ABC 123 wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 10:06 pm
Dan Z wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 11:28 am
First and foremost, I'm happy for the decision because I believe it will save the lives of innocent unborn children. I'd love to see the pro-life camp follow up by quickly promoting more robust social support for those who now will carry their babies to term. Although this is a morally correct opinion in my view, it must also be recognized as a socially and economically disruptive one as well - one that will especially put poor women in a bind.
Secondly, as an Anabaptist, I find distasteful the partisan crowing on the right and raging on the left...and my instinct is to steer clear of it and quietly give thanks, like I do whenever Caesar decides for justice.
I see it this way as well.
It is sobering how oblivious it is to celebrate babies being brought to term and into this world by people who did not want them. I am not at all negating the child's right to life, but these are children whose parent(s) would murder them if given the chance.
At the heart of this are moral issues.
There are some unclear medical issues that concern me as well. Like missed miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. What about events where a mother is very sick and she either undergoes an emergency preterm c section or induction? It happens. Will these still be an option? What of very young girls who are raped and not physically strong enough to carry and birth a child? (Rapists need to be prosecuted more than they are, I think.)
It should be obvious that partial birth abortion and the like are medically unnecessary and morally wrong.
I just can't rejoice. There is so much hurt in this world and it is complicated.
I think this names some of my fears and concerns as the Supreme Court takes a sledgehammer to morally complicated and ambiguous issues.
My wife has a cousin who is a family doctor here in rural Colorado and delivers most of the babies in her community. She also performs D&Cs in the case of miscarriages, which would be outlawed under most abortion bans. She’s a Christian and fairly conservative, but believes this procedure is necessary. The thought that states will force women to carry fetuses that are dead or non-viable is horrifying and lacks compassion.
(I’m going to point out that late-term abortions are rare (1% of abortions) and most of them are medically necessary. Most of the time, a partial birth abortion will happen when the mother’s life is in danger or if lethal fetal abnormalities are detected. What makes these abortions especially tragic is that in many cases the mother wants the child.)
This article also makes some of my fears and concerns:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022 ... -worse/amp
Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.
In the meantime, abortion bans will hurt, disable, and endanger many people who want to carry their pregnancies to term but who encounter medical difficulties. Physicians in prohibition states have already begun declining to treat women who are in the midst of miscarriages, for fear that the treatment could be classified as abortion. One woman in Texas was told that she had to drive fifteen hours to New Mexico to have her ectopic pregnancy—which is nonviable, by definition, and always dangerous to the mother—removed. Misoprostol, one of the abortion pills, is routinely prescribed for miscarriage management, because it causes the uterus to expel any remaining tissue. Pharmacists in Texas, fearing legal liability, have already refused to prescribe it. If a miscarriage is not managed to a safe completion, women risk—among other things, and taking the emotional damage for granted—uterine perforation, organ failure, infection, infertility, and death.
I’m also afraid of the criminalization of miscarriages. In some states, women who miscarry will face criminal investigations and prosecution if they are unable to prove whether they have had a miscarriage.
Both abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times each year in America, and the two events are often clinically indistinguishable. Because of this, prohibition states will have a profoundly invasive interest in differentiating between them. Some have already laid the groundwork for establishing government databases of pregnant women likely to seek abortions. Last year, Arkansas passed a law called the Every Mom Matters Act, which requires women considering abortion to call a state hotline and requires abortion providers to register all patients in a database with a unique I.D. Since then, six other states have implemented or proposed similar laws. The hotlines are provided by crisis pregnancy centers: typically Christian organizations, many of which masquerade as abortion clinics, provide no health care, and passionately counsel women against abortion.
The data that crisis pregnancy centers are capable of collecting—names, locations, family details, sexual and medical histories, non-diagnostic ultrasound images—can now be deployed against those who seek their help.
Fetal-personhood laws have passed in Georgia and Alabama, and they are no longer likely to be found unconstitutional. Such laws justify a full-scale criminalization of pregnancy, whereby women can be arrested, detained, and otherwise placed under state intervention for taking actions perceived to be potentially harmful to a fetus. This approach has been steadily tested, on low-income minorities in particular, for the past four decades. National Advocates for Pregnant Women—the organization that has provided legal defense for most of the cases mentioned in this article—has documented almost eighteen hundred cases, from 1973 to 2020, of prosecutions or forced interventions related to pregnancy; this is likely a substantial undercount. Even in states such as California, where the law explicitly prohibits charging women with murder after a pregnancy loss, conservative prosecutors are doing so anyway.
I dislike abortion. I want less abortion. I understand the religious objections and even though I am critical of the pro-life movement, I don’t completely disagree with them. But I also think this is a set of morally and ethically complicated issues that require a certain amount of ambiguity. I think the pro-life movement’s absolutist framing is completely inadequate to deal with these issues.
I’m deeply skeptical and cynical about the rhetoric that conservative Christians are going to provide compassion and care to single mothers and their babies now that Roe is gone. Part of my cynicism comes from the fact that nothing prevented Christian conservatives from doing these things already (and yes, I know that crisis pregnancy centers provide support, but that support is limited. What about free childcare that would enable the mother to earn a living to support herself and her children? What about healthcare? What about decent affordable housing? What mental health and spiritual support? How active are these pro-life Christians in the lives of these single mothers and children five or ten years down the road?)
And yes, I certainly know people who put their money where their mouth is — some of my cousins have fostered and adopted children and I find that work deeply admirable — but I also feel they are outliers. It’s incredibly easy to advocate for someone who requires nothing from you (fetuses are pretty undemanding for people who aren’t pregnant) — it is a lot harder when that advocacy costs you something. Raising children who are traumatized, have behavioral disorders, struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome or neonatal abstinence syndrome are not for the faint of heart. There are reasons why there are over 400,000 children in the US foster care system.
As Ken points out, states with more abortion restrictions have higher infant mortality rates than states with less abortion restrictions. A lot of this has to do with politics and ideology — more conservative states offer less of the kind of critical services needed for prenatal care and healthy births. The cynical part of me believes that the pro-life movement does not care a lot about fetuses after they are born — the ideological concern about creeping Communism seems greater than concern for marginal, low-income women.
I think the
Dodd ruling is a disaster. I think women will die or be harmed because they will not receive medically necessary treatment that otherwise would be available. I think there is a strong potential that some states will become incredibly intrusive in the lives of women. Some states will ban shipping abortion pills by mail. Are they going to go through the mail looking for these pills? Some states are going to ban travel to other states for abortions. Are they going to restrict interstate travel for their own citizens? Will states imprison women they believe had an abortion (which again, is clinically indistinguishable from a miscarriage)? Are states going to subpoena ovulation apps to turn over data so that they can monitor whether women are pregnant?
By using a sledgehammer to these complicated issues, the Supreme Court is enabling an authoritarian element in conservatism. People often complain about intrusive big government, I can’t think of anything more intrusive than the government in your bedroom and your medical decisions.
