do these numbers scare you?
....
in catholic school we were taught about the development of life in utero. we were taught about abortion techniques. we followed the legislature and prayed for the ban of partial-birth abortions. in ninth grade religion class we watched a video of an abortion procedure. i was one of two girls who left the room.
my feelings on abortion are complicated and intense and changing all time. i marked this change recently when driving past a church in new orleans, at the corner of carrollton and oak. they had posted a banner outside, typical catholic pro-life stuff, a picture of a baby with the caption "IF YOU'RE PREGNANT ... IT'S A BABY."
if you are well-versed in pro-life teachings, the above proclamation makes sense. we learned in catholic school that the pro-choice people passed Roe v. Wade by arguing that the thing in your belly was a 'fetus' and not a baby - so abortion isn't murder, because you're 'terminating a fetus' instead of killing a baby. it was a logic trick; it was semantics. the church on carrollton seeks to restore to pro-choice people the understanding that the thing in their belly is not a 'fetus' but a baby - so that they will make the right decision to preserve this baby's life.
five years ago, or maybe even one year ago, i would not have batted an eye at the sight of this banner.
but now i burst out laughing. do they not understand how irrelevant this argument is? do they seriously think that they're telling a pregnant woman something she doesn't already know? that's the whole fucking point. generally speaking, if you're pregnant and you're seeking an abortion, it's not because you don't want to have a 'fetus.' it's because you don't want to have a baby.
but then, maybe the church uses this slogan because they're giving women the benefit of the doubt - approaching a pro-choice woman as someone with the capacity for compassion and appealing to that compassion - rather than dismissing her summarily as an apathetic baby killer.
except this approach assumes that if you tell a woman she's "pregnant with a baby," her maternal instinct is going to kick in and she'll realize that it is in fact her destiny to birth a small creature and love it and nurture it and devote her life to it and this act will be the realization of her fullest potential. motherhood is the ultimate expression of and greatest gift to womanhood. etc etc. [and if you don't subscribe to these beliefs, if you don't hold them sacred, you must be some kind of frigid alien-bitch.]
it is very easy for me to fall into the trap of "if it's natural it must be right and good" - in fact i am uncomfortable with my own ambivalence towards abortion as a personal choice and as a legal right - and i was startled to discover, several months ago, that i felt my capacity for childbirth was an unfair burden. it seems ridiculous to consider what is more or less a biological inevitability "unfair" - but that's how i feel right now.
on the other hand, i suppose there are lots of "unnatural" things that i believe in, like airplanes, the internet, classical ballet, and sex-as-recreation between people of all genders, same or otherwise.
and i find solace in "anatomy is not destiny" and i find inspiration in the reaffirmation of Roe v. Wade that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes below.
what follows are sections of the april 18th supreme court ruling supporting the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act (5 - 4), along with some media commentary. all formatting for emphasis is mine; some citations have been removed for readability.
i think the supreme court ruling is paternalistic and patronizing; i think Justice Ginsberg's dissenting opinion is eloquent and her destruction of the majority argument is thorough; i think the "enhanced informed consent" as described in the New York Times article below is both condescending and something akin to emotional torture of women who have made an extremely difficult and emotionally charged decision protected by legal right in this country - all in the supposed best interest of the woman-mother's mental health.
i hope those numbers scare you. they scare the shit out of me.
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from Gonzales v. Carhart et al. – Dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
In reaffirming Roe, the Casey Court described the centrality of “the decision whether to bear . . . a child,” Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453 (1972), to a woman’s “dignity and autonomy,” her “personhood” and “destiny,” her “conception of . . . her place in society.” 505 U. S., at 851–852.
....
from Gonzales v. Carhart et al. – Opinion of the Court, decided April 18, 2007 (5 - 4)
It must be stated at the outset and with clarity that Roe’s essential holding, the holding we reaffirm, has three parts. … And third is the principle that the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the fetus that may become a child. These principles do not contradict one another; and we adhere to each.
... The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.
....
from The Nation - May 16, 2007 - Jessica Arons
With his opinion in Gonzalez v. Carhart, Justice Anthony Kennedy utterly changed the course of abortion jurisprudence in this country. Among the reasons he cited for upholding the ban on a type of midterm abortion procedure was the concern that some women may "come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.... Severe depression and loss of self-esteem can follow."
... Since when do we base the free exercise of our rights on whether we may later regret having done so?
... Clearly, Justice Kennedy has bought into every single stereotype that the "prolife" movement has painted about the women who have abortions--that women who want abortions are selfish; that they don't fully understand the consequences of their decision; that it is unnatural for a woman to want an abortion; that they are a different breed of women from those who choose motherhood; that they will be traumatized by having an abortion; that they don't have the proper respect for human life.
