1984 is approaching

I want to preface this post by stating that I was going to talk about my wild spring break activities (or at least begin to talk about them) and my raging girl-crush.  Instead, when I drifted home in a post-coital haze I was greeted by an email from NARAL in my inbox, to let me know that the Supreme Court has decided to ban late term abortions with no exceptions for a woman's health.  Way to harsh my buzz, Supreme Court.

My thoughts and opinions are towards the end of the post-I think it's important first to give the details for those who don't know much about the procedure.

Here is some information on the D&X procedure (called "partial birth abortion by pro-lifers) and why it's performed and when, courtesy of the Ontario Consultants for Religious Tolerance.

1st Trimester: D&Xs are not performed during the first three months of pregnancy, because there are better ways to perform abortions. There is no need to follow a D&X procedure, because the fetus' head quite small at this stage of gestation and can be quite easily removed from the woman's uterus.

2nd Trimester: D&Xs are very rarely performed in the late second trimester at a time in the pregnancy before the fetus is viable. These, like most abortions, are performed for a variety of reasons, including:

• She is not ready to have a baby for whatever reason and has delayed her decision to have an abortion into the second trimester. As mentioned above, 90% of abortions are done in the first trimester.

• There are mental or physical health problems related to the pregnancy.

• The fetus has been found to be dead, badly malformed, or suffering from a very serious genetic defect. This is often only detectable late in the second trimester.

3rd Trimester: They are also very rarely performed in late pregnancy. The most common justifications at that time are:

• The fetus is dead.

• The fetus is alive, but continued pregnancy would place the woman's life in severe danger.

• The fetus is alive, but continued pregnancy would grievously damage the woman's health and/or disable her.

• The fetus is so malformed that it can never gain consciousness and will die shortly after birth. Many which fall into this category have developed a very severe form of hydrocephalus.

From the Boston Globe Article, I give you the words of dissenting justice (and only female Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg-

Today's decision is alarming," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling "refuses to take ... seriously" previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision "tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."

My thoughts

As the numbers prove, most women who want to get an abortion do so in the first trimester.  However, there are many birth defects that are not detectable until later in a pregnancy, and it's no one else's place to judge a family's decision to raise or not raise a child with those defects.  More to the point, if it came down to choosing between my life and that of an unborn, unviable fetus, you can call me a bitch but I (and my husband) would choose my life.  If the child has died in utero, am I supposed to wait an extra few months before they go in and remove it's dead body?  How psychologically damaging would that be?  What could possibly justify the health risks of waiting to remove it?

While I am uncomfortable with any ban on abortion, the decision to not include exemptions for a woman's health is irresponsible and scary.  This opens the door to banning second trimester abortions entirely.  And then how much longer will it be before we're overturning Roe V. Wade?  Today's decision was a green light to the anti-choice movement that overturning Roe V Wade is an achievable goal.

I'm not really sure what pisses me off more..

1-That the Republican party's platform is that of small government, which does not interfere with the lives of it's citizenry. (No, just my uterus)

or

2-That had we actually woken up to how horrible a President we'd elected earlier, we might have been able to avoid all of this. (Is now a good time to remind all of you that GORE won in '00?)

It is moments like this that recall in vivid detail the increasingly plausible plots of books like 1984 and A Handmaid's Tale.

I really hope that Sandra Day O'Connor is losing sleep over this.  I'm certainly not judging her on her decision to step down and take care of her ailing husband-I would've done the same in her place.  However, she was the one person holding back the tide, and with the appointment of Samuel Alito, she stepped aside and let the anti-woman anti-choice agenda overwhelm a nation that is split 50/50 on this controversial issue.

While the Supreme Court is a necessary and important part of our government, I worry that on many issues, it's simply a question of one person's opinion.  4-5 changed quickly to 5-4, and I don't like the implications.

As a woman, I worry that a panel of 8 men and 1 woman can make life altering decisions about my body and my life.  While I am not in a position to "need" an abortion (married, in decent middle class shape financially) and am, in fact, looking forward to the day I see the little plus sign on a pregnancy test, I am not safe from this decision.  Should something go tragically wrong with that future pregnancy, it could mean my life.  I'm not okay with anyone but my family and my doctor getting to make that choice-and today 9 strangers made it for me.

It seems incomprehensible to me that I could go from the happiness and heights of multiple orgasms to the depths of anger and resentment that I now feel in the space of two short hours, but there it is.

I can only hope that this is the wake up call that reinvigorates the pro-choice movement.  In the 30 or so years since abortion has been legal, we've grown complacent and smug.  If anything positive comes out of this horrible decision, I can pray that it's the sound of a nation's women (and men) waking up and realizing that we're not as safe as we thought we were.  At this critical juncture, the best thing we can do to combat the anti-choice movement and this sort of judgement is to elect a pro-choice candidates in '08.

You think your vote doesn't count?  It does.

I urge you to contact your representatives and let them know where you stand on this issue.  Don't just shake your head and move on.  If you think this doesn't affect you, I'll remind you of a poem by  Pastor Martin Niemöller

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

You can read Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in full here.

Other bloggers worth reading on this topic

• Bitch PhD
• Bradford Plumer
• Lawyers, Guns and Money
• Obsidian Wings
• Tapped
• Talk Left

Comments

[Fumi]

What hope is there that this misrepresentative court will ever do the right thing?

[Juno Henry]

I still can't fully fathom quite how primitive American laws on abortion are becoming. And knowing the influence that the US has in so many popular cultural issues over the Western world, if not the whole world -- this frightens me not a little.

Fuck.

[Deliciously Naughty]

While I do love my country, there are certainly times when I look at other countries' policies towards women and their bodies and sigh longingly.

[Sexyhusband]

I'm disappointed, too and I'm pessimistic enough to believe that the only way laws like this will be fixed will be when a husband loses a wife because they couldn't find a hospital to perform a D&X that turned out to be medically necessary (or the nearest emergency room that could do an emergency D&X was too far away or ...). And, yes, sadly, I believe that there are plenty of people in my country that are sexist enough and narrow-minded enough that it will specifically require a husband losing a wife (and, quite possibly, children losing a mother) until some minds are changed and people realize that governments shouldn't get into the business of micromanaging which medical procedures are and aren't permissible.