As a female, I have to look at the calendar from time to time to remind myself that this really is the year 2019.
Even though I am well-past my reproductive years, my horror at the erosion of hard won women’s rights is not diminished by age. Some kind of mass hysteria seems to have seized the so-called “right-to-life” lobby, resulting in ever more grotesque displays of misogynistic cruelty. Waiting periods escalated to invasive exams and psychological coercion; then to eliminating abortion clinics altogether and even threats to prosecute women for choosing to terminate pregnancies.
The great state of Alabama, already a dangerous outlier, just upped the ante by charging a woman with murder after the fetus in her womb was killed by a gunshot that was fired at her during an argument with another woman. The woman who fired the shot isn’t even being charged. The fact that the prosecuter later dropped the charges against the grieving mother does little to relieve the pall this incident has left over Alabama women in contemplating their reproductive future. This is especially true of women of color, since, unsurprisingly, the target of this draconian miscarriage of justice was black.
It’s Alabama Alice in Wonderland!
This (hopefully) temporary insanity isn’t confined to the deep south. It percolates up through the public discourse even in a progressive state like Vermont.
Among letters to the editor of the St. Albans Messenger on July 1 was one from a woman whom I do not know, concerning the poor little infant recently found abandoned in a plastic bag. The circumstances were so universally disturbing that it seems rather cynical for someone to seize upon that moment to distort the public record on reproductive rights.
In her letter, the Messenger commenter misrepresented the pro-choice position, as so many anti-abortion advocates are inclined to do; suggesting that giving women complete autonomy to make reproductive choices; choices about their own bodies; somehow endorses infanticide after birth. It does not.
I felt compelled to respond.
This incident took place in Georgia, one of the states that severely restricts women’s access to reproductive choices. Some statistics from NARAL about issues arising from Georgia’s restrictions on reproductive choice and education may shed a bit of light on what might have precipitated the tragic circumstances.
96% of Georgia’s counties have no access to clinics that provide abortions. One in five women of child-bearing age in Georgia is not covered by either public or private health insurance.
Teen birthrates in Georgia are higher than the national average, and less than one-third of high schools provide the full range of sex education topics recommended by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Atlanta Journal reports that one in three children in Georgia lives in poverty. 23.3% of children, 0-18 years of age, are malnourished. That’s almost one-in-four.
No child should be unwanted, but in places where reproductive rights are restricted and ignorance of alternatives is considered a virtue, unwanted children are the inevitable outcome. Quite apart from all this, safe and legal abortion saves lives. Many who benefit from the procedure are little more than children, themselves.
The little baby in the plastic bag is as much a victim of opposition to reproductive choice as she is to her mother’s apparent despair over a situation with which she simply could not cope.
I deeply respect the individual beliefs of those who oppose abortion as a matter of conscience; but respect should be a two-way street, allowing for the beliefs and choices of others who disagree.
it might be equally well argued that forcing any woman, but especially a woman with serious physical or metal issues, to carry a baby to term against her will, leaving the vulnerable infant in immediate peril, is cruel and unusual punishment for both mother and child.
The ethics and morality street runs both ways.
As a powerful minority attempts to steer the entire country backward toward the 19th century in terms of women’s rights, I hope they will keep in mind the moral obligation they will have for the lifetime support and well-being of every single infant that they force into live-birth despite the odds that that life will be a living hell. This means providing adequate food, shelter, health and mental care, and accepting the societal consequences of this unhappy population. Let’s see those checkbooks open wide, Gentlemen!
