Feminism Friday entry, to help build up the ongoing collected works series.
I love the Guttmacher Institute, I really do. In the reproductive justice debates, they’re a peerless organization, adamantly pro-choice, but so thorough and unassailable in their research that even the SOBs on the anti-choice side, the people who peddle lies about abortion causing depression and breast cancer, have to give their respects to the Guttmacher Institute. One of the valuable things they do is provide the necessary research to back up commonsense assertions from reproductive rights advocates that anti-choicers assail, precisely because there’s not a lot of research to prove things that people basically already know to be true. For instance, it was the Guttmacher Institute that did the research showing that the vast majority of Americans—95%—have premarital sex and this has been the trend for decades. It’s one of those things that reality-based thinkers might wonder at, since it’s so obviously true that it almost seems pointless to research it. But “abstinence-only” education has been shoved down the throats of school districts nationwide on the theory that avoiding premarital sex is a common enough choice that we can build the curricula around it, and this research is priceless in making the ninnies who think that if you just don’t tell kids what condoms are, they’ll wait until their wedding night for sex look like the blathering idiots they are.
Anyhow, Guttmacher just released another “no duh” study that will nonetheless be critical in shutting down anti-choicers who make bad faith arguments about how they just looooooove babies, when it’s clear that it’s more about punishing women for having a sexuality. The research shows that worldwide, abortion bans don’t work at all in reducing the abortion rate, not one bit.
Women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal, according to research published Friday.
In a study examining abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, experts also found that abortion rates are virtually equal in rich and poor countries, and that half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe.
The study was done by Gilda Sedgh of the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and colleagues from the World Health Organization. It was published in an edition of The Lancet medical journal devoted to maternal health.
“The legal status of abortion has never dissuaded women and couples, who, for whatever reason, seek to end pregnancy,” Beth Fredrick of the International Women’s Health Coalition in the U.S. said in an accompanying commentary.
So, if you claim that you want to ban abortion because you want to stop abortion, you’re either stupid or lying. Or some combination of the two. Usually when you’re discussing abortion with an anti-choicer and you bring up the fact that the laws don’t stop abortions (the pretend goal), and instead just function to hurt women (which is consistent with what I believe anti-choicers want, which is to punish women for being sexual), usually the anti-choicer will prove that this is about hurting women for digging around for reasons that women who seek abortions are stupid sluts who deserve to suffer. As feminists around the internet are fond of saying, scratch a “pro-lifer”, find a misogynist. And bringing up the specter of septic abortions, of women dying with coathangers hanging out of their bodies is the absolute quickest way to get your “pro-lifer” off the blather about saving babies and straight onto why women seeking abortion are stupid sluts who are just getting what they deserve.
For instance, this exchange on “The View”. Whoopi Goldberg, as she is fond of doing, brings up the specter of coathanger deaths the second Elizabeth Hasselbeck starts wanking about stopping abortions (albeit through bribery instead of banning). Hasselbeck immediately switches gears and starts in on the barely-coded slut-bashing, the “superficial” women who have abortions for badly defined shallow reasons. The discourse about “superficial” women is an allusion to the commonly held stereotype of the American slut, the bubbleheaded white college girl or the slatternly black welfare queen who just spread their legs for anyone, as if they had that right,* and now needs to suffer shoving a coathanger up her cootch in a hotel room to teach her a lesson. Meanwhile, the non-superficial woman, say the married mother of four who just forgot her birth control pill in midst of toddler drool-wiping and husband sock-picking-up deserves a break. Or whatever your personal breakdown of bad girls vs. good women is. That abortion bans can’t really tell the difference between the women you personally think have moral abortions and those who have “superficial” ones doesn’t seem to enter into the discussion.
Now, there are some strongly consistent anti-choicers who really do think that all women—married or not, mother or not—who seek to have sex for reasons other than making more babies are bad women and deserve to suffer. And for those who seek to ban all abortions, even those that are done to prevent the maiming or killing of a woman who probably wanted the baby, seem to have a pretty expansive misogyny, a delight in the idea that even boring, married, missionary position sex done to make a baby is probably too lustful to really be given a pass from the “wages of sin are death” concept. It’s a level of misogyny that’s really probably more just plain old misanthropy, the same love of making others suffer that leads the hard right nuts to suggest that people should sleep on the street covered in sores rather than get a little government-sponsored health care. Most of us aren’t that hateful, or at least, most of us aren’t that arrogant as to think it could never, ever be us that horrible things happen to.
Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, but anti-choicers must pretend (or believe, if they’re in the “stupid” instead of “lying” category) that it does, because the ugly reality—that abortion bans kill women—tends to damper the enthusiasm from people who don’t think women deserve to die horrible deaths or suffer septic abortions for the venial sin of sex. And even if you can swallow the idea that a certain percentage of women should suffer and die needlessly in order to satisfy some misogynist urge to punish sexuality, it’s hard to support the notion that children should be left motherless because of an abortion ban.
But these things are the reality of abortion bans—they do nothing to stop abortions, but they do a whole lot in killing and maiming women and orphaning children.
Abortion accounts for 13 percent of maternal mortality worldwide. About 70,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions. An additional 5 million women suffer permanent or temporary injury.
Septic abortion deaths tend to be concentrated in developing countries, where access to post-abortion emergency care can be meager, especially under Bush administration laws that deprive funding from organizations that provide that kind of care, for fear that “saving a woman from septic abortion” is one step away from performing them yourself. (In a medical sense, there’s a point there—clearing out the biological debris from a coathanger abortion and performing an abortion yourself are not all that different.) Again, even if you’re obsessed with the idea that death or maiming is acceptable because the women aren’t “innocent”, what of the children that are left behind by so many, probably most, of the women who die every year from septic abortion? Hard to believe the “pro-life” cover story about innocent children when you’re advocating policies that are best described as “pro-orphan” more than “pro-life”.
*They actually do.
