Culture Of Life – Page 4

Dear Rep. Franklin: I submit my used tampon as evidence.

There’s a new bill in Georgia sponsored by Rep. Bobby Franklin that would require women to file police reports when they miscarry, since fetuses are Georgia citizens and their deaths are potential crimes. I’m going to write more about the bill later — it’s actually really horrific and scary and basically turns all women into potential criminals — but in the meantime, I think we should help Georgia out. Since life begins at conception, and a fertilized egg is a human being with all of the rights of any other citizen of the great state of Georgia, we need to make sure that all egg-deaths are properly accounted for, and that all zygote-Americans receive a proper burial and an investigation into whether their deaths were caused by foul play.

Devery Doleman, an Actual Woman, writes a letter to Rep. Franklin requesting that he investigate the potential murders going on in her pants. I think she’s on to something. I support Devery’s idea of sending Rep. Franklin the evidence of the potential murders committed in our uteri. Now, we can’t actually send used tampons through the mail — sending bio-hazardous material to an elected official can get you in BAD TROUBLE, so don’t do it — but we can certainly send photos. So! Next time you’re on the rag, photo-document the results. Why? Because somewhere around 50% of fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the body. It’s an act of God, sure, but still — that’s a 50% prenatal death rate for Georgia’s smallest citizens. Your womb, basically, is a serial killer. And Rep. Franklin is very, very interested in using the Georgia state police to investigate any possible death of a Georgia citizen.

So! I recommend you photograph your period paraphernalia, and attach it to a letter thanking Rep. Franklin for his good work in standing up for human life. Here’s a form letter you are welcome to use:

Dear Rep. Franklin,

I applaud your efforts to support the rights of zygote citizens of Georgia by criminalizing miscarriages and investigating every instance of fetal death as a potential crime. The Georgia State Assembly knows that life begins at the moment of conception, and a fertilized egg death is a human death — a death that we should all grieve, and of course investigate to the fullest extent until we find the responsible party and bring them to justice (the death penalty, which your bill prescribes as the punishment for killing a pre-born Georgia citizen, is definitely appropriate here). I couldn’t agree more, and I would like to help.

As I’m sure you know, more than 50% of fertilized eggs –Georgia citizens! — naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the body during menstruation. I am personally concerned that my own murdering woman-body may have flushed out some human beings, and I may have flushed them down the toilet without knowing that I was disposing of Georgia citizens in such an undignified way. This must be remedied. I would like to be sure that I am not killing any more Georgia citizens — and that if I am, they are able to receive a proper funeral and not a burial at sea, and that our state police can dedicate valuable time and resources to investigating their deaths.

To that end, I attach a picture of my latest used tampon. I am preserving this tampon, as well as all of my other tampons, pads, feminine hygiene products and soiled panties from my current menstrual cycle, so that the Georgia State Police can come collect them as evidence. I would also be happy to drop the specimens off at your office, should you want to examine them yourself.

Please let me know if I can make an appointment to give you these items. Or, since I appreciate that you are a very busy man, please let me know when the police will be by my home to collect them, as my next cycle is rapidly approaching and they are starting to smell. I cannot keep them in my refrigerator for much longer.

Thanks for all the work you do to further the pro-life cause.

Sincerely,
Jill Filipovic

Yes, this is totally serious. Send Rep. Franklin evidence of the potential crimes happening in your uterus, which if my calculations are correct should begin in approximately 4 days (we’re all on the same cycle, right?). You can contact Rep. Franklin at:

Rep. Bobby Franklin
401 Coverdell Legislative Office Building
Atlanta, Georgia 30334

Phone: 404.656.0152
Fax: 404.656.5562

bobby.franklin@house.ga.gov

All systems go. (And if you’re spreading the word on this — and I hope you do! — please be sure to credit Devery, who came up with this idea in the first place).

House votes to block all funding from Planned Parenthood

Because they’re so “pro-life,” of course.

