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The original argument for abortion rights was an argument against reproductive slavery
HAPPY 40TH ANNIVERSARY ROE V WADE
This is what it boils down to me - not 'privacy', but rather self-determination. By outlawing birth control or abortion and living in an almost unpunished rape culture (except the punishment brought upon the victim of this violent crime thereby 'raping' her again in society and the legal system), we subject women to reproductive slavery - also called compulsory pregnancy. Consider this from the article below:
"As Dorothy Roberts writes in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, “[t]he essence of Black women’s experience during slavery was the brutal denial of autonomy over reproduction.” Female slaves’ ability to produce more slaves was central to the economic interests of slaveowners and, once the importation of slaves was banned, to the perpetuation of the institution of slavery. A woman’s reproductive capacity figured into her price on the market and was as valuable as labor in the fields. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm.”
Slaveowners beat women who did not reproduce or sold them, separating them from their families. Some engaged in slave-breeding, forcing slaves considered “prime stock” to mate in order to produce particularly valuable new slaves for labor or sale. Evidence exists that slaves resisted slaveowners’ demands that they reproduce by using herbal and other makeshift contraceptive and abortive methods. Slaveowners were free to rape slaves with impunity and the children who resulted increased their wealth. A slave women’s child was not her own, but the property of her master. Even prior to conception, a slaveowner held a property interest in a woman’s future children that could be bequeathed by will.
Slavery separated black women from their future children at the moment of conception, treating the interests of the fetus as separate and conflicting with that of the mother. Though this conception of the fetus as having distinct interests to be protected from the mother is a familiar part of our discourse and legal framework today, this division did not exist for white women at the time. Professor Roberts describes one method of whipping pregnant women that illustrates this early conception of the maternal-fetal conflict. The mother would be forced to lay with her stomach in a hole dug in the ground so the mother could be beaten while the fetus was protected. “It is the most striking metaphor I know for the evils of policies that seek to protect the fetus while disregarding the humanity of the mother,” she writes."
Slaveowners beat women who did not reproduce or sold them, separating them from their families. Some engaged in slave-breeding, forcing slaves considered “prime stock” to mate in order to produce particularly valuable new slaves for labor or sale. Evidence exists that slaves resisted slaveowners’ demands that they reproduce by using herbal and other makeshift contraceptive and abortive methods. Slaveowners were free to rape slaves with impunity and the children who resulted increased their wealth. A slave women’s child was not her own, but the property of her master. Even prior to conception, a slaveowner held a property interest in a woman’s future children that could be bequeathed by will.
Slavery separated black women from their future children at the moment of conception, treating the interests of the fetus as separate and conflicting with that of the mother. Though this conception of the fetus as having distinct interests to be protected from the mother is a familiar part of our discourse and legal framework today, this division did not exist for white women at the time. Professor Roberts describes one method of whipping pregnant women that illustrates this early conception of the maternal-fetal conflict. The mother would be forced to lay with her stomach in a hole dug in the ground so the mother could be beaten while the fetus was protected. “It is the most striking metaphor I know for the evils of policies that seek to protect the fetus while disregarding the humanity of the mother,” she writes."
The three paragraphs above are EXACTLY what our American Taliban are attempting to relegate every American woman to now. And I say that the 13th amendment to the constitution should have outlawed slavery - including the reproductive slavery.
LINK:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/01/21/originalist-argument-abortion-rights-compulsory-childbearing-during-antebellum-sl