Caution: Pregnancy May Be Hazardous to Your Liberty

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http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/03/03/caution-pregnancy-may-be-hazardous-to-your-liberty/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet


While our country stands at a deadlock over legislation to ensure that millions of uninsured people have health care coverage, we can at least feel confident that some state legislators are hard at work, making it more difficult for women to access health care and much easier for states to put them, and the people who help them, in jail.

In Mississippi, legislators proposed a law, HB 695, which would make many forms of midwifery a crime. That is clearly bad for pregnant women and for babies for at least one very simple reason. As the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood pointed out after Hurricane Katrina, when hospitals shut down as a result of a disaster, midwives are among the few who know how to deliver babies without electronic fetal monitors, surgical theatres or epidurals. For this reason, the Alliance highlighted the need to protect (not criminalize) midwives who have the skills needed under such circumstances.

When disasters hit, however, it is not only the women who are going to term who are in trouble. As the National Network of Abortion Funds found out after Hurricane Katrina forced abortion providers to close their doors, many women were also left without access to urgently needed abortion services.

If Utah lawmakers have their way, a woman under similar circumstances who attempts to take matters into her own hands could be charged with murder under House Bill 12, the state’s effort to outlaw “self-abortions.”

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Meanwhile, in Kentucky, House Bill 136 would create a new crime just for pregnant women. According to this law, “ woman is guilty of substance endangerment of a child prior to birth when, knowing she is pregnant, she causes her child to be born” with controlled substances or alcohol in the child’s bodily fluids. What that means is that, if this law is passed, it would literally be a crime for a pregnant woman to give birth if the child she gives birth to has any amount of a controlled substance or alcohol in its body.

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health group makes us wonder.

And finally, we wonder about Nebraska’s commitment to protecting fetuses from pain. Nebraska House Bill 1103 would protect some fetuses from pain by banning virtually all women from obtaining abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. Although abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy are extremely rare (constituting only 1.5 percent of all abortions), and the doctors who perform them are heroes to the women who need such procedures, this law would make those doctors criminals.

The Nebraska legislators who support this bill claim that after 20 weeks of pregnancy an unborn child is capable of experiencing substantial pain. Certainly, if this is true, then fetuses must also suffer pain from forceps deliveries, internal electronic fetal monitoring (requiring the insertion of sharp metal wires into the delicate fetal scalp) and from chemically induced labor in which the fetus is subjected to repeated, violent maternal uterine contractions and then forced through the narrow vaginal canal. If Nebraska legislators were truly committed to preventing fetal pain, then they should also ban pitocin-induced vaginal births and other fetal-pain inducing delivery techniques and arrest the doctors who carry them out.

The lawmakers supporting these bills claim that they are trying to bar bad things from happening to pregnant women and the unborn. But whatever their stated good intentions, make no mistake, these bills are really about putting pregnant women and the people who support them behind bars.
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the male war against women is alive and well