....
from Gonzales v. Calhart et al. – Dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Today’s decision is alarming. … It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.
… Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right “to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.” Id., at 856. Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized, is intimately connected to “their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
In keeping with this comprehension of the right to reproductive choice, the Court has consistently required that laws regulating abortion, at any stage of pregnancy and in all cases, safeguard a woman’s health. .. We have thus ruled that a State must avoid subjecting women to health risks not only where the pregnancy itself creates danger, but also where state regulation forces women to resort to less safe methods of abortion.
… [I]t should not escape notice that the record already includes hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony identifying “discrete and well-defined instances” in which recourse to an intact D&E would better protect the health of women with particular conditions. See supra, at 10–11. Record evidence also documents that medical exigencies, unpredictable in advance, may indicate to a well-trained doctor that intact D&E is the safest procedure. … The Court’s allowance only of an “as-applied challenge in a discrete case,” ante, at 38—jeopardizes women’s health and places doctors in an untenable position.
The Court offers flimsy and transparent justifications for upholding a nationwide ban on intact D&E sans any exception to safeguard a women’s health. Today’s ruling, the Court declares, advances “a premise central to [Casey’s] conclusion”—i.e., the Government’s “legitimate and substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life.” But the Act scarcely furthers that interest: The law saves not a single fetus from destruction, for it targets only a method of performing abortion. … And surely the statute was not designed to protect the lives or health of pregnant women. In short, the Court upholds a law that, while doing nothing to “preserv[e] . . . fetal life,” bars a woman from choosing intact D&E although her doctor “reasonably believes [that procedure] will best protect [her].”
As another reason for upholding the ban, the Court emphasizes that the Act does not proscribe the nonintact D&E procedure. See ante, at 34. But why not, one might ask. Nonintact D&E could equally be characterized as “brutal,” ante, at 26, involving as it does “tear[ing] [a fetus] apart” and “ripp[ing] off” its limbs, ante, at 4, 6. “[T]he notion that either of these two equally gruesome procedures . . . is more akin to infanticide than the other, or that the State furthers any legitimate interest by banning one but not the other, is simply irrational.”
Delivery of an intact, albeit nonviable, fetus warrants special condemnation, the Court maintains, because a fetus that is not dismembered resembles an infant. But so, too, does a fetus delivered intact after it is terminated by injection a day or two before the surgical evacuation, or a fetus delivered through medical induction or cesarean. Yet, the availability of those procedures—along with D&E by dismemberment—the Court says, saves the ban on intact D&E from a declaration of unconstitutionality. Never mind that the procedures deemed acceptable might put a woman’s health at greater risk.
Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. (“Congress could . . . conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at
850)).
Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from “[s]evere depression and loss of esteem.” Because of women’s fragile emotional state and because of the “bond of love the mother has for her child,” the Court worries, doctors may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure.
Footnote: The Court is surely correct that, for most women, abortion is a painfully difficult decision. See ante, at 28. But “neither the weight of the scientific evidence to date nor the observable reality of 33 years of legal abortion in the United States comports with the idea that having an abortion is any more dangerous to a woman’s long-term mental health than delivering and parenting a child that she did not intend to have . . .” Cohen, Abortion and Mental Health: Myths and Realities, 9 Guttmacher Policy Rev. 8 (2006)
Footnote: Notwithstanding the “bond of love” women often have with their children, see ante, at 28, not all pregnancies, this Court has recognized, are wanted, or even the product of consensual activity. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 891 (“[O]n an average day in the United States, nearly 11,000 women are severely assaulted by their male partners. Many of these incidents involve sexual assault.”).
The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Cf. Casey, 505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opinion) (“States are free to enact laws to provide a reasonable framework for a woman to make a decision that has such profound and lasting meaning.”). Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.
This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution— ideas that have long since been discredited. [e.g., United States v. Virginia, 518 U. S. 515, 533, 542, n. 12 (1996) (State may not rely on “overbroad generalizations” about the “talents, capacities, or preferences” of women; “[s]uch judgments have . . . impeded . . . women’s progress toward full citizenship stature throughout our Nation’s history”); Calfano v. Goldfarb, 430 U. S. 199, 207 (1977)
Though today’s majority may regard women’s feelings on the matter as “self-evident,” this Court has repeatedly confirmed that “[t]he destiny of the woman must be shaped . . . on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. See also id., at 877 (plurality opinion) (“[M]eans chosen by the State to further the interest in potential life must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it.”)
