Tag: Abortion rights

The Supreme Court has struck down Texas’s horrific anti-abortion law.

In a dramatic ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday threw out a Texas abortion access law in a victory to supporters of abortion rights who argued it would have shuttered all but a handful of clinics in the state.

The 5-3 ruling is the most significant decision from the Supreme Court on abortion in two decades and could serve to deter other states from passing so-called “clinic shutdown” laws.

And (I assume) it will also make it possible for clinics forced to close by the law to re-open.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion, which was joined in full by Kennedy. Breyer wrote that despite arguments that the restrictions were designed to protect women’s health, the reality is that they merely amounted to burdening women who seek abortions.

“There was no significant health-related problem that the new law helped to cure,” Breyer wrote. “We agree with the District Court that the surgical-center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an “undue burden” on their constitutional right to do so.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Breyer’s opinion and wrote a brief concurring opinion, which focused on what she called women in “desperate circumstances.”

“When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners, faute de mieux, at great risk to their health and safety,” she wrote.

Yeah because guess what, being forced to have a baby you don’t want to have is indeed desperate circumstances. 

The court’s decision has major implications for the future political battles over abortion beyond Texas.

Anti-abortion activists since Roe v. Wade have worked to pass a slew of laws across the country restricting abortions or making them more difficult, like the law struck down in Texas.

But Monday’s ruling strengthened the premise of the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v Casey, sending a message to states that might pass such laws and lower courts that would uphold them that they have a high hurdle to prove they’re constitutional. The Casey ruling said that states could impose restrictions as long as they didn’t impose an undue burden on the woman.

“By clarifying exactly what the ‘undue burden’ test requires, I suspect the majority was hoping to dissuade states like Oklahoma from continuing to pass laws that so directly challenge the central premise of Roe v. Wade — that the Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s right to an abortion in a meaningful percentage of cases,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law.

“In the process, the Court today has called into question everything from categorical bans on abortions to so-called ‘fetal heartbeat’ restrictions, and perhaps plenty of other laws in between,” Vladeck added.

Let’s hope so.

That was Oklahoma, today. Tuesday, it was South Carolina.

The South Carolina legislature passed a bill yesterday that bans abortions after 19 weeks, and is now on its way to Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk, where she will likely sign it. That would make South Carolina the 17th state to pass the ban.

Rep. Wendy Nanney, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act’s sponsor, said the bill is a step toward getting “rid of abortion altogether.” The bill does allow for exceptions if the mother’s life is in danger, or if a doctor determines the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, and it would be illegal to abort a fetus with a severe disability—which is normally detected at 20 weeks.

Anything to make sure women are kept enslaved to their own bodies. Any way to keep the escape hatch nailed shut from the outside.

The bill would also only affect hospitals, as the three abortion clinics in the whole state of South Carolina don’t perform abortions after 15 weeks.

Three in the whole state – and they don’t do them after 15 weeks.

Sorry, women – it’s your own fault for being born with a uterus.

The Oklahoma legislature has passed a bill making abortion a felony. That seems pretty blatantly unconstitutional, but I’m not a lawyer.

The bill passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives with a vote of 59-to-9 last month. On Thursday, the state’s senate passed it with a vote of 33-to-12.

That’s a horribly large majority of legislators who believe women have no rights.

“This is a ban on abortion, plain and simple,” Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement about the legislation after the state’s house passed it. “Punishing doctors for performing a legal, medical procedure is an assault on women.”

Women apparently don’t deserve rights.

Since taking office in 2011, [Republican Governor Mary] Fallin has signed more than a dozen bills restricting access to reproductive health care, the Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-profit legal group, said Thursday.

The new bill “is blatantly unconstitutional and, if it takes effect, it will be the most extreme abortion law in this country” since the Roe v Wade decision, Amanda Allen, senior state legislative counsel at the center, wrote in a letter to Fallin on Thursday.

Allen said her group was urging Fallin to veto the legislation, which she said was part of a larger pattern of lawmakers in the state chipping away at abortion rights.

“Policymakers in Oklahoma should focus on advancing policies that will truly promote women’s health and safety, not abortion restrictions that do just the opposite,” Allen wrote. “Anti-choice politicians in the state have methodically restricted access to abortion and neglected to advance policies that truly address the challenges women and families face every day.”

But clearly the legislators are not interested in women’s health and safety. They’re interested in insuring that women stay captive to their own reproductive systems.

The New York Times:

A doctor who performs abortions at a hospital in Washington [DC] filed a federal civil rights complaint on Monday, charging that the hospital had violated the law by forbidding her, out of concerns for security, to speak publicly in defense of abortion and its role in health care.