By law, federal funds haven’t paid for abortions since the 1970s, so the House hasn’t voted to cut abortion funding. They’re cutting funding for the entire Title X program — funding for contraception, cancer screening, STI tests, sex education, mammograms, HIV testing and diagnosis, and pregnancy screening and counseling. Title X is the only federal program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and preventive health services, particularly low-income families. Last year, 5 million people benefited from the services funded by Title X.

Planned Parenthood is the target of this legislation, and American women the primary victims. This isn’t about abortion — it’s about cutting access to health care for women. One in five American women has used Planned Parenthood’s services. The vast majority of care — more than 90% — offered at Planned Parenthood health centers is preventative. Every year, Planned Parenthood carries out nearly one million screenings for cervical cancer — screenings which save lives. Every year, Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses give more than 830,000 breast exams — exams which save lives. Every year, nearly 2.5 million patients receive contraception from Planned Parenthood — a service which prevents enormous numbers of unintended pregnancies and, by extension, an enormous number of abortions. Every year, Planned Parenthood administers nearly 4 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV — tests and treatments which save lives, extend lives, preserve fertility, and maintain reproductive health.

That’s what “pro-lifers” in Congress are against: Health care access for the poor. Health care access for women. This is not, and has never been, about abortion. It’s certainly not about affirming “life.” It’s about an ongoing assault on women’s lives, and the lives of lower-income women in particular. It’s shameful. Stand with Planned Parenthood.

South Dakota bill would allow the killing of abortion providers as “justifiable homicide”

Yes, really.

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Here is the exact language of the bill:

22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.
Section 2. That § 22-16-35 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-35. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being

It doesn’t take a creative reading to understand that this bill would classify murdering abortion providers as “justifiable homicide,” so long as the murderer could show that he was acting in the defense of an “unborn child.”

…I don’t really have any other words.

UPDATE: The legislator behind the bill defends it, saying “It would if abortion was illegal … This code only deals with illegal acts. Abortion is legal in this country. This has nothing to do with abortion.” Since abortion isn’t legally homicide, he says, this law wouldn’t apply.

But that’s just incorrect in reading the plain language of the bill. The part about “justifiable homicide” doesn’t refer to the person being defended; the homicide that is justifiable is the killing of the person who was a threat to the life or safety of another (in the abortion scenario, the abortion provider). Would it hold up in court? Maybe not. But it does establish a potential defense to doctor-killing.

So what exactly is the purpose of this law? State Representative Jensen, who sponsored it, says:

“Say an ex-boyfriend who happens to be father of a baby doesn’t want to pay child support for the next 18 years, and he beats on his ex-girfriend’s abdomen in trying to abort her baby. If she did kill him, it would be justified. She is resisting an effort to murder her unborn child.”

Um.

Meet Mark Critz.

Ten Democrats cosponsored H.R.3, even with language redefining rape; four of those ten also apparently don’t care if pregnant women die. Sarah Jaffe takes a closer look at all ten; find all posted to date here. Originally posted at RH Reality Check.

Meet Mark Critz. He got a huge chunk of cash from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last election to hold the seat he’d won in a special election after the death of his old boss, John Murtha. How huge? $2,107,202.86

Murtha was best known for coming out loudly and angrily against the Iraq war–as the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a veteran, he was “taken seriously” the way us antiwar ladies usually aren’t. But Murtha wasn’t a dove by nature: he’d voted for the war in ’02, making his claims of being “pro-life” once again a little iffy.

Critz follows in his boss’s footsteps and opposes our right to our own bodies–he’s a cosponsor of HR3 and HR358–the one that would let us die if a doctor thought that saving us might injure a fetus.

