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YOUR TAXES NEEDED FOR ABORTIONS!
Jaysun ^ | January 21, 1997 | National Organization for Women

Posted on 12/08/2003 6:34:12 AM PST by Jaysun

I'd like to show you guys something that I came across on the National Organization for Women (NOW) website. The title of the discussion is:

NOW Reframing Abortion Rights Briefing on "Breaking the Abortion Deadlock, From Choice to Consent"

Here are a few excerpts from the discussion. I'll place a link to the full article at the end.

Eileen McDonagh: Most likely, there is no constitutional right to abortion funding, even if you are suffering from a medically abnormal pregnancy that threatens to kill you. Currently, Congress and states do provide legislative funding for abortions when a women's life is in danger, but if that were taken away from the legislative agenda, as it could be, in the opinion of constitutional law experts, there would be no constitutional right to abortion funding, even if you were threatened with death by a medically abnormal pregnancy as abortion rights are currently framed based on the Roe v. Wade decision. So as we celebrate the importance of the Roe v. Wade decision, we also need to move beyond it. We need a new vocabulary for abortion rights. We need to rethink some of the premises underlying reproductive rights, and we are here today to talk about some of the new ways we can reframe abortion rights to provide access to abortion for all women, which is as just as important as the abstract right of choice itself.

What I would like to do is start off by saying the new vocabulary we are suggesting is that we begin to shift the discussion from what the fetus "is", which has been a dominating issue for over twenty years, to a new focus on what the fetus "does". Medically and legally, what the fetus does, is to cause pregnancy. Medically and legally, a woman becomes pregnant when a fertilized ovum implants itself in her body, in her uterus. It is, therefore, the fertilized ovum and later the fetus that both causes and maintains the condition of pregnancy in a woman's body. If we start to focus on what the fetus does, and we begin to think about even what a medically normal pregnancy involves, we see the pregnancy is a massive transformation of a woman's body. Even in a medically normal pregnancy, extraordinary changes occur. Some hormones increase four hundred times their base level. A woman's blood system is rerouted to make all of her blood available to a growing fertilized ovum. A new organ is grown in a woman's body, the placenta. A woman's respiratory system is affected. Her heart rate increases, blood volume increases sometimes forty percent normal levels. Even in a medically normal pregnancy, these are massive changes, and in an abnormal pregnancy, as we know, pregnancy can entail life crippling consequences and even death.

When massive transformations happen to anyone's body, the key issue is not just that person's choice about what to do with her or his own body, but rather, that person's right to consent to what someone or something else is doing to her or him. Just as a woman must have a right to consent, for example, to engage in sexual intercourse with a man, once we begin to look at what the fetus does to a woman when it makes her pregnant, the key issue becomes not merely her choice about what to do with her own body, but rather her right to consent to what the fertilized ovum is doing to her when it initiates and maintains pregnancy as a condition in her body. Whereas we associate sex and pregnancy together, when we begin to look at this new way of framing abortion rights, we come to realize that sexual intercourse creates the risk that a fertilized ovum will be conceived and then will make a woman pregnant, but sexual intercourse is not the same thing as pregnancy. Women do not need to engage in sexual intercourse to become pregnant. Women can become pregnant through in vitro fertilization, or through artificial insemination, which underscores or illustrates why, although sexual intercourse is usually associated with pregnancy, it is not the same thing.

So, just as we have spent many decades acquiring for woman the right to consent to sexual intercourse, we now need to direct our attention and our efforts to acquiring for women the right to consent to pregnancy. The issue here is the right to consent to the way a fertilized ovum makes a woman pregnant.

Legally, consent to determine how others will intrude upon one's body and liberty is sacrosanct. None, for example, is ever required to donate even a pint of blood to another person without consent even to kin relations. Once a child is born, no state in the country requires a parent to donate even a pint of blood to a child, even if the child's life is in danger. While morally I am sure we would all agree that a parent should donate a pint of blood, legally, the law does not require people to donate anything, even a minimally invasive part of their body, such as a pint of blood, much less bone marrow, or organs to another person. This is because the law considers consent to be an absolute requirement before one private party can have access to another's body or liberty.

As this new framing of abortion rights shows, however, currently the law allows preborn life to take from another person, a woman, in invasive ways (the entire body of another person), in the way the law does not allow a born person to take needed body parts from another person. There is an imbalance, therefore, in the way the law has privileged preborn life compared to born life. The law will allow preborn life to take over the entire body of someone, a woman, but once a person is born, no one can take even a pint of blood from a mother or father without consent. So, the reframing that is involved here is a way of demanding from the law that when women are pregnant, they have the same protections in relation to preborn life that people have in relation to born life.

