The GOP and pro-life interest groups are hoping their new friend, Supreme Court Justice and noted angry drunkard, Brett Kavanaugh, will help put a stake through the heart of the 1973 decision. I have no idea if Roe v. Wade will be overturned or not, but if it were, each state would then be free to regulate access to abortion as its elected officials see fit, as the Associated Press reports:
"At the time of Roe, abortion was broadly legal in four states, allowed under limited circumstances in 16 others, and outlawed under nearly all circumstances in the rest. A reversal of Roe would produce a patchwork map where perhaps 15 or so states would continue to make abortion easily accessible, a dozen or more would ban virtually all abortions unless the mother’s life is at stake, and the rest would thrash out their response in the public arena and the legislatures."
What it won't do, of course, is end abortion. Abortion is a fact of life, and it always will be. What will happen is fearful girls and women in states that attempt to outlaw it will inadvertently harm themselves by carrying out their own abortions, or seek them from less than reputable providers at great risk to their lives and health.
I've shared my thoughts on abortion before. In that piece, I argued that the logical conclusion of the pro-life position is that A) abortion must be illegal even in instances of rape and incest, as the termination of an embryo in their world is still considered "murder" regardless of how its conceived, and B) women would naturally face criminal prosecution for obtaining an abortion, because how can we pretend they aren't liable for consciously carrying out said "murder"? From there, I deduced that the majority of pro-lifers do not, in fact, sincerely believe their own stated positions, since most sane people don't maintain such shitty beliefs. Or at least, they don't articulate them out loud.
But maybe I should have been more careful with my words.
It would seem that the pro-life movement is brazenly lurching towards at least the first conclusion, as NPR reports:
But what is clear to me, as of this writing at least, is that the pro-life position is still a contradictory farce. One of those contradictions is very apparent in the Alabama law, which dictates that medical providers can be prosecuted and potentially sentenced up to 99 years in prison for performing abortions. This is clearly draconian (quite a few publications have noted that second degree rape in Alabama carries a less stringent penalty of up to 20 years in prison) but as Emily Atkin of the New Republic articulates, it's "not quite as draconian as it could have been":
But pro-lifers rarely, if ever, say such things out loud. That's likely because they also believe that this logical conclusion is too ghastly or, as the author states, because they cynically realize that the majority of Americas do not support prosecuting women, and including such provisions would make abortion bans less politically tolerable. The problem here, no matter how you slice it, is that believing abortion is murder is really fucking silly. Many pro-lifers are at least tangentially conscious of this, which is why so many of them are unwilling to prosecute women as murderers, or still believe in allowing exceptions for rape and incest.
Another example of this is the existence of fertility clinics. Embryos created in a laboratory via in vitro fertilization (IVF) are discarded (that is to say, "murdered," following the pro-life chain of logic) all the time at fertility clinics. Curiously, Republican lawmakers concerned about the sanctity of life don't seem to give a shit. Indeed, one hapless Alabama state senator, Clyde Chambliss, gave the whole game away during a legislative debate regarding the abortion ban:
Indeed, one of the reasons they're able to get away with this oversight is because the vast majority of us consider living, breathing people to be of instinctively greater value than embryos in a laboratory. A simple anecdote demonstrates this: suppose that a fertility clinic catches fire and burns to the ground, and 50 embryos are incinerated within moments. Now suppose the same thing happens to an apartment complex the next day, and 50 residents perish in the fire. Which is the greater tragedy? It's the apartment fire, obviously. An embryo possess none of the characteristics that we recognize and value in an actual person. And yet, the pro-lifers are asking us to believe that they are equally tragic. Laurie Penny, in her piece for the New Republic, articulates far better than I can how absurd this conflation of an embryo and a person really is:
Those of us in the pro-choice camp should continue to forcibly make the case for legal abortion. It's important to dismantle their talking points by pointing out the hypocrisy, but if we're being honest, they don't actually give a shit about being hypocrites. Their objective is to control women's bodies and sex lives, not to adhere to any coherent set of principles regarding the protection of life. If it were, then they would spend as much time protesting in front of fertility clinics as abortion clinics. But they don't, because they're too busy getting off on the apparent power trip that comes along with screaming bible verses at scared 17-year-old girls walking into Planned Parenthood.
They don't have the moral high ground. After all, it was the pro-life mindset that led to the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, who succumb to a septic miscarriage thanks to the nation's then draconian laws that prevented her from getting the abortion that likely would have saved her life. The people of Ireland have since, thankfully, passed a referendum that substantially loosens abortion restrictions. And this is the same group of people that ardently opposes comprehensive sex education in our schools, and readily available access to contraceptives. Both policies have been proven to reduce unwanted pregnancies, which is very clearly the only way to reduce abortions.
Pro-lifers don't give a fuck about protecting life. Their objective, quite simply, is the perpetuation of our patriarchal society.
