Empower the pregnant people
Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch pretends to think that overturning Roe v Wade will “empower” women.
In the opening brief she submitted in July, Fitch asked the Supreme Court to use Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. She argued that abortion prevents women from reaching their full potential. When Roe was decided in 1973, she wrote, the justices maintained that an unwanted pregnancy would doom women to “a distressful life and future.” But nearly 50 years later, Fitch claims “sweeping policy advances” now allow women to fully pursue motherhood and a career, stamping out the need for abortion.
One, like hell they do, but even if they did, it doesn’t follow that there is no reason left to end a pregnancy. Some women just don’t want to, and it’s not a kind of thing anyone else should force them to do.
With this Supreme Court case, Fitch said in a television interview, God has presented women with an opportunity. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams and goals,” she said, addressing the women of America. “And you can have those beautiful children as well.”
But what if you just don’t want those beautiful children as well?
One of the economists who countered Fitch’s argument in the amicus brief points out that most U.S. mothers don’t have access to that kind of child care. “People from privilege experience a social safety net they imagine everyone else experiences,” said Kelly Jones, a professor of economics at American University who focuses on gender equality and welfare. When high-income people get pregnant unexpectedly, they can turn to family members or other members of their community, she said — or they can fly out of state to get an abortion. But many pregnant people have no one to fall back on and no money to pay for child care.
Oops. There are the pregnant people again – twice. If it were people who got pregnant we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
To Jennifer Riley Collins, the Democrat who ran against Fitch in the 2019 attorney general race, Fitch’s argument is “absurd.”
“You want to empower women?” Collins said. “Put in place systems that support women. You don’t take away from women that which is their freedom.”
The freedom to decide whether or not to house a human being inside your body is a pretty basic freedom.
My thought experiment:
Imagine that somehow a fetilized egg should become lodged in the penis of the sperm donor. Would he be forced to carry the developing embryo to term?
I’ve been thinking about the argument that if men could get pregnant, abortions would be given out with every oil change. The thing is, women’s status is based on the fact that women are the ones who get pregnant. If men carried the babies, then the women would be the power sex and abortion would be, yes, a controversial issue and a keystone in a battle for men’s rights.
That’s how I play out that thought experiment. Also, such a thing would be as deadly as an ectopic pregnancy.
I did a Google Books search for “pregnant people” from the period 1900 to 2000.
Guess what! There actually are hits!
Here’s one, for example, from 1977:
“Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sex. Pregnant people are invariably female. Discrimination against pregnant people is therefore discrimination against women. […] We believe that discrimination against pregnant people is particularly serious because it is one of the most important manifestations of the sex stereotypes which have harmed women in their efforts to be treated equally as members of the work force.”
(Statement of Laurence Gold, special counsel, AFl-CIO, accompanied by Kenneth Young, associate director of legislation, and Marsha Berzon, office of general counsel. In Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Human Resources, US Senate, 95th congress)
Michael, imagine a thought experiment where rather than men becoming pregnant, it was a random coin toss which ‘sex’ became pregnant and both ‘sexes’ were capable of safely carrying the foetus. I know, I’m stretching our understanding of mammalian biology to it’s breaking point, but bear with me. I bet under these conditions it would be very unlikely for social stigmatisation of pregnancy or a class of people who could become pregnant to develop. Not impossible for sure, but given that anyone who had sex could end up pregnant, I suspect not. No-one likes the bad stuff they’ve done unto others to be revisited upon them.
It would be an improvement if women were capable of safely carrying the fœtus. The fact is, even women who manage to carry a healthy fœtus to term and deliver it safely with no surgical intervention, are still left with life-long deleterious effects, and many more pregnancies abort spontaneously in the early days and weeks than are ever aborted electively. Our reproductive organs evolved in ancestors who used all four limbs for locomotion. Our bodies simply don’t cope well with pregnancy, due to our upright posture. I won’t list all the things which can go wrong during, and after, pregnancy; it would take a thick book, and I’m quite sure that Ophelia doesn’t need a gynæcological tome here. Suffice it to say that I don’t know a single woman who has ever given birth whose body hasn’t been changed for the worse, and often a lot worse.