Turning Back The Clock On Abortion

The New Republic: Supreme Court's Decision Based On Old-Fashioned, Discredited Views On Women

(The New Republic)  In one famous case, a middle-class African American woman from Long Island, pregnant with a rubella-scarred fetus, was approved for a therapeutic abortion but had the bad luck to fall into the hands of a fervent anti-abortion Catholic physician, who tricked her into believing the fetus was normal and sent her home.

But, in the long run, the push for therapeutic abortion made Americans of both sexes think publicly about what pregnancy meant to those most closely involved: the woman, her family, and the child who could be born unwanted. Considerations of how dire the circumstances of pregnancy were in hardship cases led to reflections about the hardships any pregnancy could cause. Large numbers of people — many of them well outside the radical politics of the decade — came to believe that the state should refrain from intruding into a decision that, in the end, was the pregnant woman's to make. In 1966, The Saturday Evening Post — as conventional as they came — ran the headline "we should legalize abortion," and The New York Times editorialized for legalization the next year. By 1970, there were initiatives in many state legislatures and a public that was leaning toward legalizing abortion, period.

It's interesting to note that D&X is used to end pregnancies in the kinds of situations in which there has long been a consensus that the woman's wishes should be honored. It's as if the anti-choice movement is going back to the '60s and trying for a do-over, dismantling the first premise on which most could agree — the right of a pregnant woman in a terrible bind to get a legal abortion from a competent physician, one who will put her health and safety first.

So how, despite public opinion, did abortion opponents manage to waylay and subvert pro-choice measures in state after state before 1973? The answer lies in the intractable determination of religious conservatives to recast abortion as a debate over the primacy of child-bearing and the personhood of the fetus, rather than as an issue of women's well-being. The Catholic Church was the first to attack abortion: Even before Roe, the Church hierarchy coordinated a parish-by-parish effort to stop any sort of reform bill, including those for therapeutic abortions. This predominantly Catholic movement didn't broaden into the more ecumenical one we know until the late '70s and early '80s, when Protestant evangelicals first joined in. In 1978, Jerry Falwell preached his first sermon on abortion; a year later, the newly formed Moral Majority put abortion at the top of its list of secular humanist scourges. Two years later, Ronald Reagan was the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to run on a party platform that condemned abortion. Over the next twelve years, the anti-choice movement battened onto fears of adolescent girls gone wild, securing parental consent laws in many states. It gained public platforms to proselytize and intimidate, with ersatz "scientific" revelations about the subjective life of the fetus. And, as the troops heated up in the 1980s, the far right wing turned violent — picketing and firebombing clinics, assaulting women, and murdering physicians.

The turn to terrorism did not serve the movement well. Americans recoiled from the violence and a "mainstream" right-to-life movement that refused to condemn it. In addition, although anti-choice forces succeeded in making it hard for women and girls to get abortions (there are reputed to be places in the West where a woman has to drive 600 miles for an abortion), they never made a dent in the 60-plus percent of Americans who supported legal abortion.

By the late '90s, some right-to-life strategists began to search for a softer, more "woman-friendly" message. They mixed the old rhetoric of protecting fetuses with new claims to defending women: from the pressures of loutish male partners too selfish to consider fatherhood, from domineering feminists, and from the depression and "post-abortion syndrome" that supposedly ensues. In The American Prospect last October, Siegel and Sarah Blustain reported how, in South Dakota, the strategy was tested with the aid of a willing red-state legislature that sponsored a task force on abortion. The task force issued a 70-page report in 2006 that was essentially a brief from anti-choice groups: Its intent was to show that women who sought abortions did not know their own minds and that they would inevitably be harmed by an act that violated the bond between them and their child. The report led to the draconian South Dakota law that made performing any abortion, except to save the life of the mother, a felony for physicians. Voters overturned the law several months later. What's dismaying, though, is that the logic and pseudoscience behind it survived to inform Kennedy's opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart.

To comprehend just how bad the Court's decision is, you need look no further than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's powerful and lucid dissent. Ginsburg notes Kennedy's reversion to "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution." In Kennedy's statement about the legal salience of "the bond of love the mother has for her child," she hears echoes of the Court's 1908 ruling in Muller v. Oregon that labor laws for women must be geared to the "proper discharge of her maternal functions." In the Court's assumption of the role of benevolent overseer of the pregnant woman's psyche — preventing her from casually making "so grave a choice" — she hears resonances of the 1873 case Bradwell v. Illinois, which asserted that "the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wives and mothers."

