By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, editor@news-photos-features.com
It is not OK that Christo Nationalist lawmakers are trying to preserve in vitro fertilization (IVF) by carving out limits to liability for fertility clinics and doctors even though it goes against their personhood scripture. (“We want more children!” “Families should be able to breed!”)
But once you deem a clump of cells – representing the “hope”, the “possibility” of a child – having “personhood” and establish that personhood over the personhood of the mother, you still expose her to prosecution under Alabama’s 1872 state law, the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, should she refuse to continue to pay the fees for storage, to refuse to implant an embryo that is not viable or has genetic defect, or in fact, fails to implant all the embryos that are collected in the hopes of having a pregnancy. While 10 percent of women seek fertility treatment, 2% of pregnancies result from IVF. And then you expose her to prosecution if the pregnancy fails, in this burgeoning criminalization of pregnancy.
“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote, invoking Genesis, the prophet Jeremiah and 16th and 17th-century theologians.“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.” (Apparently, he forgets the part that life begins at the first breath: Genesis 2:7 states “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.) But his argument is irrelevant (and unconstitutional) since America was founded on the premise of separation of church and state, religion is not law – God is not in the Constitution.
Women are already being prosecuted for miscarrying (one in four pregnancies result in miscarriage) – which will lead to women living in fear that they will be charged for infanticide if they are shown to have indulged in “risky” behavior like skiing during pregnancy, riding in a speedboat – while women are forced by the State to come to the brink of death or lose their future futility without receiving health care.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to give emergency medical care, but states including Texas, Kansas and Missouri with extreme abortion bans have decided that hospitals and doctors, on threat of prosecution, must ignore a woman’s plight, federal law, their Hippocratic Oath, and let her bleed to death in the parking lot or if she survives, lose her ability to become pregnant again. It is no coincidence that the states with the most draconian abortion bans also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality.
Instead of hospitals and doctors worrying about being prosecuted by the state for providing care, they should worry about being sued for a woman dying or losing their fertility because of their failure.
Nearly 2 in 3 pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, and 1 in 3 happen one week to one year after delivery, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Biden administration is enabling states to extend Medicaid, which pays 42% of US births, to a full year after giving birth but two states, Idaho and Arkansas, have refused.
And why is it, if frozen embryos are actually children, that their parents can’t take them out of state to complete their IVF procedure, but rather, they are locked up in a fertility clinic that is shut down? Isn’t that kidnapping? Illegal imprisonment? And what about the vaunted “parents rights” that let one parent ban books and curriculum? The answer is this is not about “personhood” – it is about the state taking control over women under the guise of “protecting” the unborn.
Texas and Alabama are among the states that are trying to ban pregnant women from traveling out of state to places like New York State, even prosecuting family who might provide aid. It doesn’t matter, as the Justice Department is now arguing, that the Constitution protects the right to travel across state lines and engage in conduct that is lawful where it is performed and that states cannot prevent third parties from assisting others in exercising that right.
Missouri and three other states now ban a pregnant woman from obtaining a divorce, even if she is a victim of domestic violence and her life is in danger.
There’s a Pregnant Workers Fairness Act that went into effect in 2023 (thanks Biden-Harris) that requires employers to give reasonable accommodation to pregnant women, but Texas has decided it can ignore it.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is supposed to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed, but somehow women in Texas have no right to privacy – not on their cell phones, their computer records keeping track of their periods, their health records or even have doctor-patient confidentiality anyone else gets - from the state or the bounty-hunters it has incentivized to terrorize pregnant women. (Roe was initially decided based on the right to privacy, instead of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said. And reminder: her first abortion case had to do with a woman’s right NOT to get an abortion, as the US military required her to do, not even allowing her to put her baby up for adoption in order to stay in the military. A government that can ban abortion can also require it, which the government did as recently as the Trump administration.)
It’s only a pyrrhic victory that Walgreens and CVS will make available mifepristone, a drug used in 50 percent of abortions, but only in states that have not banned abortion, even as the ChristoFascists on the Supreme Court may actually ban mifepristone, despite having been used safety and effectively for 20 years– effectively instituting a national abortion ban.
The religious zealot misogynists are resurrecting the Comstock Act from 1873 that defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit and made it a federal offense to disseminate through the mail or across state lines. Though the Act was amended in 1936 to allow physicians to legally mail birth control devices and information (and later birth control pills) – the Biden Administration’s main way to preserve reproductive health care where stripped away - rabid Christian Nationalists want to reapply the law to bar abortion medication as well as contraception (though no problem mailing Viagra).
After Roe was stripped away, 27 million - one out of every three women of reproductive age - lost access to abortion, according to the White House’s Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access – but more than that, women lost access to reproductive healthcare and basic human rights.
The horror of what is unfolding here in the United States has even triggered France to enshrine abortion rights into its constitution.
“It is always too late if we wait until a right is threatened to protect it,” Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti told France’s senators. “The freedom of abortion is not like the others because it allows people to decide their future. For democracy to control its destiny, women must be allowed to control theirs.”
“The rights of women are reversible — you are never sure to have really won,” said Geneviève Fraisse, a French feminist philosopher. “The proof is in the United States.”
It should boggle the mind that Americans need to hear the rationale to restore women’s human rights from France.
And what happens when the Supreme Court, which is supposed to uphold the Constitution, becomes the agency that violates it? Ignoring women’s rights to “equal protection” under law, ignoring the separation of church and state (“establishment clause”), ignoring the “cruel and unusual punishment”, ignoring the prohibition of “involuntary servitude,” ignoring the freedoms that are supposed to apply to all, and not just residents of “free” states?
And let’s be clear: it won’t stop with abortion bans, imprisoning pregnant women and prosecuting women for miscarrying, shutting down IVF now, surrogacy next, contraception and birth control, stem cells in medical treatment (already). Gender equality, rights for LGBTQ individuals are gone – once you can establish that some humans are not as equal as others.
What part of this do American lawmakers not get? Especially since the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, support women’s reproductive rights.
The cynical reason is that it is absolutely about control, about taking away from women their means to self-determination and progress, and guaranteeing a supply of cheap labor (they are even reversing child labor laws).
As a letter writer from Texas wrote the New York Times, “It has become clear since the Supreme Court relegated women to chattel and decided that the religious right should make their healthcare decisions for them that sanctity of life is a concept they apply only to cells that may or may not become a viable pregnancy. If life mattered, Republicans would be for gun safety instead of justifying the massacre of schoolchildren as the price we have to pay for freedom. If life mattered, Republicans would see that poor children have enough to eat in summer, but most don’t care. If life mattered, Republicans would ensure that women’s healthcare clinics remained open to provide actual medical care instead of forcing those clinics to close and using taxpayer dollars i stead on Christian crisis pregnancy centers with no medical services and whose sole purpose is to prevent all abortions. And if life begins at the moment of conception instead of at birth, then why does the Catholic Church refuse to baptize a full term stillborn child? The reason is that the baby never took a breath.”
Biden-Harris’ reelection is the only barrier to the dystopia that is already unfolding. But, clearly, the President can only do so much. We need a Democratic Congress to codify Roe and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act. And finish ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment so protections are on firmer ground even against a Supreme Court determined to ignore constitutional rights when it suits.
The New York State legislature, despite laws protecting women’s and gender rights, just passed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the state constitution. The vote to ratify the NYS ERA will appear on the November 2024 election ballot.
The Westchester Women’s Bar Association of NY is holding a zoom conference on NYS’s ERA on March 8 at 1-2:15 pm (International Women’s Day). Register at www.wwbany.com
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