Forcible intervention
Women’s bodies are public property chapter eleventy billion:
When a 21-year-old Native American woman from Oklahoma was convicted of manslaughter after having a miscarriage, people were outraged. But she was not alone.
You remember this story from a few weeks ago.
Brittney Poolaw was just about four months pregnant when she lost her baby in the hospital in January 2020.
This October, she was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for the first-degree manslaughter of her unborn son.
As if the four month old fetus inside her were an independent person she killed.
Yet Poolaw’s story is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates of Pregnant Women (NAPW), a pro-choice advocacy group.
Huh. The W word. It’s not NAPP but NAPW. I wonder how much pressure they’re under to change that.
The organisation is helping with Poolaw’s appeal, and has been tracking arrests and cases of “forcible intervention” against pregnant women in the US.
…
The recent explosion of criminal cases is part of a “uniquely American phenomenon” at the crossroads of America’s ‘War on Drugs’ and the personhood movement, said Ms Sussman.
That is, the movement to convince everyone that a pregnancy is a person. It’s a bit like the trans movement in the reliance on magical invisible Personyness that everyone has to defer to and protect.
… several US states have passed laws making it more difficult to obtain an abortion. While people oppose abortion for different reasons, often moral or religious, one part of the argument has come to focus on the notion of personhood.
“The concept of personhood is actually quite simple,” said Sarah Quale, president of Personhood Alliance Education, a pro-life organisation.
“Personhood declares that humans are human and that our equality is based on our humanness. Nothing changes the scientific fact that we are biologically human from the very beginning until the very end. Therefore, as humans, we deserve equal protection under the law because we possess inherent, natural rights.”
Yes but what is “the very beginning”? A fertilized egg isn’t a person. It’s a human fertilized egg, but that’s not a person. If one sat next to you on the bus you wouldn’t ask it to put its mask on.
The personhood movement has helped push forward laws that go beyond regulating access to abortion, to extend rights and protections to the foetus as if it were a born citizen of the state.
Which if the state is Texas or North Dakota isn’t such a treat as it may sound.
In jurisdictions that recognize “corporate personhood”, would driving a business into bankruptcy constitute murder?
I thought it wasn’t a person until it implants in the uterus. When can it buy a gun? Execute legal contracts? Can it be claimed on a tax return it was conceived? I think there are some holes in this legal theory of “personhood.”
Well this ought to be good….
Yep. There we have it all right.
In all fairness, that is pretty simple…
Oversimplification much? :P
She should just argue that the fetus asked to be choked to death. The Pybus defense.
How do they know the tiny person inside her didn’t commit suicide? Perhaps after learning what kind of f***ed up world was waiting for them on the outside. I mean if we’re going to project full personhood here, why would we exclude this possibility?
I don’t agree that a fetus is a person, but for this specific argument it is just a red herring. Anti-abortion people love to put it in terms of the fetus’ personhood, because this means the argument is now about murky edge meanings of common use words rather than the real issue – body autonomy.
Hence I find personhood so irrelevant in the abortion argument that I grant it ad argumentum. It makes no difference to the logic involved. The pregnancy still involves the question of body autonomy for the mother; even if the fetus is a person, her body is being accessed by another person and so her continued consent is required. The other person has no right to access her body against her will.
Is an “anchor baby” a person?
Of course not. It’s already born, and it’s not white. And may be female.