Footnote: Eliminating or reducing women’s reproductive choices is manifestly not a means of protecting them. When safe abortion procedures cease to be an option, many women seek other means to end unwanted or coerced pregnancies. See, e.g., World Health Organization, Unsafe Abortion: Global and Regional Estimates of the Incidence of Unsafe Abortion and Associated Mortality in 2000, pp. 3, 16 (4th ed. 2004) (“Restrictive legislation is associated with a high incidence of unsafe abortion” worldwide; unsafe abortion represents 13% of all “maternal” deaths); Henshaw, Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion: A Public Health Perspective, in A Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion 11, 19 (M. Paul, E. Lichtenberg, L. Borgatta, D. Grimes, & P. Stubblefield eds. 1999) (“Before legalization, large numbers of women in the United States died from unsafe abortions.”); H. Boonstra, R. Gold, C. Richards, & L. Finer, Abortion in Women’s Lives 13, and fig. 2.2 (2006) (“as late as 1965, illegal abortion still accounted for an estimated . . . 17% of all officially reported pregnancy-related deaths”; “[d]eaths from abortion declined dramatically after legalization”).
In cases on a “woman’s liberty to determine whether to [continue] her pregnancy,” this Court has identified viability as a critical consideration. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 869–870 (plurality opinion). “[T]here is no line [more workable] than viability,” the Court explained in Casey, for viability is “the time at which there is a realistic possibility of maintaining and nourishing a life outside the womb, so that the independent existence of the second life can in reason and all fairness be the object of state protection that now overrides the rights of the woman. . . . In some broad sense it might be said that a woman who fails to act before viability has consented to the State’s intervention on behalf of the developing child.” Id., at 870.
Today, the Court blurs that line, maintaining that “[t]he Act [legitimately] appl[ies] both previability and postviability because . . . a fetus is a living organism while within the womb, whether or not it is viable outside the womb.” Ante, at 17. Instead of drawing the line at viability, the Court refers to Congress’ purpose to differentiate “abortion and infanticide” based not on whether a fetus can survive outside the womb, but on where a fetus is anatomically located when a particular medical procedure is performed. See ante, at 28 (quoting Congressional Findings (14)(G), in notes following 18 U. S. C. §1531 (2000 ed., Supp. IV), p. 769).
One wonders how long a line that saves no fetus from destruction will hold in face of the Court’s “moral concerns.” The Court’s hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured is not concealed.
In sum, the notion that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act furthers any legitimate governmental interest is, quite simply, irrational. The Court’s defense of the statute provides no saving explanation. In candor, the Act, and the Court’s defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court—and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives. See supra, at 3, n. 2; supra, at 7, n. 4. When “a statute burdens constitutional rights and all that can be said on its behalf is that it is the vehicle that legislators have chosen for expressing their hostility to those rights, the burden is undue.” Stenberg, 530 U. S., at 952 (quoting Hope Clinic v. Ryan, 195 F. 3d 857, 881 (CA7 1999) (Posner, C. J., dissenting)).
....
May 22, 2007 – The New York Times
"Abortion Foes See Validation for New Tactic"
By Robin Toner
Washington, D.C. - For many years, the political struggle over abortion was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by opponents of abortion.
But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of
the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its
risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the
interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the
same.
The
majority opinion in the court’s 5-to-4 decision explicitly acknowledged this
argument, galvanizing anti-abortion forces and setting the stage for an
intensifying battle over new abortion restrictions in the states.
This
ferment adds to the widespread recognition that abortion politics are changing,
in ways that are, as yet, unclear, if not contradictory. Even as the
anti-abortion forces relish their biggest victory in the Supreme Court in
nearly 20 years, they face the possibility of a Republican presidential
nominee, former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who is a supporter of abortion rights.
The
anti-abortion movement’s focus on women has been building for a decade or more,
advanced by groups like the conservative Justice Foundation, the National Right
to Life Committee and Feminists for Life.
“We think
of ourselves as very pro-woman,” said Wanda Franz, president of the National
Right to Life Committee. “We believe that when you help the woman, you help the
baby.”
It is
embodied in much of the imagery and advertising of the anti-abortion movement
in recent years, especially the “Women Deserve Better Than Abortion” campaign
by Feminists for Life, the group that counts Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of
the chief justice, among its most prominent supporters.
It is also
at the heart of an effort — expected to escalate in next year’s state
legislative sessions — to enact new “informed consent” and mandatory counseling
laws that critics assert often amount to a not-so-subtle pitch against
abortion. Abortion-rights advocates, still reeling from last month’s decision,
argue that this effort is motivated by ideology, not women’s health.
“Informed
consent is really a misleading way to characterize it,” said Roger Evans,
senior director of public policy litigation and law for Planned Parenthood. “To
me, what we’ll see is an increasing attempt to push a state’s ideology into a
doctor-patient relationship, to force doctors to communicate more and more of
the state’s viewpoint.”