65 Responses to “Pro-life? More like pro-death, pro-maiming, pro-orphaning”
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One of the awesome things about teaching poetry is that I get to hit my students with all sorts of great poems by women who deal with this sort of thing in their work, and the ensuing discussions that follow. We read Lucille Clifton’s “the dead baby poem” last week, and when we started talking about the historical context, I mentioned that the stories about coathanger abortions weren’t urban legend, that poor women had been forced to resort to that, my students eyes widened and I heard a couple of audible gasps. I can’t wait till later in the semester when we read some Marge Piercy.
I’d have to read the actual study, rather than the Yahoo version, to judge for myself. I find it really hard to believe that if abortion were outlawed tomorrow in America, 1.3 million people would still go to back alleys to have them. That argument strains credulity. I mean, it’s like arguing laws against rape won’t decrease incidences of rape; it goes against common sense (and even if it didn’t, would you be against criminalizing rape? No, you would still not want retribution against rapists, and instill a social norm against rape that will also lead to a reduction in the number of offenses.)
Until we see a country with frequent abortions ban them, we’re likely not to have an on-point comparison.
Also, the article suggests that the abortion rates in poor countries are “virtually equal” to those in rich countries. So much for the pro-choice notion of making abortion “legal and rare” by raising standards of living.
Just to prevent confusion, I’m in the “stupid” category. People can have sex all they want; it’s the intentional destruction of innocent human life in order to escape the consequences of sex (a perfectly ok act in itself) that crosses the line.
You’re right, only the poorest people would have to resort to that. Richer folks, however, would get to travel to Canada or elsewhere where it’s legal to still get them safely.
I find it really hard to believe that if abortion were outlawed tomorrow in America, 1.3 million people would still go to back alleys to have them.
Won’t someone be surprised, then?
Certainly, many women will be unsuccessful in finding ways to terminate their pregnancies, and many will overdo it and end up in our new septic wards; the remainder will have gotten useful advice and/or assistence from their friend/relative/acquaintance the doctor/nurse/gal who did this before.
And of course you’ll see an uptick in infanticide and abandonment. I keep on trying to tell the pro-life men of my acquaintances this, and they keep on not listening. Don’t underestimate people you plan to oppress. The intelligent ones and the desperate ones will always outsmart you.
evan: Lancet’s 13 page .pdf.
I find it really hard to believe that if abortion were outlawed tomorrow in America, 1.3 million people would still go to back alleys to have them.
Please, you think Paris Hilton would have to go into a back alley? You really think that the thriving underground of illegal abortions by shady doctors wouldn’t spring right back into life? You think that upper- and middle-class parents wouldn’t send their daughters to Europe to get things “taken care of” the way they did in the 1950s and 1960s?
This is what drives me batty: there have always been women who sought to abort unwanted pregnancies. Always. Haven’t you ever heard of pennyroyal tea? Or the Native American remedies for ending a pregnancy? And until the late 1800s, there wasn’t even that much of a stigma as long as you did it before the mother felt the fetus moving around the four month mark.
Exactly, mnemosyne. Also, with it being illegal, no more oversight for abortion doctors! Any moron with a card table and a hanger can pretend to be an abortion specialist and kick the practice women who didn’t make it under the table. And word doesn’t get out because people don’t talk about shit that can get you arrested, so more women continue to die and the person killing them gets more and more money in black market abortions. What a paradise for life and innocence.
So, by your logic, if an empirical studied showed that anti-infanticide laws were ineffective at preventing murder, it would mean that advocates of anti-infanticide laws didn’t really care about murder, and just wanted to punish people who occasionally liked to shoot toddlers.
That’s… different.
evan:
The pro-choice notion is actually that of making abortion safe, legal and rare, period. Altering the prevailing standard of living never enters into it, because it’s completely irrelevant.
I find it hard to believe that half the voters in the US would choose a couple of homicidal psychopaths to occupy the highest offices in the land. And yet.
What bugs me is that “evan” is using this personal belief, not to talk about human nature or discuss statistics, but to argue for a policy that would be result in the deaths of tens of thousands of women and children even if “evan” is right.
Let’s say only half as many women have abortions in countries where abortion is banned. OK, now you’ve got 650,000 women “going to back alleys”. Maybe only 30 or 40,000 of them will die as a result. Maybe of the 600,000 additional births “evan” expects, only a few thousand babies a year will be found in dumpsters, only a couple hundred thousand a year will be dropped off on the doorstep of their local church or clinic.
This is like the assholes who attacked the Lancet study of excess Iraqi death due to the war and made it sound as if everything was all right because by torturing the statistics they could claim the only 300,000 additional people had died as a result of an unnecessary invasion.
Observer:
Heh. The irony of such a dedicated soldier in the authoritarian Right’s war against rationality using the phrase “by your logic” in all seriousness is lost only on you.
Actually, abortion-inducing black market prostaglandins (bathtub drugs…easy to make and easier to market) will flood the landscape.
Given the enormous success of the current “War on Drugs,” I have to wonder what anti-choicers will do when faced with the reality that virtually undetectable illegal chemical abortion has replaced the coat hangers?
11. The underlying causes of this global pandemic are apathy and
disdain for women; they suffer and die because they are not valued.
I got a preview of this at ISEE. Then, I was sitting next to one of the authors in a symposium on pollution and birth outcomes when this one academic from a developing latin american country started going off on how he was *sure* that air pollution was causing miscarriages and how we had to save these babies and on and on. (he was at an earlier day long session and I was ready to smack him then). I made some comment about panty sniffing research under my breath and she nearly sprayed the entire row with the coffee she was sipping to keep from snarling.
After one CDC researcher explained that such research would be difficult since most women don’t know they are pregnant and embryos aren’t on maternal circulation anyway, I took a turn at outlining the social complications of inappropriate focus on early pregnancy. For starters, we don’t really yet understand the later outcomes linked to air pollution which likely reflect vascular and hematological consequences of pollution - stuff like low birth weight and premature birth and interuterine growth retardation. More ominous, we might continue the grand tradition of exposure control through mother control rather than fixing problems and reducing emissions. You bad woman, commuting 45 minutes each way in traffic to a job in a more highly exposed area! It’s your fault your kid was 8 weeks undercooked. Never mind that poverty is a greater risk than emissions! Etc. All the mothers in the audience, and the reproductive health folks with clinical experience were nodding along. We all know that it is easier to mother-shame than stop poisoning future generations, especially when it results in women staying home. Patriarchy gets a win-win.
paul:
Indeed. It’s a problem that crops up whenever you’re attempting to present a statistical argument to people who aren’t ideologically capable of comprehending the reality behind said statistics (or who, for whatever reason, simply don’t care about it).