This reframing achieves the goal of abortion funding by saying that the obligation of the state is to protect pregnant women from non-consensual intrusion of their bodies in the same way that the state protects other people. That opens a whole new door to a constitutional reframing of abortion rights that includes the right to abortion funding based on women's right to equal protection of the law.

Eleanor Clift: How would this theory take into account the widely held feeling that the unborn child, the fetus, is innocent life that did not ask to be born? I mean this could be interpreted as kind of a hostile act against someone who does not come in with any intentions, any bad motivations.

Eileen McDonagh: Well, I can understand how people feel that unborn life is innocent, but from a legal standpoint, the fetus is not so much innocent as much as it is mentally incompetent. Medically and legally, the fetus cannot control itself or have a conscious intention to cause pregnancy, which means that it innocent in the sense that it is mentally incompetent. Nevertheless, the fetus is not innocent of actually causing a woman's body to change from a nonpregnant to a pregnant condition by implanting itself in her uterus, since it is this implantation that makes her pregnant.

From the stand point of the law, it is not necessary that you intend to harm in order for it to be recognized that you are causing harm. For example, some people who are born are legally viewed as being mentally incompetent because they are under the influence of drugs, or they are insane or they are mentally retarded, or for some other reason. And although mentally incompetent born people would be viewed as legally innocent of causing harm, because they do not have the ability to have intentions or control of their behavior, that does not mean they do not actually have great power to cause harm to others. So, if a born person who is incompetent were to attack you, we would all agree that such a person is innocent of any intentions of hurting you, yet such a person would still be able to hurt you a great deal, and the law would try to stop a mentally incompetent born person from hurting you, even though such a person intends no harm.

The analogy with preborn life would be similar. We could all agree that the preborn life has no intentions and no ability to control its behavior. That does not mean, however, that preborn life has no power to harm a woman. To the contrary, in the case of a medically abnormal pregnancy, the harm is caused by preborn life is obvious. And the only way to stop that harm is to remove its cause, which is the fetus. Yet, more significantly, the law recognizes that even in a medically normal pregnancy, if the woman does not consent to be pregnant, she is being seriously harmed. The legal term is "wrongful pregnancy." This term has not yet been applied to the abortion issue, but in other legal contexts, it is a well established principle. For example, when physicians fail to sterilize men or women competently and pregnancy ensues, or in cases where pregnancy is subsequent to rape or incest, even if a woman has a medically normal pregnancy, even if she has a healthy child, and even if she opts to keep the child and not put the child up for adoption, nevertheless courts all over the country recognized that she has been seriously harmed. She can sue the physician for damages, and in criminal contexts, the government punishes men more severely when pregnancy follows their imposition of nonconsensual sexual intercourse.

Dorothy Roberts: I think we are so used to the idea, and our culture, that women are supposed to be mothers, that women are supposed to be self-sacrificing that very often it is difficult to see the harm that unwanted pregnancy causes to women. And, what Eileen is saying, I think, is that these are harms that we do recognize can occur against other people. If, for example, a man were lying on an operating table, and the doctor was about to operate on him, we would know, instinctively almost, that he most consent to the operation. He must have consented to that invasion of his body before the doctor could go ahead. But, with pregnant women, very often doctors and others in our society believe that women should be able to endure all sorts of invasions to their body, both whether they decide to have the child or not, because of a cultural view of women, I think. Part of the task, therefore, is going to be to get people to see that women also have a right to reproductive liberty and a right to bodily integrity equal to others in society.

Patricia Ireland: In some ways it reminds me very much of the changes that we began in the 1970's in conceptualizing marital rape. Up until the mid 70's, and in some cases, such as North Carolina, I guess, up until just a couple of years ago, states had not done much of anything about marital rape. That was because of the notion that intercourse between a husband and wife was accepted as normal and required for the good of the country, the good of the society. And, of course, every normal woman, every real woman would consent to sex with her husband. The whole notion, therefore, that sexual intercourse could be, in fact, if there were consent a wonderful experience, beautiful love making as opposed to a brutalizing, humiliating experience of rape, irrespective of what vows you had taken. But I do think it requires a great shift in people's concept, as you describe it, of pregnant women.

Kim Gandy: Having had two children in the last four years, I can agree that there were tremendous, tremendous changes that take place. As I have been thinking about this very, very interesting idea, I wonder at what point consent can be withdrawn, and at what point consent could not be withdrawn? I think as a lawyer, that is where my mind goes with the question. Having once consented to be pregnant, can you then change your mind at some point down the line? Is consent required always, at every step in the process, or at some point do you lose the option to withdraw consent? Maybe that is the hardest question of the whole issue for me.