Nancy
Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said, “It’s motivated by
politics, not by science, not by medical care, and not for the purposes of
compassion.”
The
Guttmacher Institute, a research group and an affiliate of Planned Parenthood,
said recently that “a considerable body of credible evidence” over 30 years
contradicted the notion that legal abortion posed long-term dangers to women’s
health, physically or mentally.
But Allan
E. Parker Jr., president of the Justice Foundation, a conservative group based
in Texas, compares the campaign intended for women to the long struggle to inform
Americans about the risks of smoking. “We’re kind of in the early stages of
tobacco litigation,” Mr. Parker said.
All sides
agree that the debate reached a new level of significance when Justice Anthony
M. Kennedy, writing the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case last month,
approvingly cited a friend-of-the court brief filed by the Justice Foundation.
The
foundation, a nonprofit public interest litigation firm that has handled an
array of conservative causes, has increasingly focused on abortion through its
project called Operation Outcry. Mr. Parker said the group began hearing from
women in the late 1990s who considered themselves victims of legalized abortion
— physically and emotionally — and wanted to tell their stories. Operation
Outcry, which grew to include a Web site, a national hot line and chapters
around the country, eventually collected statements from more than 2,000 women,
officials said.
In its
friend-of-the-court brief, the group submitted statements from 180 of those
women who said that abortion had left them depressed, distraught, in emotional
turmoil. “Thirty-three years of real life experiences,” the foundation said,
“attests that abortion hurts women and endangers their physical, emotional and
psychological health.”
The case
before the Supreme Court involved a specific type of abortion, occasionally
used after the first trimester, that involves removing a fetus intact after
collapsing its skull. Justice Kennedy upheld that ban on narrower, legal
grounds, but he used the Justice Foundation brief to write more broadly about
the emotional impact of abortion on women.
“While
we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to
conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they
once created and sustained,” Justice Kennedy wrote, alluding to the brief. “Severe
depression and loss of esteem can follow.”
Given those
stakes, the justice argued, “The state has an interest in ensuring so grave a
choice is well informed.”
Many, on
both sides, viewed that as an invitation from a newly conservative court to
pass tough new counseling and informed-consent laws intended for women seeking
abortions — “a green light for enhanced informed
consent,” in the words of Clarke D. Forsythe, president of
Americans United for Life, a leader in that legislative effort.
The
abortion-rights side was caught off guard, in part because its strategists
believe the scientific debate has been so decisively settled against the
Justice Foundation’s argument over the years. “We thought that brief was so
extraneous that we didn’t even bother coming up with a response to it,” said
Mr. Evans of Planned Parenthood.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed. “The court invokes an
anti-abortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence,” she
wrote.
But Mr. Parker at the Justice Foundation said the point of view being promoted by his
group had already had an impact in states debating informed consent and other
abortion regulations, including South Dakota.
That state’s law, currently being challenged in federal court, requires women
seeking an abortion to be told that the procedure will terminate a “whole,
separate, unique, living human being,” and that it carries a variety of
psychological and physical risks to the woman.
South Carolina has been debating proposals that encourage,
if not require, a woman to go a step further and review the
sonogram. Other new
“informed consent” proposals in the states would require women to receive an
ultrasound before their abortion; according to Naral, 10 states have considered
such legislation this year.
This focus on women by the anti-abortion movement has real power, many experts said. Reva
B. Siegel, a Yale law professor and a supporter of abortion rights who recently
conducted a study of this effort, said it combined “the modern language of
trauma and women’s rights” with “some very traditional ways of understanding
women.”
But Geoffrey Garin, who conducts polls for abortion-rights groups, said, “Once you get past the verbiage, women get that the motivation here is political as opposed to medical.”
History
suggests that the way the abortion struggle is framed has a significant effect,
over the years, on legislative and political outcomes. In the late 1980s, the
Naral slogan “Who Decides?” was widely credited with helping the
abortion-rights movement capture the voters of the center. A decade later, the
campaign to outlaw what critics call partial-birth abortion — symbolizing a
broader argument that the right to an abortion had gone too far — helped the
anti-abortion movement widen its support and win significant victories in
Congress, state legislatures and the court.
The
anti-abortion movement clearly hopes this emphasis on women as victims of
abortion has similar influence, although some of its strategists acknowledge it
is a huge task; there are an estimated 1.3 million abortions a year in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Mr. Parker said his organization planned to make its legal argument, and the
accompanying testimonials from women, available to more state legislatures. Every
time he speaks on the issue, he said, he receives more phone calls from women.