I wouldn’t care so much about their refusal to make the connection between the numbers and the reality they represent if they weren’t so deeply invested in the public policy issues that require the support of those reality-based statistical arguments. When politics becomes just another game, everyone loses.
“So, by your logic, if an empirical studied showed that anti-infanticide laws were ineffective at preventing murder, it would mean that advocates of anti-infanticide laws didn’t really care about murder, and just wanted to punish people who occasionally liked to shoot toddlers.”
Huh?
How about this one:
If an “Observer” said something stupid on a Pandagon thread, would he hear the laughter of all those who think he’s stupid? And would he continue to say stupid things on Pandagon threads even after hearing the laughter?…
I’d far rather people escape the consequences of sex than they die for your stupidity, Evan.
The “if the US made abortion illegal” business is not as relevant as the “if all these countries legalized abortion” is. It isn’t the US that matters, but the places where HUMAN LIVES COULD BE IMMEDIATELY SAVED BY SAFE AND LEGAL ABORTION PROCEDURES IN EXISTING CLINICAL FACILITIES.
Oh, sorry, by your logic the health of already born children and woman doesn’t count. Silly me. We have to die because we had sex - or were raped - or had no access to family planning, etc.
Asshat.
Maybe evan and Observer would be happier in Nicaragua which bans all abortion, even to save the woman’s life. Of course, this kills a lot of women with ectopic pregnancies. And women who want to give birth but are afraid to seek medical treatment since they might be arrested to trying to abort. And terrifies doctors and nurses out of beneficial treatment because they might be accused of the same thing. But, hey, Nicaragua loves da baybeez so much, it’s OK to orphan some, maim some, and lose some.
I know that Battle of the Analogies is usually stupid, but for some reason observer’s post had me thinking, “What if you had a supposedly anti-infanticide law that also made it unlawful for a woman to breastfeed and allowed any landlord to evict families with children 7 days after birth?”
Because the anti-choice nutcases say they’re against abortion, but they regularly shoot down every measure, from proper sex education to contraceptive funding to subsidized daycare, that might make abortions less common. Instead they just want to kill the doctors and punish the women who terminate pregnancies.
Mr. or Ms. Observer,
I think I would have to agree that those people are not actually against infanticide.
And not just that, but that it is *important*.
It is *important* that laws are not the same as taboos. It is *important* that “those people ought to suffer” is different from “we ought to prevent something” or “we ought to protect something.”
It is *important*, perhaps *the most important thing*, that we strive to make solutions, not rules; that we seek to help people, not to punish them for disobedience; that we are mindful of succor, not retribution; that we think of substance and not of measure.
That we love, and live, and strive to build, not always smite and snub and seek to tumble down.
And that this is separate from whether one is pro-choice or pro-life; that it is *irrelevant* to *this* whether one thinks of abortion as a right or as a sin. Before that, it is vital to say: “Laws–and all our other works, as persons in this world–are to achieve the good, not to slake the venomous hunger of our self-righteousness.”
I admit that I don’t think you can *make* a pro-life law built around helping people instead of hurting them. But, then again, I don’t know that anyone’s really tried.
I can attest that abortions happened before abortion was legal in the United States, from personal experience.
In the 1960s, (at least) three of my friends got pregnant in high school between the ages of 14 and 16, two were forced into teenage marriages, the third was shipped out to Arizona for her asthma (so it was said) before she began to show.
Another friend dropped out of college as a freshman, into another teenage marriage. So, I listened up when a fellow student who’d earned the nickname Crazy Charlie for the tales of outrageous exploits told a group of of us that he knew a doctor in Philadelphia who did abortions for $200.
Luckily, I didn’t get pregnant in college, but if I had I’d made up my mind that I’d risk my life in an illegal abortion with that alleged doctor, even when the referral came from someone with the nickname Crazy. I wanted a future outside a teenaged marriage.
In my junior year abroad (from a dinky state school) I met one of those privileged upper middle class (or rich) girls who had a different option. For her abortion, her boyfriend flew the two of them on a vacation to the Bahamas: she got a tan with her D&C.
Four years younger than I am, my sister’s best friend also got pregnant in high school, but at that time a neighboring state had legalized abortion. And she somehow found an underground railroad of ministers and doctors appalled at the death and destruction caused by illegal abortion that helped young girls get to the states where abortion was legal.
That girl got to college, became a pharmacist (and not one who will deny a rape victim EC, I suspect), later married and had two children of her own.
Abortion was illegal until I was in my early twenties, and was something not normally discussed, outside of a police blotter that detailed abortion deaths. And yet, women had abortions, illegal and unregulated and dangerous, unless they were the upper middle class, who could afford to travel to where the abortions were legal.
(Although those with money may not always had to fly to another country. I’ve read that in the days before abortion was legal, in the more expensive neighborhoods doctors and hospitals routinely and quietly doled out D&Cs for a variety of “reasons.”)
From personal experience, I can attest that women got abortions in the United States before abortion was safe and legal, and frankly am disgusted by someone weighing in otherwise, based neither on experience or the facts.
Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, but anti-choicers must pretend (or believe, if they’re in the “stupid” instead of “lying” category) that it does,
The conservative cult of appearances is also a factor: we’re all sinners anyway; men are brutes that must be domesticated by the careful ministrations of a properly subservient wife; women are promiscuous creatures that must keep their minds off sex by attending to their almighty husband’s every need.
Because of our hopelessly sinful nature, actually being a decent, moral person (by their standards) is nearly impossible, and is secondary to the more practical matter of simply wearing a mask of decency and morality. Be polite, go to church, give to charity, and you’ve covered your sins (you may in fact win entitled asshole points to use however you want! Thank ye Lord). Of course, the losers of the bunch earnestly hope that, thanks to a ban on abortion, they’ll be able to trap a woman by means of a baby, but in the end, whether outlawing the practice would actually work or not isn’t necessarily a crucial question: officially condemning the ickiness and keeping it out of the public light is very important as such. And, as Mnemosyne said, an ineffective ban leaves the door open for the good women’s virginal abortions.