Eileen McDonagh: I think this is really an important question. And the logic of consent would always give you the option to withdraw it. The consent we are talking about is not a contract. So even though you still probably have options for how to break a contract, we are not even talking about a contract; we are talking about consent. So, as consent, it would be something you could withdraw. However, I think the subtext of your question has to do with the policy implications of withdrawing consent. This project is energized by a policy goal of obtaining abortion funding for women. As I see it, the policy consequence of shifting to consent as a premise for abortion rights rather than just choice would mean that there would be an argument for why there is a constitutional right to abortion funding. Such a right would make it possible for women to obtain the funds to have abortions earlier in pregnancy, rather than later. Because, many times, when women who seek an abortion in early pregnancy but do not have funds to obtain one, they are then forced to continue a pregnancy. They may then become eligible for funds later in pregnancy, if that pregnancy becomes a medically abnormal one, perhaps threatening their lives, and then they end up having abortions later, rather then earlier, in pregnancy. Provision of abortion funding would reduce, rather than increase, late term abortions, therefore, and the only way I can see that women can obtain a constitutional right to abortion funding is if the framework for abortion rights shifts from merely the right of privacy to make a choice about your own life to the more fundamental right to have the assistance of the government to free you from a nonconsensual pregnancy.

Kim Gandy: Late term pregnancy, of course, is more dangerous.

Eileen McDonagh: Of course, it is more dangerous. And, of course, it is contrary to any policy goal that we would ever have. Clearly, if abortion is something a woman seeks, the earlier the abortion is obtained, the better. The policy consequence of shifting to consent would open the door to a constitutional right to abortion funding. This would be funding that would be available for a medically normal pregnancy in the early stages of pregnancy. The policy result would be that for women who seek an abortion they would get one right away with the funding that would be available. Such funding would reduce, therefore, the need for abortions later in pregnancy. That would be the policy consequence.

Patricia Ireland: And why does it imply a right to funding? Because it sounds as if you were arguing that it would imply a right to funding for all women, not just indigent women, and that it would be for medically normal pregnancies as well as abnormal pregnancies.

Kim Gandy: It would be based on the principle that the police would protect you from assault if someone were assaulting you. In other words, if a police officer is standing there, that officer would be obligated to intervene, even if you had the money to hire a private security guard.

Eileen McDonagh: That's right. It would make the resources of the state available to all women. And rather than isolate indigent women as a special group, it would say indigent women have something in common with all other women, which, of course, they do, which is that if they are made pregnant against their will, the resources of the state to protect them against nonconsensual pregnancy should be available to them just as the resources of the state are available to anybody who walks down an isolated street late at night. Anyone who is threatened with a mugging or some other form of intrusion of their bodily integrity or liberty is eligible for assistance from the state.

Most important, if the state helps anyone, it has to help everyone else who is similarly situated. And that is the premise here. The state does provide funds to protect people's bodily integrity and liberty, and yet the state is not providing those funds to pregnant women; that is unconstitutional. It is the comparison of the way the state provides funds to some people but not other people whose bodily integrity and liberty is being similarly threatened. Seeing how nonconsensual pregnancy situates women similarly with others who are the victims of intrusion of their bodily integrity and liberty opens the constitutional door to the Equal Protection Clause and to women's right to abortion funding as the necessary means for stopping a fetus from continuing its imposition of nonconsensual pregnancy.

Dorothy Roberts: I think that is a major advance in the way we think about reproductive liberty because as things stand now, poor women have absolutely no constitutional right to funding, under the current interpretation of the Constitution.

Loretta Kane: What would be the benefit of the consent argument versus the sex discrimination argument?

Eileen McDonagh: The benefit is that a consent to pregnancy argument invokes women's fundamental rights as protected by Equal Protection Clause, and, thus, avoids all the obstacles the Supreme Court has created for claiming sex discrimination on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause. The constitutional right to abortion currently is based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and as Dorothy Roberts stated, all attempts to gain abortion funding have failed, because the Due Process Clause is a negative right that protects people from interference from the government, not a positive right that guarantees peoples assistance from the government. For this reason, in order to secure abortion funding, most pro-choice advocates feel we must switch from the Due Process to the Equal Protection Clause, and there have been enormous efforts over the years to do so. Normally, equal protection arguments involve identifying a group that the government is unfairly treating compared to another group. And in the case of abortion funding, the claim is that the government treats women unfairly compared to men, and the claim, therefore, is that such sex discrimination violates the Equal Protection Clause. There are two problems with sex discrimination, however. The first is that sex discrimination is not yet a strict scrutiny category which means that the Supreme Court is more lenient in allowing the government to treat men and women differently compared to other groups, such those based on race.

