How Pro-Choicers Can Take Back the Moral High Ground

[niyad]

. . .

One thing Roe v. Wade didn’t do, though, was make abortion private.


Sometimes I look up from reading about the latest onslaught against abortion rights—Texas legislators placed such onerous requirements on clinics that all but eight in the state were shut down before the Supreme Court intervened; Louisiana passed a similar law, now temporarily blocked by a judge; Missouri legislators have now required a seventy-two-hour waiting period for the state’s sole remaining clinic—and I think: How strange. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in—even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer. If the CEO of the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain, a secular business, decides that emergency contraception and IUDs are “abortifacients” and banned by God, then he is entitled to keep them out of her health coverage—even though he’s wrong about how these methods work. It’s religion; facts don’t matter, especially when the facts involve women’s liberty.

Maybe Blackmun’s mistake was thinking that a woman could claim privacy as a right in the first place. A man’s home is his castle, but a woman’s body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it’s belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn’t her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldn’t she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her doctor thinks it’s best, or be charged with a crime if she uses illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like these have been happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for their conduct during pregnancy—and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014, a law was proposed in the Kansas Legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in the pregnancy. You would almost think the people who have always opposed women’s independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

That thought gives rise to a wish. Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex, or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser. Something you could buy at the supermarket, or maybe several things you could mix together, items so safe and so ordinary they could never be banned, that you could prepare in your own home, that would flush your uterus and leave it pink and shiny and empty without you ever needing to know if you were pregnant or about to be. A brew of Earl Grey, Lapsang souchong and ground cardamom, say. Or Coca-Cola with a teaspoon of Nescafé and a dusting of cayenne pepper. Things you might have on your shelves right now, just waiting for some clever person to put them together, some stay-at-home mother with a chemistry degree rattling around her kitchen late at night.

. . . .

http://www.thenation.com/article/184321/exclusive-excerpt-how-pro-choicers-can-take-back-moral-high-ground

[Kalidurga]

1. How do you take back something you never lost?

Until we have a true safety net. Until we have true equality. Until children are truly valued and not seen as a group of moochers. Until women are given a real support system. Until all humans are seen as fully human. It is clear where the moral high ground is and it is not with forced birthers.

[littlemissmartypants]

2. Indeed. Well said. eom