Perversely, the measure of a good woman would probably be the extent to which she’s opposed to the abortion she’s about to have, as this proofs her against sluttitude. She knows it’s a sin, but only God is infallible, etc. This is the same reasoning as the “using a condom means we premeditated our crime, so let’s have unprotected sex — manslaughter isn’t as bad as murder” approach, which only leads to more abortions. Loopy is the word.
meanwhile, that old racial standby, the noose, is making a comeback in a big way…
The article states that there are a lot of abortions in Eastern Europe, fewer abortions in America and even fewer abortions in Western Europe.
The fewest abortions are in Africa where the procedure is largely banned however the childhood mortality rate is so high that it is not necessarily in a family’s interest to reduce the number of children that are born. I would be interested in a comparison between African nations that would probably be the most useful.
In countries where children are more likely to live the abortion rate is higher and in those industrialized nations the lowest rates are seen in nations with national health care, subsidized day care and ample paid maternal and paternal leave.
By those numbers Western Europe has 2/3 of the abortions that the US has and it ain’t because the procedure has been banned.
This is a subject that is dear to my heart. One of the reasons why I think that society has this attitude that all women are “slutty at heart” and deserve what they get, or the other thing that drives me freaking apeshit, is squishy prochoicers who say it abortion is a terrible decision and women make it under horrible emotional duress. Both in my mind do so much freaking damage, and allow people ot pass horrible non-evidenced based abortions.
I am going to be honest here, I am at a convention and have had more than my usual 1/2 glass wine spritizer for me, thanks I am driving(free hotel room with internet access, free wine and beer woot!) so I am rambling a bit.
But this week, I poured my heart and soul into a some personal(meta?) diaries about how we women who have had abortions and aren’t under the mythos of “my life is fucked up because of my abortion” have got to start coming out of the abortion closet and talking about our abortions and how they were life decisions, maybe life changing but no more traumatic than deciding other life decisions like going to college, or getting married. Because the more we women who are okay with our abortions and speak out about how no we aren’t guilt-ridden, or shamed, or drug addicted sluts because of our abortions. We are women who made a choice that we thougth best for ourselves and our familes, the more we can start to show people that most of us are okay despite our abortions, and maybe, just maybe we can change the idea that abortion is shameful and hurtful to women and we can keep our rights to have full body soverignity.
Here’s the link. Like I said, I am convention tipsy, and I am as one commentator said, an unpolished writer anyway. I write like I speak, and since I don’t edit what I speak I generally have typos and don’t word stuff quite right, so the diaries are just my heart and my sould being poured out in front of potentially 1 billion web people. you can go read all three diairies(I am linking the third because that has parts 1 and 2 there)
But, really I think if we just start showing how “normal” abortion is for a lot of women(because I want to be respectful of the women who felt that abortion was wrong and they still had one, I want to acknowledge that not all women are okay with having abortions, just most of us are okay and not shamed and guiltridden according to scientific studies)
Anyway, I am sorry if this is rambling, can really expensive merlot be to blame, but go read the diaries, and let’s start making abortions personal again.
Two more stories and I will shut up. Tonight, I sat at a bar and said I had an abortion and I am okay with it, and I consider it one of the best decisions of my life. I am sure that shocked 9/10s of the people I was with, because we are so used to the mytho of not being okay, and abortion being a horrible decision. You know what, I got two women who came up and shook my hand and said, I felt the same way, but felt I couldn’t talk about it.
This week, I mentioned at a meeting that 82! women in Nicarguea died because of a total abortion ban in that country. 82 women, human beings who deserved so much more than to die like that! One of the women in the group said they were babykillers they got what they deserved. I said, “I’m a babykiller too, because I had an abortion” she looke away from me, I said to her, look me in the eye, and tell me that I deserve to die. She looked down. I said, Look me in the eye and tell me I deserve to die, and she just couldn’t, and left the group. later the facilator told me that she called, and couldn’t marry the fact that I, who she considered kind, compassionate, and beautiful should deserve to die.
So, we need things like The Guttamacher Institute, with its unbiased research, because I like to think that if the G Institute is unbiased, but that facts have a “liberal bias” anyway. But we also need brave courageous women to start coming out of the abortion closet(I write a heartfelt explaination of my borrowing of the coming out of the close phrase in diary 1, please read it before you get on my case about using the term) and start, I don’t know “normalizing abortion too.
Okay, I am sorry, I am rambling. I blame the three merlots and two Guinessis, (and they were damn fine, i don’t care what sideways says about merlots, they are my go to wine in bars!) Sorry, but here is the link to the DK series I wrote. I am sorry, I am shoot from the hip, unedited writer, and probably made tons of errors. But, this stuff, this comment and my diaries come from my heart, and so maybe you can all cut me some slack on the grammar, and stuff? What I am saying is that I have kind of sort of lurked here, and you all are such amazing writers and thinkers that I kind of feel self-conious writing stuff on any blog these days.
Okay shutting up now, I do have to go to convention at 8: fucking 30 in the morning…
link to the 3rd in the series at Daily Kos, it will take you to parts 1 and 2.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/11/9562/5352
Okay really shutting up now.
Which makes you wonder why all the right wing anti-choicers are almost universally against those kinds of programs here, including affordable birth control.
This is so incredibly stupid. Partly because men with this attitude usually assume that women have abortions just for the hell of it… instead of considering that they might not be able to support those children… but also because men who are anti-choice always seem to argue that the women who want to abort their “children” are those same women have children to “rip them off” with child support.
Same as how “lesbian feminists” want to have tons of abortions. Lady saliva impregnates me regularly! What about you?
Seriously guys. Don’t you see how disingenuous you are? Oh, no, of course not. Fuck you.
Observer,
so women who get abortions would be punished under your system, yes?
Let me know how that goes over with Joe Q Public.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2185811,00.html
Ahem.
Also, before the portuguese voted in favor of a more lax legislation about abortion, each year about 5.000 women were admitted in their hospitals due to severe complications in their abortions.
