The Cruelty of the Forced-Birth Movement

This picture haunts me. It’s of Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Black woman from Ohio, at a court hearing last month, where a judge ruled she could be tried for the felony charge of abusing a corpse after she miscarried. Such things have happened before, especially when the targets are poor or of color. But there’s no doubt that anti-choice fanaticism in the wake of Roe’s upending contributes mightily to this obscene persecution. Here’s the backstory to this picture of a woman caught in a nightmare.

On September 19, 2023, Ms. Watts had gone to the hospital because she appeared to be miscarrying 21 weeks into her pregnancy. Although doctors recommended inducing delivery of her non-viable fetus, she was kept waiting for 8 hours without treatment while the hospital ethics panel debated her fate. She returned the next day and again left without treatment. Soon after, she passed fetal tissue into the toilet, which clogged when she tried to flush. Upon returning to the hospital, a nurse called the police. In October, Ms. Watts was arrested and charged with a seldom-used law against abusing a corpse despite evidence that the fetus died in utero.

Imagine being denied treatment, miscarrying alone at home, then facing charges that could have resulted in a year’s imprisonment.

Fortunately, a grand jury recently ruled against proceeding with this persecution prosecution. The legal case may be over, but the anguish on Ms. Watts face speaks to the indelible horror of our post-Roe abortion landscape.

And this wasn’t even an abortion! But it did occur in the midst of Ohio’s ugly climate as forced-birth proponents in the state legislature tried (unsuccessfully) to severely restrict, even criminalize abortion. As Wendy A. Bach, a law professor at the University of Tennessee noted in the New York Times, “This is part of an ongoing and increasing trend to use the criminal law to punish reproductive health in this country. . . [Ms. Watts’s] punishment started the moment [the hospital’s ethics board] had to debate what to do with her rather than provide her with medical care.”

The cruelty is the point.

But it’s also backfiring. In state after state, voters of all political stripes are rejecting the wet dreams of Gilead. Abortion rights advocates have certainly capitalized on horror story after horror story of what the loss of Roe has meant: a 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped being forced to seek an abortion in a neighboring state; her doctor facing egregious threats to her medical license, liberty, livelihood, and reputation; a mother and her pregnant teenager facing charges based on their Facebook messages; women like Texan Kate Cox who desperately want their babies but are unable to get the care they need when the pregnancy goes awry; ob-gyns leaving red states because it’s become impossible to deliver quality care without fear of prosecution in the legal morass of abortion bans.

These, of course, are the stories that generate sympathy and the will to fight back. My heart breaks for the hardships these people face, and I’m grateful to all who have come forward.

But even though the strategy of amplifying such stories has been highly effective at the ballot box, I’m also ambivalent about the hyper-focus on these relatively rare “sympathetic victim” cases. 

After all, the vast majority of those needing abortions don’t fall into this category. They shouldn’t have to. Failed birth control, no birth control, casual sex, awkward sex, great sex, acquiesced-to sex, immaturity, drunkenness, having other goals that don’t include childbirth are no less deserving reasons than a tragic turn in a wanted pregnancy or becoming pregnant through rape or incest. There are no categories of deserving or undeserving people when it comes to the decision of whether or when to bear a child. Everyone deserves the freedom to choose.

So come November, choose to overturn the cruelty of the forced-birth movement. Vote blue.

Don’t Be Fooled

My heart sank when I first heard about Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. That’s because I thought he might just succeed in tricking people into thinking it was a reasonable idea. After all, before the Dobbs decision eliminated constitutional protection altogether, abortion rights had been slowly eroded for decades by just such “compromises.” Chief Justice Roberts was hoping to preserve a fig leaf of SCOTUS legitimacy by allowing just such a ban to stand in Mississippi without overturning Roe. Plus, a 15-week limit polls well.