The doctor, Diane J. Horvath-Cosper, 37, an obstetrician and gynecologist, has in recent years emerged as a public advocate, urging abortion providers not to shrink before threats. Last December, her complaint says, officials of the MedStar Washington Hospital Center imposed what she described as a “gag order,” but what the officials termed a sensible precaution against anti-abortion violence.

You can see why they would want to do that, but you can see even more clearly (at least I can) why it’s important to urge abortion providers not to shrink before threats. There’s an all-out war on women’s right to end pregnancies in this country, and surrender would be a disaster.

Dr. Horvath-Cosper is part of a national movement of physicians and other medical staff members who argue that silence about their work only feeds the drive to stigmatize and restrict abortion. Similar sentiments among some patients have led to a “Shout Your Abortion” campaign on social media.

“The dialogue is dominated by those who have demonized this totally normal part of health care,” Dr. Horvath-Cosper said in an interview.

The way to do something about that is to do something about it. There isn’t any other way.

According to the legal complaint, hospital officials told Dr. Horvath-Cosper that they were worried about security after a self-described anti-abortion “warrior” attacked a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs in November, killing three people and wounding nine.

In ordering Dr. Horvath-Cosper to end her advocacy, the medical director of the hospital, Dr. Gregory J. Argyros, said he did “not want to put a Kmart blue-light special on the fact that we provide abortions at MedStar,” according to the complaint.

Ah well that’s a problem. It’s no good providing abortions if you keep the fact that you provide abortions a secret, is it. Women needing abortions need to know where they can get them, and that they can get them. The Kmart blue-light special is what’s needed.

Dr. Horvath-Cosper created a buzz last November when she wrote an article in The Washington Post that described what it was like to live in fear because of her profession.

The Colorado shootings occurred on Nov. 27. On Dec. 4, she was called to meet with Dr. Argyros and other hospital officials who said she should stop her public advocacy and clear any media requests with the public affairs office.

Since then, Dr. Horvath-Cosper said, she has forwarded several requests to be interviewed or write articles and in each case has been turned down.

Her lawyer, Debra S. Katz, of the Washington firm Katz, Marshall & Banks, who is also co-counsel in the complaint, said she tried to negotiate an agreement with the hospital that would allow Dr. Horvath-Cosper to write about abortion without mentioning where she worked.

Hospital officials responded that if she wished to speak about abortion, she should relinquish her fellowship and leave.

Dr. Horvath-Cosper said that the MedStar center in Washington, while seeking to silence her, had not carried out many of the physical security measures at the clinic that are recommended by professional groups like the National Abortion Federation.

It’s cheaper, faster and easier to just tell women to shut up.

Oklahoma throws the very idea of women’s rights out the window. Don’t be stupid: incubators are machines, and machines don’t have rights.

An Oklahoma bill that could revoke the license of any doctor who performs an abortion has headed to the governor, with opponents saying the measure in unconstitutional and promising a legal battle against the cash-strapped state if it is approved.

In the Republican-dominated legislature, the state’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a Senate bill late on Thursday. Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican, has not yet indicated whether she will sign it.

Under the bill, doctors who perform abortions would risk losing their medical licenses. Exemptions would be given for those who perform the procedure for reasons including protecting the mother or removing a miscarried fetus.

This is America, we don’t believe in women’s rights. This is God’s Country, and God is a man. Women are afterthoughts, put here to make coffee and be fucked.

Supporters of the bill said it will help protect the sanctity of life.

There’s no such thing as “the sanctity of life.” That’s an advertising slogan, not a real principle or rule. How many animals do we as a people kill every day? How many insects, bacteria, plants? We don’t have any universal law about “the sanctity of life.”

“If we take care of morality,” bill supporter David Brumbaugh, a Republican, said during deliberations, “God will take care of the economy.”

Nope, that’s not true.

Daily Dot has more.

The Center for Reproductive Rights urged Fallin not to sign the bill into law. Amanda Allen, CRR’s senior state legislative counsel, told the Daily Dot in a statement via email that the total abortion ban was “cruel and unconstitutional.”

“Oklahoma politicians have made it their mission year after year to restrict women’s access vital health care services, yet this total ban on abortion is a new low,” said Allen. “When abortion is illegal, women and their health, futures, and families suffer.”

Yes, but women don’t matter. Women are underlings. That’s the system here on planet earth.

CRR told the Daily Dot in an email that Oklahoma currently has only two abortion providers. CRR has filed eight lawsuits against Oklahoma state abortion restrictions in the past five years alone.

Two. Oklahoma’s a big state. That’s a lot of travel for some women.

On Tuesday, prior to the House passage of SB 1552, the Oklahoma Senate voted in favor of another law restricting abortion. The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2016 passed by 39-6 after being approval in the House. It would ban abortions performed on fetuses with Down Syndrome or other genetic abnormalities. The legislation would also revoke the medical licenses of doctors who perform procedures on these fetuses.