While the number of LEGAL abortions practiced was roughly 1.000 per year.
Let’s face it, the pearl-clutching hyperconservatives of the world would prefer not to deal with the messy realities of sex, pregnancy and motherhood. After all, if you acknowledge that even in the dreamtime of the nineteen-fifties people were having sex before they were legally wed, or with people they weren’t legally wed to, you have to acknowledge the level of public hypocrisy which accompanied it. Things like the girls who went interstate “to visit family” or for “health problems” or similar. Things like the women who died as a result of bearing too many children too young. Things like the women who were forced to have sex behind the closed doors of the marital home. Things like the sometimes too-convenient gap between “older sisters” and their younger siblings - because said younger sibling is actually the child of their “older sister”. The very real social stigma that accompanied being born out of wedlock, and having a child out of wedlock. The women who got pregnant, couldn’t face abortion, but whose families couldn’t face the shame of having a bastard in the family or a shotgun wedding - and wound up going off to see distant relatives, and give birth to a child they’d give away for adoption, and never know but always wonder about. All of this has to vanish, be swept under the rug of social conformity. You also have to ignore the women who found out they were pregnant and killed themselves - and had their pregnancy discovered in the subsequent inquest.
You have to ignore the children who are made motherless as a result of septic abortions (and the ones who are brought up by parents who don’t have the money to feed them as the result of enforced childbirth). You have to ignore the children who wind up being abused, or being the targets for the anger of their parents. You have to ignore the women who didn’t want to be mothers, but didn’t have the temperaments to become cloistered virgins either. You have to ignore women who were raped, women who were assaulted, women who had the misfortune to catch the attention of their boss, or the women who just couldn’t predict whether or not they were fertile on the day they had sex with their lawfully wedded husband.
You have to maintain a lot of myths in your head to maintain this kind of mindset. You have to believe that pregnancy and childbirth solves anything; you have to believe that there isn’t a link between sex and pregnancy; you have to believe that pregnancy is a punishment; you have to believe that pregnancy is the maximum inconvenience involved in the whole childrearing process, never mind the subsequent eighteen years; you have to believe that the human body is under the absolute control of the human mind, and that people therefore *choose* to get pregnant any time a pregnancy occurs; you have to believe that sex is something which isn’t acceptable for other people. In other words, you need to be as neurotic as a shaved monkey, and you have to maintain that state constantly - to the point of being close on psychotic in your insistence that everyone else in the world *has* to comply with your neuroses.
The US would be saved one hell of a lot of problems if these people could just be correctly diagnosed and committed, y’know.
Here’s another link for people who don’t believe women in abortion-restricting countries are clamouring for abortions:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3051436.stm
If you click on my name, you’ll see my post about Guttmacher that warranted another blogger’s comment “you’re auditioning for Pandagon, aren’t you?” I LOVE the Guttmacher Inst. too. The study I was referencing in my rambling post back in May was framed as women who are “at risk” for pregnancy, acknowledging that we’re often dodging and weaving childbearing rather than acting as if it’s the most accomplished thing we’ll ever do (not to knock the women who do feel that way). I just loved the frame (the study was about inequity in contraception access and unintended pregnancies, if I remember correctly).
I also want to thank “hello” above for being forthright about being ok with abortion as a life choice, as one of many life choices women may have to make over the course of their lives. I have a friend who had one who also felt it was a necc. if slightly unremarkable decision; she had expected differently, I believe, based on the rhetoric and heat involved in the abortion debate.
“Hello”’s comments are a far cry from Brownback’s or Tancredo’s description of the GOP in the most recent debate, where he attribute a pro-choice Republican party with the end of the GOP. That it would actually cease to exist without its pro-life position.
Try as I may, I cannot for the life of me understand how this social policy is the foundation of one of our two political parties in the U.S. Is Lincoln rolling over in his grave right now?
If you click on my name, you’ll see my post about Guttmacher that warranted another blogger’s comment “you’re auditioning for Pandagon, aren’t you?” I LOVE the Guttmacher Inst. too. The study I was referencing in my rambling post back in May was framed as women who are “at risk” for pregnancy, acknowledging that we’re often dodging and weaving childbearing rather than acting as if it’s the most accomplished thing we’ll ever do (not to knock the women who do feel that way). I just loved the frame (the study was about inequity in contraception access and unintended pregnancies, if I remember correctly).
I also want to thank “hello” above for being forthright about being ok with abortion as a life choice, as one of many life choices women may have to make over the course of their lives. I have a friend who had one who also felt it was a necc. if slightly unremarkable decision; she had expected differently, I believe, based on the rhetoric and heat involved in the abortion debate.
“Hello”’s comments are a far cry from Brownback’s or Tancredo’s description of the GOP in the most recent debate, where he attribute a pro-choice Republican party with the end of the GOP. That it would cease to exist without its pro-life position.
Try as I may, I cannot for the life of me understand how this social policy is the foundation of one of our two political parties in the U.S. Is Lincoln rolling over in his grave right now?
I liked Observer’s “liked to shoot toddlers” bit myself.
Cause, you know, women really *like* to get abortions.
Why, me and my friends, we got pregnant five or six times on purpose last year alone just so we could go on them fun abortion sprees together!
Which makes you wonder why all the right wing anti-choicers are almost universally against those kinds of programs here, including affordable birth control.
Because those programs “let women get away with” stuff. They should suffer, you know.
I live in Chile, where even therapeutic abortion is illegal (thanks to the CIA sponsored bloody dictatorship) and I personally know about five or six women who have gotten abortions (I’m only counting my close friends, I actually know dozens more).
My sister had to get an abortion last year. It was a chemical abortion and cost us the rough equivalent of 500 dollars. It was safe, and everything went well, but most women around here don’t have that kind of money, and have to resort to all sorts of medieval methods (you would’nt believe).
Chile is the south american country with the highest abortion to live births ratio, and yet, we have a woman, socialist president (democrats sure are useless everywhere)
Pardon my english, as I said, I’m from south america, and I find it really annoying that people would believe abortion will cease once it is outlawed. Look at the evidence from other countries and you will see much proof to the contrary
I live in Chile, where even therapeutic abortion is illegal (thanks to the CIA sponsored bloody dictatorship) and I personally know about five or six women who have gotten abortions (I’m only counting my close friends, I actually know dozens more).