Ginsburg knows those decisions intimately, because she devoted much of her career to dismantling the assumptions they enshrined in the law about women's domestic and maternal nature, their limited capacities to function in the world, and their need for supervision and guidance. In the '70s, she helped lead a legal revolution to undo restrictions that pushed women into second-class status. It's this comprehension of the Constitution's meaning that Ginsburg felt compelled to recall for her colleagues: "This Court has repeatedly confirmed the destiny of the woman must be shaped ... on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society." Justice Kennedy and four of his colleagues showed profound indifference to that distinguished history. Now the woman who engendered sympathy and respect for her difficult choices is treated as a lesser being who requires the greater wisdom of the law to pull her back from a moral precipice.

[yeshuas_lion]

Of course Sy takes an extremist point of view, and in a civil society concerned with civil debate and discourse there is no reasoning with a person who is entirely unreasonable, who is coming from a very skewed and irrational point of view. The rhetoric is old and tired; reminiscent of old-time "fire and brimstone" preachers or of the "old-guard" Marxist. It is certainly obsolete, not suited for the 21st Century, (by the way, welcome to the year 2007, you're stuck somewhere in the 50's and 60's)- the presentation of false scenerios of fear, are simply tactics with no substance. There is no basis in fact. This is the "scary monsters" theory, which may work on a grade-school playground, but it does not work in adult debate and conversation.

In other words, your presentation is not believable by any stretch of the imagination and therefore can be considered a fable or myth

[sy2502]

Here is what a society that considers embryos and fetuses just like people would look like:
- Since every sexually active woman can become pregnant at any sexual encounter, every woman will have to take regular mandatory pregnancy tests.
- If the mandatory pregnancy test turns out positive, she will have to be locked up under supervision and strict control to ensure that nothing she does, eats, or drinks can harm the fetus.
- If she has a miscarriage, she will go through criminal prosecution, to ascertain that nothing she did caused the death of the fetus. Miscarriage will be equated to 2nd degree murder.
- Fetuses will be awarded the same tax breaks of children.
- Women will carry medical certificates to show they can ride in the carpool lane, since there are 2 people in the car.
- If a pregnant woman gets a illness from, say, a co-worker, and the fetus dies of complications from that illness, the co-worker will be prosecuted as accessory to murder.
- Since the woman will have no possible way of terminating her pregnancy, she can sue a guy who wants to have *** without a condom.

Oh of course, the last one will never happen, since it would put some of the burden on the guy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition wants the WOMEN to be damned, downtrodden, pounded into submission, and stripped of any right to their own body and especially to their reproductive system.

Good luck, I hope you like the society you are trying to create. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would be proud of you!

[yeshuas_lion]

To carry life and to have a new and seperate being, fully alive and fully human, come forth from one's body, is a priviledge and gift that can not be duplicated by any other life experience.

Woman was chosen to carry "The Gift of LIFE" It is an honor beyond any other. The span of sacrifice, in which a woman gives over her body as a sanctuary for the yet to be born child, is a mere 9 months. (What wonderful, miraculous creation of life have you brought forth from your body Mr. Todd, in 9 months?)

But it is exactly what Katg says, with the Gift, comes responsibility. Both the man and the woman are ultimately responsible for the life they have chosen to create.

[guysdigdirt]

kat & yesh, you 2 nutcakes crack me up, polishing each other's sniper rifles. you have too much time on your hands...
Posted by actornaught
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It is interesting what some people say when they know they are wrong but do not have the courage to admit it. They attack the messenger for their correct message.

[guysdigdirt]

Ugh. Pro-lifers make me sick.

YOU pay for the health care cost, the cost burden of raising that child, the social cost.

People who bomb Planned Parenthood are terrorists.

Posted by toddpw01
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Interesting that people who want to save lives make you sick. How do pro-death people make you feel?

Is it all about cost to you? If so go to planned parethood and get some free condoms, then there would not be the problem.

I agree, those who bomb or kill others are terrorists. Not much different than those Pro-Abortion people. Why are you not at Gitmo?

[guysdigdirt]

You young women are now the ones to insure your sisters a safe choice.
Posted by kansas1946
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It is not a choice, it is a life.

Why did you not spend your time teaching your sisters to be responsible?

[actornaught]

kat & yesh, you 2 nutcakes crack me up, polishing each other's sniper rifles. you have too much time on your hands...

[katg21]

YOU pay for the health care cost of carrying that baby to term. YOU pay for the cost burden of raising that unwanted child. YOU pay for the social cost of the extra crime and poverty you're forcing on poorer families to punish them for disobeying YOUR religious beliefs.

Get off the religious *** already, this is about taking responsibility for your actions. Stop giving people the easy way out and maybe this world will be a better place.

[katg21]

You see it always begins as a lie, and the lie itself is so very seductive....

The lie always promises more freedom.
The lie always promises a better life.
The lie always tells you,
"This is for your own good."
The lie is always clothed in compassion.
Posted by Yeshuas_lion at 02:21 AM : May 18, 2007

Ahh, TRUTH... speaks volumes, thank you.

