induce an abortion as the father of the unborn child if the man knows that he is not the father of the unborn child.

5) Prohibit a person from causing a man to believe that the man is the father of an unborn child for the purpose of obtaining the consent required to perform or induce an abortion, if the person knows that the man is not the father of the unborn child.

6) Require the person who is to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman who identifies two or more men as possible fathers of the unborn child to perform a paternity test, or cause a paternity test to be performed, to determine the father of the unborn child prior to accepting any parental consent.

7) Provide that the written parental consent and written paternal identification are confidential.

The mind truly boggles. At the time, I sent a letter to Representative Adams, although I never received a response of any kind:

Dear Representative Adams:

It has recently come to my attention that you intend to introduce legislation aimed at protecting the rights of fathers in the case of abortion. (The original bill was introduced as HB 339 in the 124th General Assembly.) While the bill will do several things, its primary purpose is to require paternal notification and consent before a woman can terminate her pregnancy.

I am writing to you to urge you to abandon this proposed piece of legislation. First, the United States Supreme Court has considered the constitutional validity of spousal consent requirements and found them lacking. In Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976), the Court specifically held the state could not delegate a veto power to a spouse when the state itself was specifically prohibited from doing the same under Roe v. Wade. There is nothing based upon the language of your bill which suggests that paternal notification will not meet the same constitutional fate. I implore you not to waste taxpayer time and money (or compromise your own oath of office) in proposing a law that is facially unconstitutional.

Secondly, I am deeply troubled by the fact that you seem to be of the opinion that a man’s right to determine the fate of his potential offspring trumps a woman’s right to determine the same. Whether it is your intent or not, your bill would empower men to decide for women whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. The Orwellian overtones of such a bill are, frankly, terrifying.

I am confident that it is not your intent to patronize women in this manner, nor is it your objective to put pregnant women at the whim of their sexual partners. However, I am not sure what other conclusion will result from your proposed legislation. In healthy relationships (sexual, romantic, marital, and otherwise), men and women already communicate the facts of pregnancy and proposed termination to each other. In circumstances where they do not, it is not the province of the legislature to intervene. It seems the height of arrogance to assume that a man’s right to know somehow overwhelms the right of a woman to bodily integrity.

It is indeed regretful when a man and woman are unable to agree on what to do in the event of an unwanted pregnancy, but attempting to legislate paternal consent is not a solution. I can only hope that you will please reconsider your bill and abandon your efforts to gain co-sponsors.

Sincerely,

etc., etc.

And as if the legislation were not bad enough, there’s the matter of the press coverage.

Several Ohio state representatives who normally take an anti-abortion stance are now pushing pro-choice legislation – sort of.

Led by Rep. John Adams, a group of state legislators have submitted a bill that would give fathers of unborn children a final say in whether or not an abortion can take place. “This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child,” said Adams, a Republican from Sidney. “I didn’t bring it up to draw attention to myself or to be controversial. In most cases, when a child is born the father has financial responsibility for that child, so he should have a say.”

First, let’s be clear: there is nothing pro-choice about this bill whatsoever because it operates to give men complete and total authority to decide whether or not their partner may have an abortion. It’s not encouraging choices, it’s encouraging either (a) nothing at all because people in healthy relationships already talk about unplanned pregnancies or (b) abuse and manipulation. Let’s guess which is more likely. I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that would-be fathers should have some say in reproductive decision making,* but “a say” cannot be veto power. (Edited to add: you can talk all you like for as long as your partner is willing to discuss it, but the decision belongs to the person whose bodily autonomy is in question.)

Thank goodness we’ve got a liberal governor in office.

A Question for Pro-Lifers

I know there are at least a few regular readers who self-identify as “pro-life.” So here’s a question for you: How much time should she do?

One goal of the anti-choice movement is to outlaw abortion. But, as Anna Quindlen points out, anti-choice activists are almost never able to identify what the legal consequences should be for women who terminate their pregnancies. So, pro-lifers, tell me: What should the penalty be? How much time in jail should a woman face for abortion?

Anti-choicers emphasize that a fetus is a person, invested with all the same* natural rights as you or I. Life begins at conception. That fertilized egg has all of its DNA, making it just as human as all of us and endowing it with the right to live. Ok. But if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder — deliberate, pre-meditated murder. That certainly isn’t a new concept for anti-choicers — the “abortion is murder” line has been around for decades now. But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.

Do you support executing women who have abortions?

Do you support jailing them for life? For a few decades?

What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?

Quindlen writes:

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?

If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?

How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?

But that’s not the “pro-life” argument.

To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate? What do we do about all those embryos in fertility clinics? Do we force women to implant them and carry them to term? If not, how do we justify forcing women to carry naturally-implanted pregnancies to term? If the answer is that no, we don’t force women to be implanted with embryos, but we don’t kill the embryos either — we just let them be — then would it be ok for pregnant women to simply remove their embryos/fetuses without purposely killing them and just hope for the best?