General Audience Speaking: We know that is a serious problem, we agree. We acknowledge that is a problem.

Eileen McDonagh: Right. And as Dorothy and I were talking earlier, maybe eventually Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the help of feminist organizations such as NOW will be successful in getting sex discrimination to be recognized by the Supreme Court as a strict scrutiny category, but that has not happened yet. And that means that the state does not need a compelling interest to justify a policy that is based on sex discrimination, it just needs a kind of good reason. Yet, a second and an even more serious problem with sex discrimination -- even if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is successful in declaring and getting sex discrimination to be strict scrutiny -- is that despite how counter-intuitive this may seem, the Supreme Court has ruled several times that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not necessarily a form sex discrimination. So, even if sex discrimination were strict scrutiny, policies that discriminate on the basis of pregnancy are not necessarily a form of sex discrimination. After a lot thought and work, I decided, rather than to try to overcome the obstacles blocking the sex discrimination route abortion funding, I would just try to find a different path. From a strategic vantage point, a new route is advantageous because it does not require the Supreme Court to overturn existing precedents, which it is loathe to do. If it is a new route, at least the Court can think about it freshly, and it does not involve requiring the Court to change previous rulings. I do not think the Court is going to change its rulings on pregnancy and sex discrimination, but I do hope that the Court will be able to look at this new argument and rule in favor of abortion funding.

The consent to pregnancy argument for abortion funding, because it does not invoke sex discrimination, does not ask the Court to compare the way the government treats men and women. Rather, it asks the Court to look at the way the government treats pregnant women compared to other people who are the victims of intrusion of their bodily integrity and liberty. And that could be anybody. It could be someone walking down an isolated street who is being threatened by a mugging. If the state helps that person, then the state has got to help the pregnant woman whose entire body and liberty is being taken over by preborn life. So, a consent to pregnancy approach is a fundamental rights argument, not a sex discrimination argument, in terms of equal protection analysis.

Twiss Butler: Women do not have a guarantee of equal protection of the law, and they don't have a Fourteenth Amendment, and they don't have a guarantee of bodily integrity

Eileen McDonagh: Well, I agree.. The particular constitutional argument that this abortion funding reframing rests upon was validated in Romer v. Evans which is a recent case where the Supreme Court did rule it was unconstitutional to exclude a group from political protections that are available to other people, even if the group in question has no special standing as a suspect group. The Court upheld the ruling by highest court in Colorado, which had struck down an amendment to the Colorado state constitution as unconstitutional on the grounds that the amendment deprived a group, defined in terms of sexual orientation, from equal access to the political process, even though the group in question enjoyed no constitutionally protected status against government discrimination.

A consent to pregnancy foundation for abortion rights draws upon the Court's ruling in Romer by arguing that there are some forms of government protection that must be available to all people similarly situated, even the people in question are not members of constitutionally protected groups.

Twiss Butler: If I may specify, my questions were not about parenting, but the social dominance of men over women and, therefore, the meaning of pregnancy as a form of demonstrating that dominance. One might have thought that if Roe v. Wade were a constitutional decision, it would have ended the quarrel over access to abortion, and indeed would have supported federal funding for abortion. But it didn't. And instead what we find is that liberty, as you have called it, to obtain an abortion is constantly at risk. And if even women with the resources to exercise their liberty can't do so because there is terrorizing of the people who provide the service as well as those who partake of it, that does not imply a constitutional barrier to limits on women's liberty. So I would wonder if another approach that does not name the problem would fare any better, or whether it too would be vexed at all times by opposition which the Constitution did not prevent.

Eileen McDonagh: Well, I think we're always talking about degrees of improvement and I am not trying to say this is a panacea..

Patricia Ireland: Well, I know that this is just the beginning of a discussion, and we have many copies of Eileen's book here, and we'll look forward to Dorothy's book's publication. When is itanticipated?

Dorothy Roberts: Well, later this year, by Pantheon.

Patricia Ireland: Later this year. Alright. We'll keep an eye out for that and I am sure that you all could stay for a little bit if folks want to talk with you further informally, but I know some folks do need to get on with the day. Thanks to all of you for being here and to Eleanor and Tony K Films for taking part. We appreciate very much your thoughts and sharing your time with us. Thanks.