On Labor

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a perfect piece about the work of pregnancy and childbirth:

For reasons beyond me, childbirth–in the popular American mind–is swaddled in gossamer, gift-wrap, and icing. Beneath the pastel Hallmark cards and baby showers, behind the flowers, lies a truth encoded, still, in our wording, but given only minimal respect–the charge of shepherding life is labor. It’s work. And you need only look to the immediate past, or you need only look around the world, or you need only come close to losing the love of your small, young life to understand a correlating truth–pregnancy is potentially lethal work.
…
This is the era of internet intellectuals, mostly dudes, who excel at analogizing easily accessible facts to buttress their points. It’s a good skill to have, and one I employ myself. But it isn’t wisdom. Like most people, I have deep problems with the termination of life–and that is what I believe abortion to be. Still a decade ago, I learned that those problems were abstract, and could not stand against something as tangible and imposing as death.

My embrace of a pro-choice stance is not built on analogizing Rick Santorum with Hitler. It is not built on what the pro-life movement is “like.” It’s built on set of disturbing and inelidable truths: My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into this world nearly killed his mother. The literalism of that last point can not be escaped.

Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. Its courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.

Read it all.

New bill will let doctors refuse to save the lives of pregnant women

Sometimes there really aren’t words for what passes as “pro-life” in the United States. The “Protect Life Act” overrides the requirement that ER doctors treat every patient and do what’s necessary to save the patient’s life, regardless of the patient’s identity or ability to pay — the Act allows doctors to refuse necessary care to a pregnant woman if that care will kill the fetus.

In other words, it gives doctors the green light to let pregnant women die if they have a life-threatening condition and need an emergency abortion. We know that women’s lives have been saved by abortion (and that some number of people don’t approve of the whole life-saving thing). It’s not surprising that a few religious blow-hards think it’s better for women to die instead of receiving therapeutic abortions, but to encode the view that you don’t have to save a pregnant woman’s life into federal law? That is truly sick — and shockingly cruel, even for the usual “pro-life” suspects who regularly use their ideology as a tool to punish women.

Also? It’s not like letting the pregnant woman die saves the fetus, so there’s no “protecting life” here. When the woman dies, the fetus dies too. The entire purpose of this bill is to allow ideologues to refuse necessary, life-saving care to patients, if those patients happen to be pregnant. It’s disgusting. I hope, at the very least, that this will be widely publicized, and will show the rest of the country what a far-right “culture of life” really looks like — it’s not particularly life-affirming to anyone with a uterus.

Thanks to Amanda for the heads up.

Answering William Saletan on Abortion

As much as William Saletan’s writing on abortion drives me slightly up a wall because of his tendency to forget that there’s an actual woman involved instead of just an interesting moral quandary, I do respect his willingness to engage on the issue. So in that spirit, let’s look at his piece today, answering some arguments from pro-choicers and posing new questions:

Last week, I cited the report as a challenge to several feminist writers who have lately asserted a woman’s right to decide not only whether to have an abortion but how long she can wait to make that choice. Gosnell stands charged with abortions beyond the 24-week gestational limit prescribed by Pennsylvania law. I asked the feminist writers whether, in the name of women’s autonomy, those charges should be dropped.I haven’t seen an answer to my question.

Here is an answer: No, the charges should not be dropped in the name of women’s autonomy.

On second thought about Kermit Gosnell

He does tell us a few things about abortion. They just aren’t what William Saletan thinks.

The Gosnell case shows us the worst of what happens when abortion isn’t accessible. Gosnell’s “clinic” was nothing short of a house of horrors, and he preyed upon women who couldn’t get abortions anywhere else or who were unfamiliar with the American medical system — poor women, immigrants, minors. Michelle Goldberg writes:

No woman would subject herself to such a place if she thought she had somewhere else to go. Forty-one-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died after being given an overdose of sedatives at the clinic, was a refugee who had recently arrived in the U.S. from a resettlement camp in Nepal. She couldn’t read English and may not have had any idea how to find a decent clinic. Minors went to Gosnell’s clinic—it was the one place they could skirt state law and get abortions without parental consent. Gosnell performed illegal late-term abortions on women who should have been cared for months earlier.