I've shared my thoughts on abortion before. In that piece, I argued that the logical conclusion of the pro-life position is that A) abortion must be illegal even in instances of rape and incest, as the termination of an embryo in their world is still considered "murder" regardless of how its conceived, and B) women would naturally face criminal prosecution for obtaining an abortion, because how can we pretend they aren't liable for consciously carrying out said "murder"? From there, I deduced that the majority of pro-lifers do not, in fact, sincerely believe their own stated positions, since most sane people don't maintain such shitty beliefs. Or at least, they don't articulate them out loud.
But maybe I should have been more careful with my words.
It would seem that the pro-life movement is brazenly lurching towards at least the first conclusion, as NPR reports:
"Opponents of abortion rights have a long history of supporting abortion bans with three major exceptions: when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when a woman's life is at risk.
But fueled by momentum from the passage of a restrictive abortion law in Alabama, a coalition of anti-abortion-rights groups released a letter Wednesday asking Republican officials to "reconsider decades-old talking points" on exceptions to such laws.
"We understand that issues like rape and incest are difficult topics to tackle; nevertheless, it is our view that the value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of one's conception or birth," said a draft of the letter provided to NPR by Students for Life of America, which led the effort.
The letter, which is addressed to Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, goes on: "A child conceived in rape is still a child. We don't blame children for other matters outside their control. Why should we do so here?""I haven't yet decided if it's a good thing that pro-lifers are coming around to this conclusion. On the one hand, it may push more squeamish, moderate voters away from supporting such laws. But on the other hand, the Overton window may be gradually pushed to the right until such a position becomes standard for even moderate Republicans. As the NPR piece states, even Donald Trump and Republican Congressmen like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy aren't ready to publicly support abortion restrictions without exceptions for rape and incest quite yet.
But what is clear to me, as of this writing at least, is that the pro-life position is still a contradictory farce. One of those contradictions is very apparent in the Alabama law, which dictates that medical providers can be prosecuted and potentially sentenced up to 99 years in prison for performing abortions. This is clearly draconian (quite a few publications have noted that second degree rape in Alabama carries a less stringent penalty of up to 20 years in prison) but as Emily Atkin of the New Republic articulates, it's "not quite as draconian as it could have been":
"Alabama’s male lawmakers could have sought to punish the women themselves. But they knew that throwing women in jail for doing what they please with their own bodies would have been seen as too cruel. So they targeted doctors instead. Cowards.
***
Too many Americans still think of abortion as a medieval procedure in which a white-coated doctor stands at the edge of an exam table, armed with clamps, ready to pry a nearly fully formed baby from a woman’s womb. This is not reality. About a quarter of abortions in the United States are so-called medication abortions, in which the woman takes one or more pills to induce an abortion, usually prior to nine weeks of gestation and in the comfort of their home. And most surgical abortions, which require a doctor and occur in a clinic or other medical setting, are not being done to viable fetuses. More than 90 percent of abortions in the United States are performed at or before 13 weeks of gestation."This remains, in my mind, the most prominent evidence that pro-lifers aren't serious when they proclaim that abortion is murder. How can we take them seriously when they're either unwilling or too cowardly to name and prosecute the supposed murderers? Women are inducing abortions of their own accord and free from coercion, and they will clearly find ways to continue getting medication that allows them to do so in the event that abortion is completely outlawed, so it's silly to pin everything on doctors. This seems abundantly clear to me: if abortion is murder, then the women who get abortions are murderers, and should be prosecuted as such.
But pro-lifers rarely, if ever, say such things out loud. That's likely because they also believe that this logical conclusion is too ghastly or, as the author states, because they cynically realize that the majority of Americas do not support prosecuting women, and including such provisions would make abortion bans less politically tolerable. The problem here, no matter how you slice it, is that believing abortion is murder is really fucking silly. Many pro-lifers are at least tangentially conscious of this, which is why so many of them are unwilling to prosecute women as murderers, or still believe in allowing exceptions for rape and incest.
Another example of this is the existence of fertility clinics. Embryos created in a laboratory via in vitro fertilization (IVF) are discarded (that is to say, "murdered," following the pro-life chain of logic) all the time at fertility clinics. Curiously, Republican lawmakers concerned about the sanctity of life don't seem to give a shit. Indeed, one hapless Alabama state senator, Clyde Chambliss, gave the whole game away during a legislative debate regarding the abortion ban:
Whoops! "The egg in the lab doesn't apply" because "it's not in a woman" is a huge fucking tell. They're not interested in protecting embryos - they're interested in regulating women's bodies. That's what this is about. Well, that, and their cynical belief that their abortion bans would face even greater opposition if they went after fertility clinics, as this Bloomberg article suggests:Chambliss, responding to the IVF argument from Smitherman, cites a part of the bill that says it applies to a pregnant woman. "The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant." #alpolitics— Brian Lyman (@lyman_brian) May 14, 2019
"The fertility industry didn’t support the Alabama bill, nor did it lobby for an exemption, says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the Birmingham-based American Society for Reproductive Medicine. It didn’t need to, he says: Politicians recognized that the popularity of fertility treatments was preventing anti-abortion laws from passing.