>>Truely disgusting. I'm not even sure that I got the worst of it. You decide: http://www.now.org/issues/abortion/mcdonagh.html


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Extended News; Government; Miscellaneous; Politics/Elections; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: abortion; abortionfunding; dorothyroberts; eileenmcdonagh; eleanorclift; feminist; nags; now; patriciaireland; rowvwade
Hey buddy - can you spare half of your paycheck, my wife wants to get another abortion.....
1 posted on 12/08/2003 6:34:14 AM PST by Jaysun
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To: Jaysun
Good to know the fetus causes pregnancy.

Does this mean I'm off the hook for child support?

2 posted on 12/08/2003 6:41:43 AM PST by freebilly
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To: freebilly
That is a good point: if women consent to be pregnant, does that remove the man's obligation if he objects? What is good for the goose is dandy for the gander.
Of course that would never be allowed to happen. Men only exist for women to use, according to these wackos.
3 posted on 12/08/2003 6:53:49 AM PST by Adder
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To: Jaysun
"the obligation of the state is to protect pregnant women from non-consensual intrusion of their bodies [by a fetus]"

"from a legal standpoint, the fetus is not so much innocent as much as it is mentally incompetent"

"the fetus is not innocent of actually causing a woman's body to change from a nonpregnant to a pregnant condition"

"harm is caused by preborn life is obvious"

"why does it imply a right to funding? ... It would be based on the principle that the police would protect you from assault if someone were assaulting you. [Ergo, when a fetus assaults you you have a right to protection -- a free abortion using tax dollars."

I am utterly speechless. These women are evil incarnate. The above quotes, several of many, say it all. These women are 21st century Nazis.

4 posted on 12/08/2003 6:55:12 AM PST by tom h
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To: Adder; tom h
Don't you find it interesting that the whole discussion starts out with the admittance: "Most likely, there is no constitutional right to abortion funding.." and then the rest of the discussion is about how they can use a play on words, a few insider judges, and some bizarre concepts to MAKE it constitutional? This is what is wrong with America! This isn't their first such discussion, and you can be sure that they're not alone (Environmentalist, Anti-Christian Activist, "civil rights" groups, just to name a few). It makes me sick to think about it. I recently saw a story on the NAACP (i think) in which someone had uncovered a document that showed their influence over the courts and the law. I don't know all of the details and I may be miscaracturizing that - but - we need to have this seen. I think that if the media can spread this, it'll lessen their chances of success. Could you imagine? Taxpayers sending the Feds money to fund these maniacs?

As to the question of the man's responsibility: I think that they cover that question from a legal standpoint on the original website. It was something that basiclly amount to them concluding that the parasite (aka baby) doesn't have the same damage capabilities on the man, and therefore the man is left out of this situation. They'll attempt to make it where the baby can be considered a "parasite" that attacks the mother, or a baby, and it would be up to the mother to make the destinction. Sickos from hell.
5 posted on 12/08/2003 8:09:27 AM PST by Jaysun (Get real, Control-Everybody-But-Yourselves freaks!)
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To: tom h
"from a legal standpoint, the fetus is not so much innocent as much as it is mentally incompetent"

From a legal standpoint, this comment is so stupid it borders on the incredible.

6 posted on 12/08/2003 8:13:27 AM PST by Campion
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To: Campion
"from a legal standpoint, the fetus is not so much innocent as much as it is mentally incompetent"
From a legal standpoint, this comment is so stupid it borders on the incredible.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From a legal standpoint, the entire legal argument in favor of abortion - starting with Roe v Wade - is lunacy!
7 posted on 12/08/2003 9:24:56 AM PST by Jaysun (Get real, Control-Everybody-But-Yourselves freaks!)
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To: Jaysun
What a convoluted load.
8 posted on 12/08/2003 9:29:41 AM PST by Havoc (If you can't be frank all the time are you lying the rest of the time?)
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To: Campion
"from a legal standpoint, the fetus is not so much innocent as much as it is mentally incompetent"
-------------------
From a legal standpoint, this comment is so stupid it borders on the incredible.
-------------------

From a legal standpoint, this argument forms the basis of abortion rights, infanticide, murder of the incapacitated, euthanasia and the whole right-to-die movement. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil!

9 posted on 12/08/2003 10:19:46 AM PST by pgyanke ("If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave." Ar-Bshp Fulton Sheen)
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To: Jaysun
Amen to your comments. If I have any consolation it's that these women are grasping at straws and they WILL lose. Over 30 million American women have had abortions and 75% of them regret it. THAT'S why the tide has been turning. The women who grieve over their aborted children will not be turned by the arcane legalities discussed in the article. They will also see through the euphemisms used.

I hope that some federal district judge of liberal persuasion tries NOW's argument. It will galvanize the rest of us to finally put a stop to the insanity.

10 posted on 12/08/2003 10:49:02 AM PST by tom h
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