As Florence pointed out in a comment on the previous Gosnell post, “It also says quite a bit about how important it is to give laws teeth. The laws were in place to prevent this from happening, but despite numerous complaints the state couldn’t or didn’t intervene.”

Gosnell’s clinic hadn’t been reviewed by the Department of Health in 15 years. Members of his staff were unlicensed and not properly trained. And Gosnell knew that he could get away with offering sub-par care to women who he thought were less likely to complain — young women, immigrants, poor women and women of color. As Lori Adelman details:

As you may have witnessed, media coverage of these charges against Dr. Gosnell and nine staff members of his clinic has been rife with gruesome details like this one, which have understandably generated public reactions of horror and disgust. But buried deep in articles describing “bloodstained furniture” and ” jars packed with severed baby feet,” is a less gory but equally as horrifying insight that, at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, “white women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area” than Gosnell’s regular clientele, which was comprised primarily of poor minority women, including many immigrants. Gosnell reportedly treated these white suburban clients to a more pleasant and sanitary experience because he believed they were “more likely to file complaints” about substandard care.

He was right about that for a long, long time. Lori continues:

The crimes of which Gosnell is accused are exceedingly serious; he must be prosecuted for them to the fullest extent of the law. But the undeniably racialized elements of his practice reflect a need to explore the bigger picture of this story, beyond Gosnell’s presumed guilt or innocence: why Gosnell’s clinic was allowed to continue for so long, and why Dr. Gosnell’s patients, who were overwhelmingly poor minority women, had come to expect their health care needs to be met with such inadequacy that they were forced to accept Gosnell’s “care”.

Gosnell tells us quite a bit about the state of health care in the United States — and especially about abortion care. His clinic was by all accounts a disgusting, flea-infested mess. It doesn’t sound like the kind of place that women would go if they felt like they had any other options. Obviously anti-choice advocates are latching onto this story as an illustration of the horrors of abortion, even though most abortion clinics don’t look like Gosnell’s and are in fact subject to must stricter rules than other medical facilities — but there are more than a few health clinics, abortion-related or not, that are decrepit and run by incompetent practitioners. Those sub-par centers almost exclusively serve communities that are poor, of-color, immigrant, or non-English-speaking. It is absolutely a crisis.

But that’s not the story that you’re going to hear from anti-choicers and conservatives. You’ll hear “abortion is bad” without any recognition that outlawing abortion would have done absolutely nothing to help the women and babies who died or suffered in Gosnell’s care. You won’t hear about how affordable and accessible health care for everyone could have alleviated this situation, or how greater government oversight and enforcement of health care laws could have shut down Gosnell’s operation years ago. To prevent this from happening again — to stop other predatory clinics that offer a variety of health care services, not just abortion — we’d have to get into the hard stuff of recognizing the socioeconomic and racial inequalities in our current health care system. We’d have to admit that for many Americans, decent health care is inaccessible, and reproductive health care is especially poor. There’s a reason we have one of the highest infant death rates in the developed world. There’s a reason that in Washington D.C. the infant death rate is 14.1 per 1,000 live births, while in Connecticut it’s 5.5.

If we want to actually help women and babies (and men and children too), we can increase access to health care and increase government oversight of health care facilities and practices. We can give government entities greater ability to enforce existing laws, and we can push for new laws across the spectrum of consumer safety — in health care, in food regulation and in consumer goods. But those are tough, across-the-board changes. They take (yikes) taxes and government involvement. They require recognizing that we have a problem, and that the USA is not #1 where health care is concerned.

Which is to say that enacting those changes is almost certainly a pipe dream. But that would be a whole lot more life-affirming (and life-saving) than simply using the Gosnell atrocity to fall back on the same old “make abortion illegal” position in the abortion debates. Illegality doesn’t end abortion. Demonizing abortion doesn’t end abortion. Using the Gosnell case as an example of why abortion is bad doesn’t end abortion. But affordable and accessible health care, including abortion care, for everyone regardless of socioeconomic status or location or immigration status or race or English language skills? That saves lives. That decreases the abortion rate. And that’s how we make sure that women aren’t forced to accept inadequate and dangerous “care” because they have no other options.