A 2011 attempt to amend the state constitution of Mississippi so that a fertilized egg would have the same rights as a full person shocked abortion foes “where they fully expected to win,” Tipton says. A statement released by Personhood Mississippi at the time blamed Planned Parenthood for the measure’s defeat and for “misleading” voters about its impact on in vitro fertilization. Similar so-called personhood amendments were subsequently rejected in Colorado, North Dakota, and other states. The Alabama lawmakers “recognized how potent opposition from the infertility community was and sought to avoid it,” he says."Here again, Republicans and pro-life groups reveal just how inane this all is. If they actually adhered to their principles, then the popularity of in vitro fertilization would matter not, as the destruction of embryos in a laboratory would presumably be just as heinous as a woman getting an abortion. But Republicans in Alabama were willing to let this glaring oversight slide, because the protection of embryos really isn't their objective.
Indeed, one of the reasons they're able to get away with this oversight is because the vast majority of us consider living, breathing people to be of instinctively greater value than embryos in a laboratory. A simple anecdote demonstrates this: suppose that a fertility clinic catches fire and burns to the ground, and 50 embryos are incinerated within moments. Now suppose the same thing happens to an apartment complex the next day, and 50 residents perish in the fire. Which is the greater tragedy? It's the apartment fire, obviously. An embryo possess none of the characteristics that we recognize and value in an actual person. And yet, the pro-lifers are asking us to believe that they are equally tragic. Laurie Penny, in her piece for the New Republic, articulates far better than I can how absurd this conflation of an embryo and a person really is:
"“Abortion kills babies” is an article of faith on the American right. The millions of voters who have grown up hearing nothing else are not lying when they say they believe life begins at conception. They are entitled to that belief, as long as they don’t weaponize it to punish strangers. The question of whether a fetus is a person is conveniently unanswerable. The question of whether a woman is a person, however, is not up for debate—and it is female personhood, not fetal personhood, that should decide the issue of basic bodily autonomy.
The mere fact that an abortion is taking a life—if that is truly what you believe—is not enough to justify jailing little girls for getting one. There are plenty of situations where American law permits one individual to take a life: home invasion, self-defense, membership in the armed forces. Now, I happen to believe, along with 58 percent of Americans and most medical professionals, that terminating a pregnancy in its early stages is no more murderous than a biopsy. I happen to believe that a six-week-old fetus with a heartbeat but no limbic brain activity is less sentient than what most Republicans eat for breakfast in any of the constitutionally carnivorous states of the American South. But my personal feelings about the meaning of life don’t matter here. As the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson put it, what matters more—far more—is women’s freedom to control their own lives."Again, this is about regulating women's bodies. Pro-choicers have known this to be true ever since abortion became a culture war flashpoint in the 70's and 80's. Pro-lifers will deny this but, well, people like Alabama state senator Clyde Chambliss have a tendency of saying the quiet part out loud. And the manner in which they craft our laws tells us precisely what they think about women being in control of their own sexual and reproductive decisions, as this Chicago Tribune article highlights:
"The disparity between how the law treats abortion patients and IVF patients reveals an ugly truth about abortion restrictions: that they are often less about protecting life than about controlling women's bodies. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people. But only abortion concerns women who have had sex that they don't want to lead to childbirth. Abortion restrictions use unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for "irresponsible sex" and remind women of the consequences of being unchaste: If you didn't want to endure a mandatory vaginal ultrasound, you shouldn't have had sex in the first place."Those in the pro-life camp like to envision themselves as earnest moralists who desire nothing more than to protect babies from their promiscuous, nefarious mothers from slaughtering them. They tend not to use words like "zygote," "embryo," or "fetus"; it's always a "baby" that's being aborted. This is an intentional strategy to pull at our heartstrings. And they positively love to invoke the specter of late term abortion for the same reasons. But as I wrote in my last piece, late term abortions are exceedingly rare, and the reasons that women may opt to get a late term abortion, such as when there are fetal abnormalities or their own health is at risk, always seem to escape the imaginations of those who wish to implement blanket bans on the procedure.
Those of us in the pro-choice camp should continue to forcibly make the case for legal abortion. It's important to dismantle their talking points by pointing out the hypocrisy, but if we're being honest, they don't actually give a shit about being hypocrites. Their objective is to control women's bodies and sex lives, not to adhere to any coherent set of principles regarding the protection of life. If it were, then they would spend as much time protesting in front of fertility clinics as abortion clinics. But they don't, because they're too busy getting off on the apparent power trip that comes along with screaming bible verses at scared 17-year-old girls walking into Planned Parenthood.
They don't have the moral high ground. After all, it was the pro-life mindset that led to the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland, who succumb to a septic miscarriage thanks to the nation's then draconian laws that prevented her from getting the abortion that likely would have saved her life. The people of Ireland have since, thankfully, passed a referendum that substantially loosens abortion restrictions. And this is the same group of people that ardently opposes comprehensive sex education in our schools, and readily available access to contraceptives. Both policies have been proven to reduce unwanted pregnancies, which is very clearly the only way to reduce abortions.
Pro-lifers don't give a fuck about protecting life. Their objective, quite simply, is the perpetuation of our patriarchal society.
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