[katg21]

Yeshuas_lion,

Beautifully stated.

[toddpw01]

Ugh. Pro-lifers make me sick. Pregnancy carries plenty of risk, and childrearing is quite expensive, but you don't care about that. All you care about is saving the precious little embryos even if they aren't independently viable yet. You don't care about the mother at all. You wouldn't stop me from having a tumor removed, but if a pregnancy was threatening a mother's life you'd still make her abortion illegal if you could!

YOU pay for the health care cost of carrying that baby to term. YOU pay for the cost burden of raising that unwanted child. YOU pay for the social cost of the extra crime and poverty you're forcing on poorer families to punish them for disobeying YOUR religious beliefs.

2000 years ago people married at puberty and we knew nothing about disease. You can make a great case for abstinence in that environment. But nowadays we have much better medicine and understanding, and economically it makes a lot more sense to build your career up before you start a family. Why do you want to keep poor people down?

Women throughout history have resorted to illegal abortion when they felt they had no better options. But it took the baby boomers hitting their teens to cause a wave of emergency room vists from botched back-alley abortions -- that is how the legalization movement started.

People who bomb Planned Parenthood are terrorists. The only reason we don't send them to Gitmo is because the President agrees with their choice of religion.

[yeshuas_lion]

It always begins with a lie, by a few who are well-meaning, but by most who are not...

The Woman's Movement claim was that they were speaking for a large sector of society, a silent majority who did not have a true voice.

They claimed they were speaking for those who were not being heard or represented, and who were in fact being treated only as property.

The Movement's claim was that of a compassionate understanding of what it truly meant to be accepted as FULLY HUMAN; that women were not being treated equally and as fully human.

In order to be regarded as fully human,the personhood of a woman must be respected and fully accepted. She must be seen as a person.

To be seen as a person means to be given the right to make ones own decision, and the ultimate test of personhood is that those rights pertain to ones own existence and personal life. That a woman has the right to choose life, that she breathes, moves, feels, and is aware of her surroundings entitles her to equal; equal rights of life and happiness, not deminished or unequal rights. Life; that one exists truly entitles them to all the rights of life that are enjoyed by everyone else in existance.

That, even more so, we should safeguard the existence of the very least of these.

[yeshuas_lion]

It was the Woman's Movement who draped themselves in compassion. Who became the voice for women everywhere, because a woman, afterall, couldn't be expected to truly speak for herself.

So, the Woman's Movement became the mouthpiece, to speak for women everwhere who were too timid, or too ignorant, or too emotional, or too religious, to speak correctly for themselves. They became the self-appointed and self-anointed saviors of women because women could not be expected to know for themselves or do for themselves without the superior help and guidance of those in the Woman's Movement. Afterall, women must be told what to do and how to do it. In other words they became the "New Men."

[yeshuas_lion]

Belial, the father of all lies, has been with the World from its inception and knows how to wrap "The culture of death," in sweet smelling sentiment and compassionate words of false comfort and hope.

This is why the debate rages on and on.
It is not of this world.

The premise or concept of abortion comes wrapped up in a neat, tidy, sterile package. Nothing is lost, you have everything to gain, no one is hurt, there is nothing to see or hear, it is quick, it is easy, and always so very, very compassionate.

Money certainly does talk, and the abortion industry certainly does make money.

[yeshuas_lion]

You see it always begins as a lie, and the lie itself is so very seductive....

The lie always promises more freedom.
The lie always promises a better life.
The lie always tells you,
"This is for your own good."
The lie is always clothed in compassion.

[yeshuas_lion]

You see it always begins as a lie, and the lie itself is so very seductive....

The lie always promises more freedom.
The lie always promises a better life.
The lie always tells you,
"This is for your own good."
The lie is always clothed in compassion.

[yeshuas_lion]

I'm not sure that you won, Kansas. It sure hasn't been a "win" situation for the millions of babies mutilated then aborted like trash.

Wasn't that the exact thing you claim to have fought against, that woman were being treated like property, like trash?

[kansas1946]

I am well past the age of having to worry about being able to get a safe and legal abortion. I spent the sixties and early seventies fighting this battle and won. Now it is up to the younger generation of women to take up the standard. I think they are starting to wake up when they can't even get the morning after pill without a bunch of hooey from some pharmacist with an agenda. You young women are now the ones to insure your sisters a safe choice.

[actornaught]

i see extremists still want to race past "when the woman's life is in danger", even if IDX is performed on a non-viable fetus.

The mind is a drunken monkey.

[guysdigdirt]

You want to force me to act according to what you and another few believe.
Posted by sy2502
--------------------

I am done with you. You are twisted and dishonest.

Argueing with you is like wrestling with a pig. We both get dirty, but the pig likes it.