Some people who should know better say the fight for women's health, for reproductive choice and privacy, is a distraction from "real issues." That too much time and energy is being spent on a peripheral concern. It's certainly true that this matter ought not to be up for debate. It ought to have been settled long ago. It's true that progressives and the nation as a whole should be spending all our time dealing with public policy on the economy, on the environmental crisis and energy, on foreign affairs, on education, on the bloated military-industrial complex, on taxes and spending, on keeping right-wingers and moderate enablers of right-wingers out of office from the city council level all the way to the White House.
But our enemies give us no choice. Presidential candidates, congresspeople, state legislators and assorted censorious private-sector busybodies empowered by the Vatican or Rush Limbaugh or their own twisted view that everybody should be beholden to their assessment of what's right for every woman to do with her own body have ramped up their crusade in the past couple of years. What had been a steady nibbling away at women's legal right to abortion has become a full-blown assault that has spilled over into promoting controls on who can use contraception and for what purpose.
We can discuss all day long the origins and hypocritical, double-standard, patriarchal and parochial underpinnings of those who are carrying out this assault. But that takes time away from putting a stop to it, from fighting it head-on and from moving from self-defense to offense. Besides making things tougher to pass the worst such laws, as happened with Virginia's transvaginal ultrasound bill, turning the tables on these benighted reactionaries is what liberals/progressives/leftists ought to be doing.
In the battles we've had pushing back against these reactionary attacks, some hard-to-ignore allies have joined us. They oppose what we oppose and/or support what we support and we can make gains by getting others to do likewise. For instance, the Pennsylvania Medical Society, as Joan McCarter points out in her diary, opposes requiring ultrasounds before abortions. You can sign a petition asking the American Medical Association to add their opposition to forced ultrasounds here.
Self-defense is essential. But the goal of merely hanging onto what we've got when what we've got includes the Hyde Act that punishes poor women and religious conscience laws that permit pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for women who have been raped is simply not enough. That self-defense battle must continue, of course. Not least because the forced-birthers are always coming up with new attacks, like personhood laws that make fertilized eggs equal to human beings already born.
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As Mother Mags explained in righteous fury Tuesday, the Arizona legislature seems likely to pass a bill that would allow employers to require workers to get proof from their physicians that their contraceptive prescriptions aren't for birth control purposes but for medical conditions.
An ultrasound law that is just as bad, in effect, as the one shot down in Virginia is on the books in Texas. Check out this first-person Texas Monthly story of how it affected one woman:
My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.
“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
The governor of Pennsylvania
insults women by telling them they should just "close their eyes" when faced by an ultrasound required by law.
And then we have the on-going attacks on funding for Planned Parenthood, an organization that serves low-income women with a broad array of reproductive health-care needs, including, for a small proportion of them, abortions. The putative GOP nominee himself has said he's going to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood. Presumably, he means their funding, although there are now state laws designed to shut down clinics that provide abortions by forcing them to comply with inspections and other rules that are simply not medically necessary. Maybe he's just pandering to his right flank, maybe not.
What should a progressive offense on reproductive rights look like? That, of course, needs a full-blown discussion because we have been in self-defense mode for so long. But we've already seen one replicable approach emerge in Washington state, the Reproductive Parity Act.
In addition, there should be a focus on encouraging through public grants the funding of abortion training in hospitals, something that is taught at fewer and fewer places. And although every city and town should have community health centers like those Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed more funding for, there ought also to be a clinic offering reproductive health care within a reasonable distance of every woman in the country. Currently, 87 percent of the counties have none. The entire state of South Dakota has one clinic that performs abortions. Abstininence-only sex education ought to be ditched.
Every fight requires defense and offense. This fight goes to the very heart of freedom for women. The enemies of that freedom have been hammering away at it for decades. And, as we have seen, they are succeeding in state after state. Not everywhere, but they don't quit when they lose. They find another path to victory. We can't let that keep happening. We can't let people who say this is a distraction we should ignore set the agenda. Stopping the enemies of reproductive freedom will not be accomplished by ignoring them. And meeting women's reproductive health needs cannot be done simply by defending against the attacks on it.