My sister had to get an abortion last year. It was a chemical abortion and cost us the rough equivalent of 500 dollars. It was safe, and everything went well, but most women around here don’t have that kind of money, and have to resort to all sorts of medieval methods (you would’nt believe).
Chile is the south american country with the highest abortion to live births ratio, and yet, we have a woman, socialist president (democrats sure are useless everywhere)
Pardon my english, as I said, I’m from south america, and I find it really annoying that people would believe abortion will cease once it is outlawed. Look at the evidence from other countries and you will see much proof to the contrary
Well, yes. If a reliable, empirical study showed that anti-infanticide laws were ineffective at preventing infanticide, then I would be forced to conclude that people who continued to push anti-infanticide laws and nothing else weren’t actually that interested in preventing babies from being murdered. Especially when those self-same people also pushed laws that made life harder on new parents, thereby creating more desperate people who couldn’t care for their kids.
Or hadn’t you noticed the increase in infant drop-off laws - created by people who actually want to save the children.
Incertus Brian- Thank you for the heads up on the Lucille Clifton poem. I had never read it before- and I was an English major!
That is exactly what the anti-choicers want, ultimately. THIS is the part of the 1950s they want to go back to worst.
Compulsory pregnancy as wrecking ball for female life-choices and as means to trap women into marriages.
Evan, you do belong in the stupid category, and your assumption about “back alleys” is more a product of your misogynist fantasy of punishing the sluts than a reality. Most septic abortions from the era of the septic abortion ward were caused by women doing it to themselves in their own homes. The reason that they shot up in the 50s and 60s was that the law started raiding underground clinics and locking doctors and other abortion providers more, making it hard to find someone willing to do it. So yes, I do think that the abortion rate will stay as is if it’s banned. What you’ll get an uptick in is the number of dead teenage girls with horrible infections from septic abortions they performed on themselves.
Interesting fact: A lot of anti-choicers assume the abortion rate shot up post-Roe because the number of white infants available for adoption plummeted. Actually, what happened was that at the same time abortion became legal, the rate of single motherhood shot up. In the past, single white women who didn’t abort gave their babies up. The number of women who elect to give birth instead of abort didn’t change, but they just started keeping their babies instead of giving them away.
A.) Nobody disputes a toddler’s claim to sentience or human rights, whereas abortion is not considered murder by quite a lot of people.
B.) With illegal abortions, the mother’s health is jeopardized. Unless one has really, really, really bad aim, shooting a toddler isn’t the same sort of risk. With illegal abortions, both woman and fetus are more likely to die.
Prying into when, exactly, a fetus gains human rights is a tricky business. Because there is quite a bit of disagreement and because it would require the adoption of ineffective and cruel policies regarding pregnancy and childbirth, it is better to provide clean and safe legal abortions and trust individual women to make the choices that are best for them.
There is a common thread through all of the “no abortion, no exceptions” laws: The Roman Catholic Church.
In the eyes of the Catholic Church ALL abortion is murder. Even when it is necessary to save a woman’s life. Even in cases of ectopic pregnancy*
Furthermore, since the Natural Law (as the Catholic Church understands it) must be the basis of Civil Law, in the eyes of the Catholic Church it doesn’t matter how many abortions actually happen or how many women die as long as the civil government upholds the Natural Law.
But don’t worry, ladies, dying for your fetus is grounds for sainthood.
Of course, none of these men will ever have to face this decision or have wives or daughters who may have to face these decisions.
*According to some moral theologians. Others allow removal of the entire fallopian tube, although this is the most invasive and risky way of resolving the ectopic pregnancy.
I find it really hard to believe that if abortion were outlawed tomorrow in America, 1.3 million people would still go to back alleys to have them. That argument strains credulity.
Oh, please. You think it’s more likely that people will say, “Gee, this pregnancy is a disaster for me, but abortion is illegal, so I guess I’ll go through 9 months of pregnancy and then either raise a child I’m not prepared for or go through the emotional ordeal of giving my newborn away”? You think that “strains credulity” more than people saying “well, I’ll take my chances with this guy my friend recommended”? Please.
Until we see a country with frequent abortions ban them, we’re likely not to have an on-point comparison.
This is silly. You think countries that have frequent abortions and then ban abortion are going to have different results than countries where frequent abortions and a ban on abortion simultaneously exist? Why would they?
Wayward, it’s good that you bring up the RCC, since most of the fucked-up ideas about sex in the West come directly from that peculiar institution.
It has always amazed me just how many people are willing to listen to a bunch of (ostensibly) celibate-for-life men when it comes to issues of sex.
Wayward’s comment about the Catholic church brought something to mind.
I was arguing with a Catholic conservative the other day who was whining because I said the Catholic Church was misogynist. Apparently it’s “bigotry” to criticize the ideology or institution of a religion, now. Anyway, here’s how the conversation roughly went:
ME: No, dumbass, it would be bigoted if I said “all Catholics are misogynist” because that would be ignoring the diversity of opinion amongst Catholics. But the Catholic Church is an institution with one official position on most topics, and I have every right to criticize those positions and call them misogynist if I want.
HIM: But we don’t hate women!
ME: You think women deserve to die if they have sex. You think they shouldn’t be allowed contraception and that if they conceive they can’t abort even if their lives are in danger.
HIM: But that’s not the same as hate.
ME: YES IT IS. You think a woman should be forced to be an incubator even if it KILLS HER. You think her life, her past, her responsibilities, her hopes and dreams are always less important than sustaining the fetus’s life. How is that not misogynist?
HIM: But do you hate babies because you want them to die?
ME: I don’t want them to die. I don’t want their mothers to be compelled to sustain them even unto the cost of their own lives.
HIM: But…but…I don’t hate women.
ME: YES, YOU DO.
Etc.
The point is, we need to make it clear that this is hateful. This isn’t about “protecting babies” or standing up for “responsibility.” This is saying that women are worthless.
