The other day, kos posted
Naral's Bloggy Call To Action with a reference to Naral's
following statement:
With the Roberts nomination front and center, choice is being talked about more and more, especially on some of the most well-known political blogs. But what's disturbing is that choice and abortion are being discussed--in blogs and in the media--more as a political tool than as an issue that affects women's lives.
So NARAL is issuing a call to action. We've listed five of the some of the most well-known progressive blogs below--go to them and make your voice heard. Use their comments sections to make sure that choice is being discussed as something that affects women, not just politics.
Rather than get into the Chafee argument, I'd like to do what NARAL suggested - remind everyone how choice affects women. Let's forget about NARAL and Chafee, just for this diary.
Many people think of choice, or what I call medical privacy, as a single issue. It's not. For women, it is our very lives that are at stake, our status in society, our equality. To suggest that this is an issue that can just be tossed aside for political expediency is to demean women and our very right to exist, and I have seen numerous such suggestions since last November. I believe NARAL is correct that we should take the time now to review this issue and remind everyone of its importance.
To begin, let me go back to an editorial by Charles Krauthammer in the April 22nd WaPo and a passage that I found particularly disturbing:
It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said that Roe v. Wade "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue." Whenever such an obvious sociological truth is pointed out, proponents of judicial imperialism immediately resort to their trump card: Brown v. Board of Education and the courts' role in ending Jim Crow.
But Brown was different. The race cases were cases of a disenfranchised citizenry. The representative branches of government were legitimately superseded because they were not representative. Millions of blacks could not vote. Millions of blacks could not participate in civic life. The courts had to act to end this aberration and injustice, and, to their glory, they did.
The cases are not different. Justice Ginsburg is mistaken, the political process was not moving in a reform direction and the courts had a responsibility to act to save the lives of thousands of women suffering from a grave injustice. And Krauthammer is wrong in thinking the disenfranchisement by race was more of an "aberration and injustice" than the disenfranchisment by sex that women were suffering. He says "The representative branches of government were legitimately superseded because they were not representative" implying race was not adequately represented in the legislature. Well neither was sex, women were (and still are) grossly underrepresented. He says "Millions of blacks could not vote. Millions of blacks could not participate in civic life". Well, millions of women could not control their own bodies! Over the period in our history when abortion was illegal millions of women died from illegal abortions! How much more of an "aberration and injustice" do we need before people like Krauthammer admit the courts needed to intervene?
I was 13 in January of 1973, in the 8th grade at a Catholic elementary school. I have zero recollection of the political climate regarding abortion leading up to Roe v. Wade, probably because it was just never discussed. Since then I haven't really had much inclination to learn about the history, I just believed that the case was rightly decided. It just seems like common sense to me - women should be allowed to make their medical decisions themselves without the interference of any government. It's not that I agree with the procedure itself, I just don't think the government has any place in such a private issue as a woman's medical choices, or a man's for that matter. Our government doesn't force people to donate organs or even blood, not even to their own children, so how could anyone think the government should have a say in a woman donating her body to a pregnancy? But I think it is time for me to look back at events leading up to the decision and learn about what women before me had to face.
In 1968, Roy Lucas wrote a paper entitled "Federal Constitutional Limitations on the Enforcement and Administration of State Abortion Statutes". This paper, published in the North Carolina Law Review, drew the right to choice from the just decided Griswold case (Griswold established a marital privacy right to use contraceptives) and became a pivotal inspiration in the judicial fight resulting in the Roe decision. The first few sentances of this paper are striking:
Until recently, mishandled criminal abortions claimed the lives of an estimated ten thousand American women each year. The vast majority of these individuals were married -- wives and mothers. Legal hospital abortions on the other hand, presently account for the termination of only eight to nine thousand pregnancies yearly. This figure contrasts sharply with the probable one-quarter to two million annual illegal abortions performed within the United States.
Emphasis mine. I did find the paper on a website, an anti-abortion website. I refuse to include a link to that site on dailykos. Google the title and you can find the paper.
One-quarter to two million annual illegal abortions. Ten thousand women dead each year from illegal abortions. This is what the right would have us return to. This is what would happen if Democrats abandoned women. This is life and death, it is not a "single issue".
More from Lucas, and remember, this is 1968:
Estimates indicate that as much as 350,000,000 dollars each year is expended on illegal abortion, "much of it ending up in the coffers of crime syndicates and abortion mills." Illegal abortion then not only creates economic demands and physical danger for the pregnant woman, but also amounts to the third largest criminal racket in the United States.
Abortion was illegal, yet women were spending 350 Million per year on abortions. Women were dying by the thousands, maimed by the thousands, spending millions of dollars. Anyone who thinks making abortion illegal will stop abortion is dellusional. This isn't about the babies, this is about the lives and health of women. This is life and death, it is not a "single issue".
The Lucas paper is excellent, I urge everyone to find it and read it. Lucas addresses many issues that I think worthy of discussion, but I'd end up reproducing the whole paper here. Let me just include one more chunk. Part of the problem with getting a legal abortion (therapeutic abortion) was the inconsistency of hospital policies, including the ridiculous use of quotas. Here are the kind of interpretations of state statutes we can expect to go back to:
Only five states specifically permit abortion in the interest of preserving a woman's "health.'' Hospitals in other jurisdictions, however, tend to permit abortion for women afflicted with some dangerous conditions but not others. Women ill with leukemia, lung cancer, tumors, and crippling paralysis have frequently met "the rationalization that another pregnancy . . .[would] not adversely affect the course of their disease.'' Many hospitals, moreover, refuse to abort a woman who has been the victim of rape. Others consider the likelihood that forced birth of a child caused by rape too seriously threatens the family and the mental health of the woman to deny her request.
In the case of a woman who has taken thalidomide, or has contracted rubella (German measles) in the first trimester of pregnancy, the statutes do not recognize that possible birth of a seriously deformed child may impair the mother's health. Yet, a fertile woman faced with such a probability usually does not wish to give birth to that particular child; she would prefer to have a more "normal" child at some later time. She is in much the same position as a pregnant woman who has no husband. Yet the same society which ostracizes a deformed child or an unwed mother still insists that that particular birth take place.
No statute in the United States permits a woman to terminate her tenth pregnancy by abortion because she cannot afford to support and feed a family of ten children. A pregnant woman confined to bed with polio faces the same rigid statute as does the woman whose husband recently abandoned her or who has no husband. All these cases, and others involving socio-economic factors, are increasingly being rejected by hospital abortion committees. To the wealthy, of course, the alternative of foreign abortion provides a complete answer. Others frequentlyrisk the danger of an illegal abortion at the hands of an unskilled criminal abortionist. To the poor the choice is between attempted self-induced abortion and the accompanying danger or increased poverty and powerlessness in the face of the government mandate. In these instances the state has determined that a woman and her physician have no authority over family planning unless done by preventive means. If the woman has no knowledge of contraception, or if her preventive efforts fail, her interests are immediately subordinated to the government determination that she must bear that specific child.
Again, emphasis mine.
Imagine you are a woman who has been raped, or has leukemia, polio, or some other foul disease, and you find you are pregnant. Now imagine having to ask a panel of men at a hospital if you can have an abortion. And now imagine them telling you no because their hospital has already performed 5 abortions this month and you would put them over quota. This is not a "single issue".
Part two coming soon.