- The right to control your own body is the most fundamental of all.
- No other freedom or right will mean a thing if you can be physically tortured for exercising it.
- It’s why you can kill in self-defense.
- Others’ lives are irrelevant to that right. Nobody can tackle you and remove a kidney because somebody else needs it to live and you’re a tissue match.
- (I know it’s a new concept in some circles, so, to be clear, pregnancy is not magic. It’s complete life support. It’s a dialysis-heart-lung-liver-and-everything-else-system. Forcing that level of contribution is ethically exactly the same as forcing organ donation. The only difference is forced organ donation could affect men.)
- If a woman is a human being, she has the same right to control her own body as non-female human beings.
- Therefore she has the right to make any and all decisions about her own pregnancy. Fetal viability is not an issue any more than someone else’s need for your kidney is an issue.*
Think for a moment about what it means if that last point seems kind of … out there. Maybe even shocking, depending on who you are.
It means you’ve somewhere absorbed the feeling that women are not really people. Not completely. Only up to the point where they need to be sacrificed for someone else. At that point, they’re nobody. Their needs, plans, or lives don’t matter compared to what somebody else has decided is more important.
That is not the way real people are treated. Even corpses are treated with more respect. You can’t take organs from a corpse without the deceased’s written permission, even if it will save lives. [1]
The essence of being considered a real human being is that others aren’t allowed to use you like a thing. Slaves are never considered human in slave-owning societies. Farm animals have no choices. What slaves or animals want does not matter when somebody else decides on their actual purpose. Just as a woman’s own thoughts on the subject are irrelevant when people are sure her real purpose is to provide useful organs, not to be a human being.
And that’s really the point of anti-abortion movements everywhere. They’re to force women into second class status. They’re to use biology — all forms of subjugation use biological vulnerabilities to control victims — to control women.
The breadcrumbs of evidence are everywhere. Advances in medical technology have laid bare some of the more obvious ones. Until reliable birth control became available, and when abortion was difficult and uncommon, fear of pregnancy (with all the social garbage larded on to unwanted pregancies) was enough to keep most women in line. Prior to the mid-1960s, religious tracts, all the way back to Exodus, don’t see abortion as some kind of murder [2]. Then, once medical technology gave women some control over pregnancy, then abortion suddenly became all about The Babies.
It’s also been pointed out ad nauseam that the people who say they’re pro-life also seem to be pro-military, pro-death penalty, against life-saving health care for the poors, against birth control even though it reduces the need for abortions, and so on, and so forth, and so on, forever. There’s only one very limited situation where they suddenly care about life: when that life can be used to take decisions away from women.
And then there was that priceless statement from the Congressman too stupid to realize what he’d just said. From Bloomberg [3]:
Alabama’s new blanket ban on abortion “protects the sanctity of unborn life,” with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment.
“The egg in the lab doesn’t apply,” Clyde Chambliss, state senator and sponsor of the abortion bill, said during the Alabama legislative debate. “It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
So, suddenly, when there’s no woman to control, The Babies don’t matter. Eeeenteresting, as they say in the movies.
And now, of course, we’re having a Handmaid forced onto the Supreme Court to make all this drivel the law of the land. Faced with our own Dred Scott decision, what can we do?
The best short term alternative is probably to use more medical technology to get around the issue. At this point medicines that produce abortion very early in a pregnancy have an excellent record of safety and effectiveness. One has to be careful to order them from places which don’t substitute counterfeits for the real medicine. Aid Access [4], Women on Web [5] and Plan C Pills [6] have more information. Added 2021-06-11: This useful site [7] lists the dosages needed to use birth control pills as morning after pills, also called emergency contraception.
The best long term alternative is to understand that women are human.
*(Yes, once the fetus can survive without medical assistance, the goal is delivery, not abortion. No, no woman is going to almost complete the grueling marathon of pregnancy only to decide three days before term that it’s too much trouble [8]. That is misogynist nonsense invented to feed the stereotype of women being too frilly to know their own minds. It takes someone who’s fully human to make those decisions for them! The point I’m making is that as a matter of principle nobody except the woman carrying the pregnancy has any right to say what to do with it.)
5 Comments To "Public Service Message About Human Rights And Abortion"
#1 Comment By quixote On 24 Oct, 2020 @ 17:15
It may be worth mentioning the obvious corollary, since so much that is obvious about abortion rights seems to be repressed.
If you buy that women don’t own their own bodies, you’ve admitted the principle that nobody does. You’re not only on the side of forced organ donation. You’re also on the side of forced abortion. The difference between forced pregnancy and forced abortion is only in the priorities of whoever decides. There’s no ethical difference between them.
The price of maintaining misogynist control over women is being okay with organ farming.
It only sounds extreme because we (society) try so hard not to think about the implications of treating half of humanity as a useful collection of organs.
#2 Comment By Earlynerd On 24 Oct, 2020 @ 22:31
I don’t thing the true purpose of “pro-life” could be spelled out any more clearly.
For even more enraging background to all this: something that’s been kept from public view for at least twenty years is the fact that courts usually decide in favor of the male sperm donor if he objects to having frozen embryos implanted and brought to term in any woman’s body, even the woman’s whose egg was the other half.
I first saw the case, in Ohio I think it was (it’s on the stolen hard drive and probably on one of the ones around here somewhere), in 1995 or so, where that state’s supreme court refused to allow a woman to have embryos she had created with her ex husband implanted *in her own body* over her ex’s objections. The particularly infuriating language in this decision was the court stating that forcing a man to become a parent against his will was to make an object out of him. This they could not allow.
Not one single cell still attached to his body was required to allow the woman to have this embryo implanted in her uterus, but for American law, even this was coercive when it involved a male.
Another infuriating thing: this was during the time when every single one of the major news outlets in the U.S. was referring to an embryo *inside a woman* as an “unborn child”. I noted when storing the article on the above that nowhere, in the coverage of the story nor in the case language, was the same exact entity, a fertilized egg, referred to as an “unborn child”.
Since then, the majority of courts have sided with males, and media coverage of these cases has overwhelmingly done so. Not one article I’ve read about these cases has referred to an embryo as an “unborn child”. In fact, most have gone to the length of doing what the media do so well: creating a new term to lift women’s rights out of common recognized language and into some undetermined new territory: “pre-zygote” and “pre-embryo” were the two I saw most often.
#3 Comment By quixote On 26 Oct, 2020 @ 16:29
Interesting about the sperm donor case. I hadn’t heard of that before. Stark.
#4 Comment By Earlynerd On 26 Oct, 2020 @ 22:06
There have been a number of such cases since the Ohio? one. That one just had incredibly memorable hypocritical language. Although most courts have ruled in favor of sperm donors since then, enough have not that this should end up with the Supremes.
It’ll be interesting to see how this now 6 “Justice” rabid Catholic majority rules when this kind of case lands on their desk. Rather, the contortions they twist themselves into to side with the men, but still call themselves “pro-life” will be interesting.
(Sotomayer was never among the rabid – she has a solid legal background and is not an ideologue. The white male facemask who just joined Thomas on the court has had only three f’n years experience as a judge of any kind. Three years.)
#5 Comment By Earlynerd On 26 Oct, 2020 @ 22:38
Can’t resist one more comment.
Barrett was sworn by Thomas! I think we have a trifecta.
The first white male facemask on the Supreme Court swears in the second.
On the eve of an election that gives U.S. women the choice between the candidate who enabled one and the candidate who nominated the other.