Oh, and when you’re arguing with “moderate” anti-choice folks, it’s helpful to point out that their logic implies that abortion should be illegal even when it’s necessary to save the mother’s life. For instance, the “responsibility” argument: women know when they have sex that they could get pregnant AND that the pregnancy could risk their lives, so by anti-choicer logic this ought to mean that sex is consenting to death. But most anti-choicers are too squeamish to do this.
Also, it helps to ask them why they accept abortion to save the mother’s life if they really believe that the mother’s life and the fetus’s are equal. If both are equal, then wouldn’t it make just as much sense to let the mother die to save the fetus? And why should the mother be able to make that decision, rather than the doctor? Why should she be given power of life or death over the fetus if they’re both equal, rather than having it decided by some third party?
(Obviously I don’t agree with any of this bullshit, I just think it’s a good way to point out to people that it’s really rather ridiculous to posit the mother and the fetus as equal lives when one resides in the body of another).
The other thing to do — if you want to be mean — with the “moderate” woman-haters is to ask how long the woman should go to prison for having an abortion. Not a lot of other kinds of premeditated homicide where the person who commissioned it goes free.
Until we see a country with frequent abortions ban them, we’re likely not to have an on-point comparison.
It’s been done. The country is Romania where abortion, previously legal, was banned by Ceausescu. The maternal mortality rate increased dramatically and stayed high. When Ceausecu was overthrown and the law reversed, maternal mortality dropped dramatically almost immediately
So much for the pro-choice notion of making abortion “legal and rare” by raising standards of living.
Keeping abortion safe and legal is a pro-life stance. Haven’t you been looking at the data?
Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent that practice. Wide access to contraceptives prevents abortion. The promise of adequate health care for kids born with disabilities prevents abortion.
Dianne:
She shoots, she scores!!
Reality 1, misogyny 0.
Furthermore, since the Natural Law (as the Catholic Church understands it) must be the basis of Civil Law, in the eyes of the Catholic Church it doesn’t matter how many abortions actually happen or how many women die as long as the civil government upholds the Natural Law.
Wow, wayward, just yesterday at a pro-choice LiveJournal community I was musing that many anti-choicers don’t actually care whether illegality and lack of safety has an effect on the number of abortions (because all the better if those bitches suffer and get infections, hey), because they just want it illegal so that Sky Daddy can’t get mad at them for not making abortion illegal wherever they live. I didn’t think that was actually a spelled-out policy somewhere. But I guess I’m not surprised.
Not to mention that in Romania, where abortion had been banned for 20 years, the numbers of abandoned children were amongst the highest in the world- if anyone remembers the stories about tehromanian street kids living in the sewers which were all over the TV in te 90s, that’s another consequence of having had abortions be illegal.
Yet, even there and then, abortions were allowed for cases of rape, illness of the mother or the fetus.Think about that.
I’m Romanian. I lived through part of those times and it never ceases to amaze me that people didn’t learn anything.
The Devil’s Advocate: Keeping abortion safe and legal is a pro-life stance.
Not in any self-definition of the pro-life movement I ever encountered.
Leia: ME: You think women deserve to die if they have sex. You think they shouldn’t be allowed contraception and that if they conceive they can’t abort even if their lives are in danger.
You could have pointed out that the Catholic Church’s official position is that if a woman has been raped in a war zone, or if a girl has been raped by her father, if rape results in pregnancy, and the woman (or the girl) succeeds in getting an illegal abortion, she should be prosecuted and jailed for doing so.
Amnesty International decided in April last year that they were no longer going to stand by and be neutral when women who had been raped needed abortions and were being forced to carry the fetus to term: and the Catholic Church explicitly said that because of this decision, they were going to withdraw all Catholic funding from Amnesty International. So the official position of the Church is that helping prisoners is less important than forcing raped women and girls through pregnancy. This is public, open, hateful misogyny - “if you won’t help us persecute these women as we think they should be persecuted, we’re not going to help you do anything else, not even the stuff our God said we were supposed to do”.
Yet curiously enough, news stories about the women being raped in the Congo and in other war zones rarely mention the Catholic Church’s public and vigorously-expressed policy to deny them abortions if they need and want them.
Indeed, there is a huge diversity of opinion among Catholics. There is a good chance that even your local neighborhood priest, while probably not as liberal as the folks on this blog, is frustrated and embarrassed by some of the teachings of the Catholic Church.
There are plenty of wonderful people in the Catholic Church who are truly concerned with “loving thy neighbor” and taking care of “the least of these.” However, the institution as a whole is misogynistic, authoritarian, hypocritical, corrupt, self-important, and heartless.
Which is why I am no longer Catholic.
Most anti-choicers don’t “want the bitches to suffer”, at least not consciously. Their opposition to abortion is mainly so the “Sky Daddy” won’t get mad at them.
Fear of damnation and God’s wrath is what drives them. Fear of damnation and God’s wrath is what fills the churches and always has. This is why liberal churches can’t win. When people stop being afraid, they stop going to church. Even if the church is loving, and even if people have no animosity towards that particular institution, without the fear of hell driving them into the pews, sleeping in, golf, fishing, or NFL Countdown are all more appealing options to most people than church on a Sunday morning.
While liberal churches may be shrinking because their members aren’t “feeling the heat”, conservative churches have the problem that the average modern westerner simply doesn’t believe in hell anymore. Not seriously, anyway.
Not in any self-definition of the pro-life movement I ever encountered.
Maybe those self-defined pro-life movements really aren’t as concerned about life as they claim to be, then.
…when, exactly, a fetus gains human rights is a tricky business.
Napthia9, my own thoughts on that particular issue have become much more clear in the last year or two, partly from reading here.
However developed (or undeveloped) a fetus may be, it does not have the right to use its mother’s body. Or to put it another way, the law should not compel a woman to provide use of her body to grow a baby.
With this as a guideline, one could assert that a fetus capable of living outside the womb has a right to live, but that has nothing to do with the vast majority of abortions.
