These religious zealots don’t care about children. They just want to use them to control women and punish them for sex. Who considers a baby a “punishment”?
Every woman of childbearing age in the US is less safe today than she was three days ago thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. And every pregnant woman in this country is in real and present danger, whether her pregnancy is wanted or not. Because the risk of death during childbirth is 14 times higher than with a legal abortion. The situation is even worse for black and brown women, with an estimated 33% increase in pregnancy-related deaths as a result of the Supreme Court decision.
For those with a wanted pregnancy, there is always a risk that it will go horribly wrong and threaten the mother’s life. When Ireland was a theocracy, during the 35 years that Amendment 8 set similarly draconian limits on abortion, women could and did die. The horrific and entirely preventable death of Savita Halappanavar from sepsis caused by an incomplete miscarriage was one of the events that ended that reign of terror as the Irish voted to repeal the amendment and legalize abortion in a landslide.
For women confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, there is a real possibility of dying from an inherently unsafe illegal abortion if they are too poor, too young, too alone and too little support to travel to a state where abortion is still legal. If they dodge that bullet, there is also a very real chance of being arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
All this in a country that is already recognized as having the highest risk of maternal mortality among developed countries, with no universal health care and no paid parental leave. And in case you thought the stats couldn’t get any worse, the US also has a reputation for being the country where the leading cause of death in pregnant women, despite the above stats, isn’t poorer care for obstetric complications — although it is Case is real – but murder!
These religious zealots want to punish women for having sex. Who considers a baby a “punishment”? These people don’t care about children. They just want to use them to punish and control women.
When I see what I call “forced births” (honestly, given the facts in the section above, I don’t see how anyone could call them “pro-life”), which are the inverse of Roe v Wade, or 50 years “fixed Right” celebrate “, as the Americans put it so bizarrely, I can feel my gorge rising. How dare they cheapen the rights of women—girls, adult women, sentient women—to health, safety, and self-determination while self-righteously congratulating themselves on their religious purity? Your hatred of women must be profound. Yes, even the forced female births like Amy Comey Barrett. Their inherent misogyny allows them to diligently build a stairway to heaven on the back of other women’s suffering. To put it bluntly, their actions are cruel.
Every pregnant woman in the US, but especially in the Republican states, has just lost her human rights. And every woman who becomes pregnant today or at some point in the future will too. The Supreme Court just relegated her to the moral and legal equivalent of a handful of cells, a fertilized zygote that knows nothing and cares nothing. A zygote cannot feel fear or despair. He can’t worry about how he will care for the children he already has if he has another baby. It cannot weep over lost dreams, educational opportunities, or a lifelong responsibility it never chose. It cannot feel trapped in a relationship with an abusive partner. Comparing the experience of real, flesh-and-blood thinking, feeling female humans to the experience of a few fertilized cells reveals an ancient and terrifying contempt for woman and her humanity. Women are not simply portals through which other people enter the world. They are just as human as you are in every way. But in many parts of the US and some other notoriously hideous places for women like Poland and El Salvador, pregnant women now have fewer rights than a corpse. Finally, we do not allow the removal of organs from a dead body, even if those organs keep another person alive, unless that body has given us permission to do so before death. Many American women may now be forced to devote their bodies to someone else’s life, whether they like it or not, regardless of what that means for their health or their future. They have been reduced to the level of cattle, by breeders.
And don’t try the “animate” argument on me. If you believe in such a Christian concept, then fine, don’t have an abortion. When things go wrong, you can choose to die agonizingly from sepsis caused by an incomplete miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy that explodes your fallopian tubes. That is their right. But don’t you dare, do you? Car Try to force this suffering and death on others because of your religious beliefs. That’s not morality, that’s fascism.
Then there is the anti-abortion “until birth” argument. Which can be torn down in a few sentences. 90% of abortions in most developed countries are performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (a descriptor by which the US is hanging by a thread), especially since the advent of safe medical abortions and the morning-after pill. Mind you, I expect theocrats like Thomas, Alito, and Comey Barrett to come soon after these and birth control. In fact, Thomas said so much. These religious zealots (conservatives is too polite a word, I think) want to punish women for having sex. Aside from the fright and momentary intrusiveness that entails (what’s her business?), what kind of person considers a baby a “consequence,” a “punishment”? These people don’t care about children. They just want to use them to punish and control women.
On too The Big Smoke
But let’s go back to the 10% of abortions that take place after 12 weeks. In Australia, where abortion is decriminalized in all states except WA, access is likely the reason for the delay (particularly in WA). Women in regional and remote areas can find it difficult to access appropriate medical care quickly. Other barriers can be extreme youth, ignorance, or coming from a cultural or religious background (I’m looking at you Evangelical Christians) where pregnancy out of wedlock carries a terrible stigma. All of this can affect a woman’s ability to access abortion services quickly. Indeed, making abortion more difficult increases the likelihood that women will have an abortion later. Well done, Supreme Court enforced obstetricians, another triumph.
However, when we’re talking about a really late abortion, all at 24 weeks, what we’re usually looking at is a wanted pregnancy that went horribly wrong. A late abortion is an uncomfortable, annoying procedure. No one with access to early termination would choose to wait until that was their only option. Women don’t just go around blithely, going through months and months of pregnancy (also often uncomfortable and sometimes worse – remember Kate Middleton was hospitalized during one of her pregnancies due to constant vomiting) and then suddenly decide they’re not going through with it want. On the contrary, an abortion after 24 weeks is almost always a tragedy. Either the fetus is so deformed that it is incompatible with life, so that abortion is a merciful act of grieving parents to save their child from inevitable torment, or the continuation of the pregnancy poses a significant threat to the life of the mother. Either way, it’s a devastating situation, and using these infinitesimally rare but desperate moments in people’s lives as a point of discussion to imply they’re murderers is frankly beneath all contempt. And this argument also assumes that medical professionals would happily kill a perfectly healthy, about-to-be-born fetus at the mother’s “freak”! Forced births, it seems to me, have a very low opinion of their fellow human beings, especially female human beings.
Forcing women to give birth against their will is cruel. It is nothing less than a form of mass coercive state control of half of its citizens. A civilized country would not consider that.