I also had to read the fine print to understand that Graham’s proposal did not ensure abortion rights nationwide for the first 15 weeks. Quite the contrary: States would remain perfectly free to restrict abortion at any earlier point, while states with more liberal access would be forced to ban the procedure after 15 weeks. As the saying goes, “Heads we win, tails you lose.”

Still, it’s not unusual for people to react with outrage to egregious proposals before acquiescing to something more in the middle. Graham is trying to quell the intense backlash to overturning Roe by offering something that sounds more reasonable than the draconian restrictions GOP state legislatures are passing right and left.

I myself—staunchly pro-choice my entire life—almost fell for something similar when “partial-birth abortion” entered the anti-choice lexicon in the mid-90s. The descriptions of the procedure were pretty grisly: puncturing the skulls and removing the brains of partially delivered fetuses. It sounded as bad as abandoning newborn infants on Chinese mountaintops simply because they were girls. A steady diet of such horror stories made me wonder who could possibly oppose banning such a practice.

Or so I reacted for a nano-second, until I thought and learned some more. The scary coinage came from the National Right to Life Committee in 1995. The correct term for the medical procedure is “intact dilation and extraction,” a safer method than the prior standard for ending pregnancies after the first trimester. About 95% of abortions occur before 15 weeks, but it’s not exactly like care-free women are casually clamoring to end their pregnancies later on. Some may not have known they were pregnant. Others have been forced to jump through so many hoops already that a safer, simpler abortion option is no longer possible. Most likely, something has gone wrong with a wanted pregnancy, as Pete Buttigieg explained in 2020 at a Fox News Town Hall. Here’s his exchange as reported by Upworthy with moderator Chris Wallace about whether there should be any limits on abortion rights:

“I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we’ve gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line,” Buttigieg replied, “and I trust women to draw the line when it’s their own health.”

Wallace wanted to clarify that Buttigieg would be okay with late-term abortion and pointed out that there are more than 6000 women who get third trimester abortions each year.

“That’s right,” responded Buttiegieg, “representing one percent of cases. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, than almost by definition, you’ve been expecting to carry it to term. We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name. Women who have purchased a crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother or viability of the pregnancy that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice. And the bottom line is as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.”

Reporter Annie Renau then observes:

And that’s really the gist of the pro-choice stance. Why would we want the government to be involved in our most difficult medical and moral dilemmas and decisions?

Exactly. Especially the likes of Lindsey Graham and all the other Forced Birth proponents in government. No matter what the reason or stage of pregnancy.

Luckily, Graham’s proposal has backfired. His intentions are clear, and his own party is mad at him for saying the quiet parts out loud as they busily scrub their websites of draconian anti-choice pronouncements.

Don’t be fooled. Come November 8, Roe, Roe, Roe your vote.

The Slave States of Gilead

The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply
rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.” — Justice
Samuel Alito

You know what is deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions? Slavery and the subjugation of women, particularly Black women.

The reckless Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade has triggered chaos, despair, and rage across America. It holds many parallels to the Civil War era:

States’ rights. By returning abortion decisions to states, Kavanaugh disingenuously claims “scrupulous neutrality.” But “states’ rights” was the fig leaf behind which slavery hid. Letting states decide for themselves meant powerful white men could enslave Black people. Right now, “states rights” is the fig leaf behind more than half of U.S. states’ severely restricting abortion or banning it altogether in an obliteration of women’s rights.

Lack of bodily autonomy. Enslaved people were considered property—they could be bought, sold, brutalized, starved, raped, forced into labor. Being forced into the labor of carrying, birthing, and raising or surrendering a child is also enslavement.

Not even second-class citizens. Enslaved people were explicitly prohibited from citizenship until the 14th amendment was ratified in 1868. Women, even white women, fared just as poorly, with no property, voting, employment rights, or even the ability to get a credit card until well into the 20th century.

The Fugitive Slave Act. Passed in 1850, this act required that enslaved people be returned to their enslavers, even if they were in a free state. Right now, we are witnessing the mind-boggling swiftness and reach of anti-choice states going after women and anyone who helps them even if they travel to states where abortion is legal.

Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker warns of a totalitarian and technological twist to today’s vicious pursuits:

“We have entered an era . . .  of widespread state surveillance and
criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth.

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found.”

 

“Let the people decide.” Which people? Throughout most of our history, Black people and women couldn’t vote. A minority of powerful white men called the shots. Today, minority rule dominates as well, thanks to the Electoral College, the filibuster, gerrymandering, a breath-taking array of new voter suppression laws, and two stolen Supreme Court seats. The Senate is split 50-50, but the Democratic half represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half. Huge majorities of Americans favor retaining Roe v Wade, but are helpless to exercise their formerly protected rights in the slave states of Gilead.

The minority dissent in Dobbs by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and
Kagan, is crystal clear: “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”

Stench

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” – Joni Mitchell

It was 2016, and I was phone banking into Nevada for the presidential election. “Do you know if you’re planning on voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in November?” I asked the man who answered the phone.

“I think they’re both morons, but I’m a conservative and I want conservative judges so I’m voting for Trump!” he replied before slamming down the phone.

I had to admire his strategic clarity. If only those who support abortion rights were so fervent and clear-sighted! Now, after death by a thousand cuts whittled away access for decades, the right-wing Supreme Court seems poised to deliver the final blow, erasing 50 years of a constitutional right supported by a large majority of Americans.

But the Supreme Court was really lost in 2016, when Mitch McConnell got away with stealing an open seat from President Obama, liberals were not as motivated to vote as Nevada Guy was, Hillary Clinton lost in the electoral college, and RBG lost her gamble that she could outlive cancer and Donald Trump.

Now those of us who cherish the right to choose have lost even more.

Opponents of reproductive rights have fanatically pursued their agenda for decades. Alas, proponents have not matched their zeal–until now. SCOTUS’s expected evisceration of Roe v Wade is the wake-up call that’s finally mobilized millions of Americans who support the right to choose. There’s nothing like fear and anger to motivate voting.

No doubt the SCOTUS leaked draft will be tidied up before its official release. But it’s impossible to mask the stench of this radical decision, which threatens not only the right to control one’s own body, but so many other fundamental rights.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayer asked at the hearings for this case in December 2021. No.

It will take time to clear the air, regain the ground we have lost. But as Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson notes, “The only thing that can stop a bad politician with a vote is a good citizen with a vote.”

Supreme Safety for Women

Supreme Court BuildingIn a major decision upholding a woman’s right to choose, the Supreme Court just overturned a Texas law that imposed severe restrictions on abortion. Under the guise of protecting women’s health, the law’s real aim was to make it much harder to gain access to safe and legal means of terminating a pregnancy. A majority of justices called out this deception in no uncertain terms.

On the same day, the Supreme Court issued a separate ruling that also furthered genuine rather than sham protection of women. By a vote of 6-2, the Court upheld a federal law that bars people with misdemeanor domestic violence convictions from owning guns even if their actions are deemed “reckless” instead of “intentional.” The little-known case pitted gun-rights groups against advocates for victims of domestic abuse.

Unlike false claims that abortion clinics compromise women’s health, batterers with guns pose a real threat. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, people with a history of committing domestic violence are five times more likely to subsequently murder an intimate partner when a firearm is in the house.

The Supreme Court’s decision is in sharp contrast with a do-nothing Congress that consistently ignores strong public support for common-sense gun laws. Although the ruling does not mend the spotty and poorly enforced patchwork of state gun laws that leave so many at risk, it blocks an attempt to undercut a 1996 federal law designed to protect victims of domestic abuse. Had the Court decided the other way, states trying to stem the tide of violence by keeping guns out of the hands of abusers would have been stymied.

In upholding a law that actually protects women while overturning one that doesn’t, the Supreme Court decisions stand as a pointed rebuke to predominantly Republican lawmakers who profess to care about women’s safety even as they undermine it.

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