Observer, I’m going to take you up on that, and the reason I’m going to do is that ya got me. Mea culpa. Me personally, I want, not to punish people who shoot toddlers, because that doesn’t happen very often, but people who like to lock toddlers in airless cars on 115-degree days in the expectation that that’s the way to be rid of a burden. I want them punished not because I want to prevent infanticide (seeing that the point at which I get mad is the point at which the infanticide has already happened) but because I think they are gawdawful people and because I don’t want them around. That’s my motive. I admit it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a similar motive drives you where abortion is concerned. Which isn’t to say I’m right; but that’s my guess.
Amanda, just to add to something that I didn’t bring up on Feministe:
Maternal deaths are at their highest point since 1977. And because of bans on abortion, the maternal death rate will continue to increase across the country, not decrease. In fact, the maternal deaths in parts of the country with the least abortion access actually skyrocketed dramatically in the past few years, while maternal deaths decreased in parts of the country with the most liberal abortion laws.
So, pro-life equals pro-death. The National Right to Life is basically the US version of the Taliban.
As with most conundrums, how tricky it is depends on whether one has an interest in finding a solution. For the theocratic anti-abortionist, the answer is very simple, but depends on accepting as fact a religious fiat, because in terms of a rational approach to how human beings actually come into being, their answer makes no sense at all. In fact the whole mindset that expects to find hard and fast, sharp boundaries, binary yes/no answers, in nature, is basically a Creationist one. The law is a human construct (unless one supposes it was actually handed down from Above–or, we might as well suppose, Below) and typically also demands sharp, binary distinctions.
But in fact, human beings are formed very gradually, in a long, difficult process known as “pregnancy.” It takes nine months or thereabouts to go from a single cell formed by an egg absorbing a sperm to a human baby. And it takes those nine months, and a lot of energy, and irreversible life changes, from a human woman. So if one assumes human women are just as much people as men are, then it clearly should only happen with her willing consent. But the flip side of this is, if a woman is willing to have a baby–that is a necessary (if not always sufficient) condition of a human life coming into being.
So–instead of hunting high and low for some physical or magical “dividing line” in the fetus, we should look instead to the choice of the woman, period. If she chooses to remain pregnant with all that entails, she has chosen to become a mother and to bring a human being into life, and from that moment, we should regard her fetus as “human” regardless of its state of development–because she says so. Vice versa if she doesn’t want to go through with it for any reason that seems good to her whatsoever, she may terminate the pregnancy, and society should either help her do this or get out of the way, because it is no one’s decision but her own. And that therefore was not a baby, because a necessary condition for a human being to be brought into being properly was not present–the woman’s consent.
If this were our legal principle, then the conundrums would vanish, the metaphysical questions about what makes a fetus human with human rights would be irrelevent except for the observation, “the mother’s choice does!” We know for reasons I’ve gone over before at length that realistically, the outcome would be that pregnancies would either be terminated as early as possible or continued anywhere near the possibility of human development only by women who wanted a baby, because if one does not, abortion as early as possible is always the rational choice. Late-term abortions would only be considered in cases where either a desired pregnacy turns out not to be medically feasible, or some violation of the social order–like, say, a woman coerced against her will to carry a pregnancy who finally manages to get away from her captors/manipulators before birth is possible. In which cases, the details of case will indicate what should be done, but these cases would be unusual.
Perhaps I have a poor understanding of the spirit and nature of common law. But if our laws and morals cannot accomodate such a straightforward recognition of the role of women in human reproduction, then I say with Samuel Johnson, “The law is an Ass.”
And of course I reason from my premises perfect agreement with you here:
Trust the women, what a concept. They’re only the progenitors of all human beings who have ever lived after all, how dare they have a say in such important matters as birthing babies from their own bodies!
@wayward
I too left the Catholic church over its position on contraception, abortion, (and homosexuality). I recognize that there are a lot of wonderful Catholics who disagree with the church’s position. But as long as they give money and attend church they are supporting an organization whose anti-sex position has done much harm to the world.
I just couldn’t keep pretending that I wasn’t tacitly endorsing the church’s viewpoint.
it’s too bad Mitt Romney doesn’t have a uterus somebody could shove a rusty coat-hanger into…
Wayward’s comment about the Catholic church brought something to mind.
I was arguing with a Catholic conservative the other day who was whining because I said the Catholic Church was misogynist. Apparently it’s “bigotry” to criticize the ideology or institution of a religion, now. Anyway, here’s how the conversation roughly went:
ME: No, dumbass, it would be bigoted if I said “all Catholics are misogynist” because that would be ignoring the diversity of opinion amongst Catholics. But the Catholic Church is an institution with one official position on most topics, and I have every right to criticize those positions and call them misogynist if I want.
HIM: But we don’t hate women!
ME: You think women deserve to die if they have sex. You think they shouldn’t be allowed contraception and that if they conceive they can’t abort even if their lives are in danger.
HIM: But that’s not the same as hate.
ME: YES IT IS. You think a woman should be forced to be an incubator even if it KILLS HER. You think her life, her past, her responsibilities, her hopes and dreams are always less important than sustaining the fetus’s life. How is that not misogynist?
HIM: But do you hate babies because you want them to die?
ME: I don’t want them to die. I don’t want their mothers to be compelled to sustain them even unto the cost of their own lives.
HIM: But…but…I don’t hate women.
ME: YES, YOU DO.
Etc.
The point is, we need to make it clear that this is hateful. This isn’t about “protecting babies” or standing up for “responsibility.” This is saying that women are worthless.
Leia, this is not true. We do not hate women, and it can be backed up. First of all, we do not “force” women to become incubators. The woman makes that choice. If she doesn’t want to suffer the consequences, then she shouldn’t have sex. Furthermore, the gift of a child is indeed a GIFT. Having a baby is a sacred thing, something that God only endows women with. Actually, abortion is what makes women worthless. Because what does abortion say? That the woman has no self-control and is like an animal who has to be “neutered” so that she can have lifeless sex with a man who doesn’t respect her. By getting rid of abortion, we would protect women from the drudgery of going through life with this disgusting label.
Another thing…the idea that a fetus is not equal to its mother because it depends on her for survival. I see your point, and you are not the first to think of it. Because, obviously, the Jews were not equal to Hitler because they depended on him for survival. Which makes it interesting that abortion is known of as “America’s Holocaust”.