Ross Douthat, mad again that women don’t want to be walking wombs

Ross Douthat apparently finds it paradoxical that some women want to have children but can’t, and some can have children but don’t want to, and the ones that don’t want to aren’t giving birth for the ones who can’t. Which leads me to believe that Ross Douthat has no idea what pregnancy or childbirth actually entails, since he doesn’t seem to understand that it involves significant physical and emotional difficulty.

Or perhaps he does, and doesn’t care. He writes:

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

It’s as if the “unborn” exist unto themselves, and we are callously and casually destroying them. Douthat neglects to recognize that there’s a woman involved, and that the desire of one woman to have a child doesn’t mean that a second woman is morally obligated to undergo nearly ten months of physically and emotionally trying pregnancy.

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

It is absolutely true that legal abortion has decreased the number of “desireable” (white, able-bodied, infant) children available for adoption. Forty years ago, the women giving birth to those babies were mostly young and unmarried; a lot of those women were shipped off to boarding houses for pregnant girls, or cloistered away so they wouldn’t shame their families. Adoption wasn’t much of a choice — the girl in question wasn’t often given the option of raising her own child. Women who did raise children without husbands were not looked upon kindly.

It’s also absolutely true that birth control has decreased the pool of potentially adoptable babies. I suppose in Douthat’s world, that’s a bad thing too, since any control over your reproduction is suspect. But for most of us, being able to prevent pregnancies we don’t want is a net gain.

Douthat also talks a big game about valuing and protecting the unborn, but neglects to lay out the specifics about how he proposes we actually do that. Implicit in his column is the argument that we outlaw abortion, but he never actually comes out and says that — probably because he realizes that when it comes right down to it, a lot of people really don’t like the idea of criminalizing women who don’t believe it’s their burden to provide babies for anyone who wants one. It’s also a lot easier to talk about “valuing life” (and to really mean “punishing women”) than it is to take the sometimes costly steps that actually value that life — providing affordable health care, early-childhood education, childcare, paid maternity leave, and on and on. You know, things that social conservatives like Douthat routinely oppose because of “personal responsibility” and “keeping the government out of our lives.”

We all know that Douthat isn’t a big fan of the ladies (or the rights of ladies). But his concern here isn’t just for fetuses — it’s also for “good” families that, in his estimation, deserve children from not-good women. The old era of adoptions, where middle and upper-middle-class families were able to adopt babies birthed in secret by teenage mothers, required not only a crackdown on women’s bodily autonomy, but also a social model that deemed single mothers inherently bad, and certain families (largely white, headed by a heterosexual couple, and on the wealthier side of not) to be the only acceptable ones. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about a return to an idealized, gender-inegalitarian, racially divided and socially stratified time. It’s about making sure women know that their place isn’t just at home and in the service of their husbands, but also in the service of “better” families.

Good luck with that.

Also, Ross Douthat? Abortions were had on those “most libertine programs” Sex & the City and Mad Men. Characters also decided to give birth. So while you’re learning about the birds and the bees and how pregnancy actually impacts a woman’s body, maybe Netflix some of those shows too.

Neil Horsley: Great Guy.

Meet Neil Horsley. He created one of the “Most Wanted” websites with the names and addresses of abortion providers, and also posted videos of women entering abortion clinics. Cool! He deserves to have a lot of good things happen to him in life. And today is Neil Horsely’s day, because charges his ongoing criminal case — which involved him picketing Elton John’s house with a sign saying “Elton John Must Die” — were dropped. Congrats, Neil Horsley. I’m glad things are going so well for you. You seem like a really neat human being. Definitely a safe and responsible guy. I am sad I don’t live in Atlanta so that I can have you as a neighbor.

In other news, a black kid with autism sits in the grass and six schools get locked down.