If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? Fertility treatments? Birth control? Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?

What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky — like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did — negligent homicide?

What do doctors do if they’re faced with a life-threatening pregnancy? Do they force the woman to continue it, knowing it will kill her? I mean, it’s not the fetus’s fault, and it can’t really be construed as self-defense to terminate the pregnancy. And their lives are equal, aren’t they? Do we just let nature take its course, then?

Finally, what about if we’re deciding between an embryo and a born child — who wins out? Lots of feminists have asked this question before and we’ve never gotten a straight answer, so let me try again. Take this hypothetical: There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?

These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies. Because this post is long and I know all your time is valuable, I’ll even let “pro-life” readers off the hook with this one, and I’ll ask that you just answer the first question: How much time should she do?

*This point is highly disputable — after all, no born people have the right to physically attach themselves to someone else and use that person’s body for their own survival, against the will and at the physical expense of the attachee. But that’s another post. Or a Judith Jarvis Thomson article.

Republicans Hate Babies

And children. This is truly pathetic. They’re really earning their pro-life title — as protesters swarm clinics in Birmingham and Wichita to praise doctor and cop-killers and to stalk and harass clinic staff, and as mainstream anti-choice groups take steps to cut abortion access and force women to give birth, their representatives in Congress refuse to fund a health care plan that could help millions of children.

When anti-choice leaders say they care about babies and “life,” they’re either lying or they’re damn stupid.

Seriously, what’s so bad about Planned Parenthood?

Kathryn Jean Lopez believes that Planned Parenthood steers pregnant teens towards abortion:

Browse on over to their web magazine for minors, www.teenwire.com, and you’ll find, among the question-and-answer, a question from a teen who says she had an abortion “a little over a month ago,” is pregnant again, and wondering if a second abortion is safe. Not only does the teenwire.com staff cavalierly tell the girl (who, I remind you, got pregnant again a month after her first abortion) that abortion is “very safe” the first or second time around, but that abortion “is much safer than giving birth.” While they do throw in a line about preventing pregnancy by using birth control, there’s no talk about adoption or other alternatives — such as raising the child, and getting help to do so — that a desperate girl could afford to hear.

Out of thousands of questions and answers, she picks out this one, which shockingly tells the truth about abortion. It is “very safe” and “much safer than birth.”

The girl (I’m assuming she’s a minor, since the site is aimed at teens, but she could be older) didn’t ask about adoption or parenting, she asked “what are the risks of a second abortion.” She steered herself towards abortion!

If she had wanted information about parenting or adoption, though, there’s plenty of it on the teenwire.com site. (And if you follow that link, you’ll notice that the archives about pregnancy, parenting and adoption are fifth from the top, while the archives about abortion are at the very bottom of the list, further proof of their aggressive marketing of abortion.) For example:

“I’m pregnant. What options do I have?” The teenwire.com staff shamelessly reply that she has three options:

  • She can choose to have a baby and raise her child.
  • She can choose to have a baby and place her child for adoption.
  • She can have an abortion.

Then they have the nerve to tell her that only she can decide which option is right for her! They suggest that she consider what she can live with, her plans for the future, her moral and spiritual beliefs, her future well-being and so on. Then they suggest talking to family, friends or a counselor.

“I’m pregnant. Everyone wants me to get an abortion, but I don’t want to! What do I do?” The teenwire.com staff brazenly tell the girl that only she can decide what is right for her. They tell her that she has three options: “raise the child, place the child for adoption, or have an abortion.” They then suggest talking to a teacher, religious adviser or trained counselor, and go through a list of things to consider before becoming a parent!

And if you do a search for “pregnancy” or “adoption” you’ll find articles like these:

“Prenatal Care for Pregnant Teens.” An article on the importance of seeing a doctor, not smoking, not drinking and eating right during pregnancy.

“Adoption: An Act of Love.” An article about open adoption, including a sweet letter from a birth mother to her baby, and her reflections on how wonderful she feels about her choice.

“Questions and Answers About Adoption.” An “FAQ” about adoption, including a link and phone number to adoptionhelp.org.

“The Rights of Teen Parents.” A positive story of a successful teen mom who won the right to take college prep classes, and a list of all the rights teen parents have, such as the right to get a GED, go to school, participate in extracurricular activities and school functions, receive extra help or tutoring, miss school for medical appointments, take a leave of absence for pregnancy, join honor societies, and so on.

I found all this stuff in a matter of minutes. Sure, they’re not shoving adoption and parenthood down the throat of every girl who asks about abortion, but they do tell girls that they have those options, and they do have information on those options for girls who are interested.

