TRUE BLUE REPORT: R-supported forced childbirth laws deny the autonomy of women

by TrueBlueMajority for Black Star Resistance

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Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017 Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017 at 8:58:12pm PST

I started writing a response to a commenter in the Kelly Macias front page post, “They’ve been waiting 44 years to overturn Roe v Wade—and now they have their chance” and my comment got so long I decided to turn it into a diary instead. Now I am rushing against the clock to get this finished by midnight, so here goes!

A newb was making the various “legitimate arguments” against abortion care as if s/he was the first to think of them, so I thought I might as well bring out some of the standard responses to those arguments from the famous essay “A Defense of Abortion” by Judith Jarvis Thomson. This 1971 essay argues that even if you acknowledge the life or personhood of the fetus, a woman still has a right to abortion based on her right to control her own life.

Three scenarios from the essay are usually highlighted.

The unconscious violinist argument: Can a person be forced by the government to provide life support for a second person?

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

Thomson says that you can now permissibly unplug yourself from the violinist even though this will cause his death: this is due to the right to life, which does not include the right to use another person's body, and so by unplugging the violinist you do not violate his right to life but merely deprive him of something—the use of your body—to which he has no right. "[I]f you do allow him to go on using your kidneys, this is a kindness on your part, and not something he can claim from you as his due.^”

The expanding baby argument: can you kill another person to save your own life?

Suppose you find yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child—you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you’ll be crushed to death. The child on the other hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man.

Thomson concedes that a third party indeed cannot make the choice to kill either the person being crushed or the child. However, this does not mean that the person being crushed cannot act in self-defense and attack the child to save his or her own life. To liken this to pregnancy, the mother can be thought to be the house, the fetus the growing child. In such a case, the mother’s life is being threatened, and the fetus is the one who threatens it. Because for no reason should the mother’s life be threatened, and also for no reason is the fetus threatening it, both are innocent, and thus no third party can intervene. But, Thomson says, the person threatened can intervene, by which justification a mother can rightfully abort.

The “people seeds” argument: since sex is presumably voluntary, must a woman always be forced to bear the consequences?

people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root.

Here, the people-seeds flying through the window represent conception, despite the mesh screen, which functions as contraception. The woman does not want a people-seed to root itself in her house, and so she even takes the measure to protect herself with the best mesh screens. However, in the event that one finds its way in, unwelcome as it may be, does the simple fact that the woman knowingly risked such an occurrence when opening her window deny her the ability to rid her house of the intruder?

I grew up in a truly pro-choice family, where a decision to end a pregnancy was respected AND a decision to carry a pregnancy to term was respected. I knew from a fairly young age that sometimes women got pregnant in difficult circumstances and decided to have the baby, and the family supported her and did not condemn, whether the father was in the picture or not. Sometimes women got pregnant in difficult circumstances and decided not to have the baby, and the family supported that too and did not condemn, whether the father was in the picture or not. Everything was so matter of fact that I did not even realize it was a matter of tremendous controversy in the country until there was a big to-do about abortion as a topic on soap operas, sitcoms and night-time dramas.

I was a young teenager and a practicing Roman Catholic when Roe was decided and I knew the RC church was opposed to abortion and birth control, and already at that age I was questioning the reasonableness and lack of compassion of that doctrine.

For various reasons, I knew for myself I could never have an abortion, but my choice was *my* choice that I did not seek to impose on anyone else. I counseled friends and supported their decisions to terminate pregnancies when the situation arose and never felt I was going against my values in any way. I am pretty sure that none of them felt judged or wondered if I was secretly condemning them to hell, because I wasn’t.

That is because I was also at that young age a committed feminist who felt strongly about women having the right to make their own decisions about sex and pregnancy and childbirth and their autonomy in general.

In my early adulthood when I reconnected with the RC church, I started to waver a little bit since they do come down pretty hard on the issue. But somewhere in my mid-twenties while I was working for various lawyers I realized three fundamental truths at the exact same time, and they have nothing to do with personhood arguments about when life begins.

Our society allows men to make life and death decisions all the time. When a man’s life is threatened, he can kill in self-defense and have some legal protection for his decision. He can kill to protect a third party even if he himself is not threatened. Men are given a strange out for “crimes of passion” — come home and find your wife in bed with someone else and you can “lose your mind” and kill him or both of them and get a sympathetic jury. There is even legal protection for killing someone who is not threatening you, but merely threatening your property. Yes you have killed a living person, but justifiable homicide covers a wide range of areas.

When a man goes to battle and kills in a just war, society as a whole absolves him of responsibility for killing. There is an agreed-upon larger issue at stake. Even the vast majority of evangelicals and RCs are willing to make that exception to their “all life is sacred” mantra.

There is no anti-abortion argument that does not depend on religious belief, so abortion laws are an establishment of religion that favor the religious beliefs of the religions that criminalize abortion over the ones that don’t and over the beliefs of people who have no religious affiliation.

Then in my 30s I worked for an international non-governmental agency that raised money to provide post-abortion care for women in countries where abortion and contraception are illegal. They were not allowed to use the funds to distribute birth control, or provide safe and legal abortion. But when a desperate woman who may already have half a dozen or ten children arrives at the clinic in sepsis from whatever she stuck in her cervix that may or may not have succeeded in ending the pregnancy, they were allowed to give “post-abortion” care to make sure she did not die.

That kind of work will radicalize you, and fast.

It is predictable Republicon hypocrisy that a party so vocal about states’ rights, U.S. sovereignty, castle doctrine and stand your ground laws would pretend to see no connection between those ideas and a woman’s right to abortion care. Basically, they talk a good game about rights this and rights that until a woman’s right to autonomy is involved.

Then it’s all about asserting control. Male control, mostly. Her father should have a say. Her husband should have a say. Her doctor should have a say (when I was growing up, most gynecologists were men). Some judge who never met her before should have a say. Male-dominated state legislatures should have a say. The male-dominated Congress should have a say. The male POTUS and VPOTUS should have a say. The predominantly male Supreme Court should have a say.

Conservatives care more about protecting the autonomy of inanimate entities like states and corporations than the autonomy of real living breathing women.

They get very hyped up respecting the sovereignty and borders of the U.S. than allowing women to make decisions about what they will allow within the boundaries of their bodies.

Crimes of passion are about controlling women also—a man protecting what “belongs” to him from being taken by someone without his consent.

Our sick culture all too frequently applauds men who impulsively shoot completely innocent people for being the wrong color at the wrong place at the wrong time just because they IMAGINED their lives were at stake, than in allowing women’s whose lives actually ARE at stake to end an unwanted pregnancy.

So many “pro-lifers” are really pro-choice when faced with the situation in their own lives. Conservatives are notorious about making exceptions for their own daughter, their own niece, their own sister—she is the good girl exception who just made a mistake and deserves to have the privilege of making her own choice, as opposed to “those women” over there who don’t know any better and definitely need to be punished physically and financially and maybe even legally if DJT gets his way. You would think that the white supremacists would make the modest proposal of demanding free abortions for women of color to decrease the surplus population.

Since the dawn of time women have been in situations where they needed to terminate pregnancies and they have always found ways to do so. They will continue to do so no matter how many laws are passed.

Pro-choice is the majority view. We outnumber them. That may not matter after they get their fifth seat on the court, but I know what side the Republicon party is on and I’d rather be on this side.

The *only* question a civilized society should ask is, are we going to make this medical procedure available in safe clean places or are we going to send women back to the back alley underground luck of the draw that has killed so many?