If this is true, then why do we have laws that do not allow women to sell their bodies, ingest the drugs they want, smoke the tobacco they want, etc,etc,etc.
I mean, it IS their body, RIGHT?
Posted on 01/21/2004 6:41:36 AM PST by dead
Under the influence of the Christian right, females are being regarded once again merely as wombs, writes Erica Jong.
One of these days, young women in the United States are going to wake up from watching so-called "reality TV" and discover that they have lost the right to both abortion and contraception. While they've been distracted, the Christian right has been chipping away at all the freedoms they take for granted.
The "partial birth" abortion bill (Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003), signed into law in November by President George Bush (and promptly challenged by the courts), is not only misnamed but is so vague concerning gestational age and the health of the mother that it leaves ample room for the Government to interfere with sound medical judgement, at the expense of women's health.
It may seem reasonable to limit abortion to the first trimester of pregnancy, but the truth is that many genetic tests - including those for Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs, Canavan's and other diseases - cannot be completed until the second trimester.
By then abortion is not such a simple matter, and limiting it makes a mockery of the right to choose not to bear a genetically damaged child. In the past decade our ability to test for genetic diseases has soared, and now we are taking away the opportunity to make informed decisions based on this technology - something no woman ever does lightly.
The contempt for women and for medicine that underlies the Christian right's attack on choice is as shocking as it is invisible. The right has been absolutely brilliant in cloaking an indifference to women's health in language that seems to affirm life.
A whole generation has grown up without knowing that in the days before legal abortion, many women died or were sterilised in their desperate efforts to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
And the pro-choice movement has been remiss in failing to remind people that banning abortion can in essence ban a woman's right to life-saving medical care.
A 1997 Nebraska bill identical to the one Bush signed has already been struck down by the Supreme Court. In the words of Justice Stephen G. Breyer: "The result [of this law] is an undue burden upon a woman's right to make an abortion decision. We must consequently find the statute unconstitutional."
The strategy of the right-to-life movement has been to keep passing the same unconstitutional laws until eventually they will be received by a Supreme Court packed with Bush appointees.
The assumption is that no one is watching, that the feminist movement is out of fashion and can be ignored, and that women of childbearing years don't really understand what's at stake.
I think this is true. Young women seem to think their rights are safe from attack. They are unaware that a relentless and heartless campaign is being waged against their right to control their own bodies and lives.
The idea that a woman is less an individual than a body containing a womb has an ancient history. In Greek and Roman times it was the father, not the mother, who could decide whether an infant would be allowed to live.
And mothers had more to fear than childbirth in antiquity, since girls were often abandoned to the elements at the behest of the father. It sometimes seems that the Christian right is nostalgic for these paternalistic powers.
The idea that a mother has special privileges because she bears the child is a modern invention, one that we relinquish at our peril. Yet the law has always been perplexed about the two-in-one of pregnancy.
In 18th-century England female felons condemned to be hanged could save themselves, at least for nine months, by becoming pregnant. It was considered wrong to kill a child for the sins of the mother. Modern American law has made it clear that a pregnant woman has a similar right to health and life if the developing foetus threatens it.
The partial-birth abortion ban strips away this right and returns us to the antique notion of woman as womb. If a woman is defined basically as her reproductive organs, her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is secondary to the rights of her foetus. It is this principle that the partial birth abortion ban seeks to establish. If it is ever entrenched as law, every ovum and sperm cell will eventually be defined as "pre-born". The result will be a ban on contraception and male masturbation as well as abortion.
All of this seems as far-fetched as the realm of dystopian novels such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But the Christian right is way ahead of us.
Its desire to undo the notion of women as human beings rather than wombs knows no bounds. If we underestimate its cunning and tenacity, we risk the very notion of women as individuals.
But individualism is a vague concept compared with the gory pictures of aborted babies that the Christian right has plastered all over the internet. The visual power of its propaganda is undeniable.
We ought to be countering it with the toll of women who died when abortion was illegal, but instead we are speaking of abstract concepts like equality. In a culture in which visual images trump democratic theory, how are we going to defend the rights we hold dear?
It may be necessary to go backward before we can go forward again. It may be necessary for a whole generation of women raised on freedom of choice to discover that that freedom has been snatched away.
We may have to fight the same battles over in each new generation before we establish certain rights as inalienable. I hope not.
This has been the problem of feminism for most of its history. One generation pushes forward, and the next, oblivious to the struggle, allows freedom to ebb away.
I pray that we will not have to lose the right to choose in order to value it again.
Erica Jong is the author of 22 books, including Fear of Flying. Her most recent novel is Sappho's Leap.
(Feel free to add to it.)
Ah, yes, spare us the "genetically damaged." This from the same crowd that boasts of their sponsorship of the Special Olympics!
Yeah, the prophlactic police are already starting to go into drugstores and bedrooms worldwide, removing all the condoms, diaphragms, IUDs, sponges, gels, spermicides, birth control pills, and morning after pills they can find. Soon, neither tubal litigation nor vasectomies will be legal. There will also be proscriptions against both the rhythm method and attempts to pull out before the job is done.
There is no such right.
That should be tubal ligation, unless you are suing the doctor for botching the job.
If this is true, then why do we have laws that do not allow women to sell their bodies, ingest the drugs they want, smoke the tobacco they want, etc,etc,etc.
I mean, it IS their body, RIGHT?
It sure beats regarding babies as just a mass of tissue.
How INNOCENT BABIES are losing the hard-won right to LIFE (Christian right regards women as wombs)
An intellectual sniper kill. One shot, one kill! Very very good.
So it is okay to murder those who are determined to be "genetically defective"? Hitler considered the Jews to be inferior to the point of not being human. The KKK believes that blacks are "genetically defective".
At a Christmas party this year, some fellow oldtimers were talking about how twenty years ago, the camper population was about 90% Downs Syndrome kids. Now, there are almost none at camp.
I pointed out that all the Downs Syndrome kids are aborted now. They looked at me like I just told them the sky was made of marshmallow. I guess they never thought about it before, and the idea that all those potential campers (the same types of kids they've loved working with over the years) have been slaughtered for "women's rights" was a little too much to think about.
"I think alot of Downs Syndrome kids go to other programs now," one of them lamely offered. "Not really," I said, and walked away to get a beer.
By then abortion is not such a simple matter, and limiting it makes a mockery of the right to choose not to bear a genetically damaged child.
I have not met one person who has had a child with abnormal genetics who wanted to about the fetus when they had the level 2 ultrasound. Everyone single one said they would not abort when they found out at 20 weeks along. We even had a freind who had genetically damaged baby, all organs developed outside of the abdominal cavity. She could of aborted it, knowing that it would die within minutes of being born after going the full term. She opted to carry it , let it be born, then prayed in the operating room with it as God chose to take it's soul back to him.
That is a poor excuse for a full term killing.
I believe I am qualified to speak on this matter, being the father of a 2 month old with Down syndrome. Let me tell any pro-abortion nazi, look into his eyes and tell me you are willing to kill him.
I forgot to add: the same crowd that is against capital punishment, in this age of DNA virtual certainty, for even the most vicious of murderers!
Didn't Marget Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, consider children who were "too brown" genetically damaged?
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