And that’s just the teenwire.com site. If a teen is capable of finding teenwire.com, she’s also capable of finding all the other websites out there about adoption and teen parenting. And if she does a Google search for abortion, the first hit is Wikipedia, the second hit is a pro-life site called “abortionfacts.com,” and Planned Parenthood is sixth on the list. Teenwire.com doesn’t even show up!

There’s no reason to think that teenagers don’t have information about adoption and parenting, as well as ample exposure to the pro-life point of view. Anti-abortion pregnancy centers outnumber abortion clinics and anti-abortion ads dominate on TV, radio, billboards and buses. Nearly 60% of teen pregnancies end in birth!

Planned Parenthood focuses on preventing unwanted pregnancy. If not for Planned Parenthood, I wouldn’t have my IUD, which has kept me pregnancy-free for the past six years. (I also used the pill for two years, for a total of eight pregnancy-free years.) I could’ve had dozens of abortions in that time, if not for Planned Parenthood’s clever “marketing ploy.”

What’s so bad about that? What’s so bad about Planned Parenthood helping people who refuse to abstain (like me) avoid pregnancy and abortion? Seems pretty pro-life to me… that is, if your personal definition of “pro-life” is about avoiding abortion, and not controlling women.

cross-posted

Family Planning Riots in China

Reuters reports that China admits to detaining 28 people in recent riots protesting the country’s draconian one-child policy, enforced with high fines, infanticide and forced abortions.

The 28 were “suspected of instigating” the riots that flared in the Guangxi region last week, the Xinhua news agency reported. It did not specify their identities or the charges they faced.

Villagers attacked officials and burned cars in protest against attempts to enforce family-planning policies they called harsh and unjust, witnesses earlier told Reuters. Xinhua also said protesters damaged government offices and files.

The Xinhua report was the first public official statement about the protests, and it blamed traditional-minded locals in Bobai county, where it said seven towns saw riots late last week. The main riot involved about 300 residents in the town of Dungu on Thursday, it said.

But the report also made clear that sweeping family-planning penalties lay behind the discontent.

“Violations of the family planning policies are common in Bobai as local residents still hold to the traditional idea that having more children brings more happiness,” Xinhua said.

“The county’s family-planning workers have carried out large-scale law enforcement campaigns,” it added.

A local official told Xinhua that the rising population was squeezing land availability. But a county government chief suggested that not all the blame lay with residents.

“There may be problems with the family planning work of the government, which have prompted complaints from residents,” Huang Shaoming, the head of Bobai, said.

Some couples with more than one child must pay fines of up to tens of thousand yuan (thousands of dollars), villagers earlier told Reuters.

China launched its one-child policy in 1980 to curb a ballooning population, now at more than 1.3 billion.

The restrictions, which vary from city to countryside, have bolstered a traditional preference for boys and have drawn fire from Western countries and human rights watchdogs after reports of forced abortions and infanticide.

It’s a tough situation in China — the government understandably wants to keep the population in check (and lord knows we have enough people on this planet), but the enforcement of the one-child policycan be so harsh that it amounts to human rights abuse, and the traditional preference for boys has led to widespread abandonment, and in some cases killing, of girls.

Thoughts?

Abortion Rights in Mexico

The young woman with the cascading curls walked into a dumpy house with no sign out front on the day she decided to get an abortion.

Inside, she says, she paid $200 for eight syringes filled with a milky liquid and a set of instructions. She spent the night in a Mexico City hotel room, giving herself injections that made her bleed and cry out in agony.

The next day, weak and depressed, the woman was persuaded by her sister to see a doctor, who determined that she had undergone an incomplete abortion, the woman said during an interview on condition of anonymity. He conducted an emergency procedure to complete the abortion and stave off infection.

“What have I done?” she recalled thinking. “I risked my life.”

Whether anti-choice leaders like it or not, women will continue to risk their lives to terminate pregnancies. Criminalizing abortion does not make it go away — it doesn’t even significantly lesson the abortion rate. What does decrease the abortion rate? Accessible and affordable health care, including contraception, and a culture which views sex as a healthy and natural part of life — and one that you should take responsibility for.

But tried-and -true ways of lowering the abortion rate aren’t particularly interesting to “pro-life” politicians and leaders. Instead, they’d like to maintain the status quo in places like Mexico, where a million abortions take place every year, killing some 3,000 women and landing another 10,000 in the hospital. Abortion is the fifth leading cause of death for women in Mexico. That is not “pro-life.”

Have an abortion, go to prison

This is what “pro-life” looks like.

Lawmakers with Mexico’s small Green Party have sent a bill to the Senate that seeks to toughen penalties for illegal abortions, a bid to counteract efforts by leftist legislators to legalize abortion, a senator said Friday.

Green Party Sen. Arturo Escobar said the bill, introduced Thursday, proposes increasing prison sentences – currently between six months to one year – to one to three years for women who have an abortion.

Is there anyone out there who honestly still believes anti-choice leaders and politicians when they say they care about women?