If signed by Fallin, the law would make Oklahoma the third state in the country, including North Dakota and Indiana, to ban abortions on fetuses with Down Syndrome and other disabilities.

Well, it won’t be men taking care of those children, so it’s ok.

Always remember, children, women are not people, they are machines for the making of babies. Because they are baby-making machines, they have to be subject to many laws regulating their behavior and making sure they don’t shirk their baby-manufacturing duties.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed a controversial abortion bill Thursday that, among other things, would ban the procedure if it is sought because the fetus was diagnosed with a disability or defect such as Down syndrome.

Because what right does any woman have to decide she can’t or doesn’t want to have a disabled child? What right does any woman have to decide, before there is a baby, that she would prefer to terminate the process of gestation rather than have a disabled child? It’s not as if her body belongs to her after all, nor is it as if she has any right to try to shape her own future.

The law, which was passed by the legislature earlier this month, would make Indiana the second state in the nation, after North Dakota, to ban abortion in cases where a fetal anomaly is detected. It also would bar the procedure in instances where the decision is based on the sex or race of the fetus. And it could make Indiana the first state in the country to require that fetal remains be buried or cremated, rather than treated like medical waste.

Maybe Indiana should elect an all-fetus legislature.

RH Reality Check on the lies behind the many new laws restricting abortion:

Seventy percent of the 353 state-level abortion restrictions introduced so far this year are based on political pretext, false information, or stereotypes, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The advocacy group National Partnership for Women & Families released the analysis as part of its “Turning Lies into Laws” campaign focused on lies about abortion in 2016. The analysis follows on the heels of its report, Bad Medicine: How a Political Agenda is Undermining Women’s Health Care, which lays out the ideological motivations and inaccuracies that the report’s authors say underpin the majority of legislative impediments to abortion care.

Two hundred fifty-one cases of newly introduced abortion care restrictions run contrary to evidence-based medicine, according to the National Partnership’s analysis of data from the Guttmacher Institute.

“Lies about abortion and the women who have them are being turned into laws across the country, and it needs to stop,” Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership, said in a statement accompanying the memo. “All women deserve medically accurate information and access to a full range of reproductive health care, including abortion care.”

Ah but do they? Doesn’t that rather assume that women have the right to make their own decisions, like grown-ups? That can’t be right. Women are baby-factories, and baby-factories can’t have autonomy. That would ruin everything.

The report issues a call for reform, asking lawmakers to reject legislation that interferes with the patient-provider relationship and to repeal laws that ignore medical evidence and science. In addition, the “Turning Lies into Laws” campaign encourages site visitors to take a pledge to fight back against politicians “using lies to push abortion out of reach.”

“The leading medical societies, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are on the record stating that obstacles to abortion care pose a threat to women’s health,” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, director of reproductive health programs at the National Partnership, said in a statement. “Abortion opponents need to learn that legislating something doesn’t make it true, and that when they lie we’re going to call them out.”

But she’s a woman. She can’t be trusted.

Michelle Goldberg reports at Slate:

Thanks to the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood spent the latter part of 2015 getting kicked in the teeth. The CMP’s highly edited undercover videos, which purported to show Planned Parenthood officials selling fetal organs, created a hurricane of terrible publicity and spurred political attacks across the country. Anti-clinic harassment shot up exponentially. Protestors targeted Planned Parenthood doctors at their homes. Five congressional committees and eighteen states launched investigations. (Ten of those state investigations cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing.) A madman ranting about “baby parts” murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.

All for the sake of trying to keep women from having the right and the ability to stop being pregnant.

Now, Planned Parenthood is going on the offensive. On Thursday afternoon, it announced a massive lawsuit against CMP, charging it with, among other things, violating the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization, or RICO, act—a law originally used against the Mafia. The lawsuit seeks restitution for actual losses caused by CMP as well as compensatory and punitive damages and attorneys fees. It hasn’t named a dollar figure, but it claims that CMP’s actions have cost Planned Parenthood millions. Should Planned Parenthood prevail, it would be a profound economic blow to the anti-abortion movement.

But but but free speech! Right?

Maybe not.

CMP may indeed have a First Amendment defense to at least some of Planned Parenthood’s charges, but the fraud and deception outlined in the lawsuit are not what investigative journalists do, even when they go undercover. In pulling off its anti-abortion coup, the suit alleges, CMP made use of fake driver’s licenses and fake credit cards. It stole the identity of one of founder Daniel Deleiden’s pro-choice high school classmates, Brianna Allen. And of course, it registered a fraudulent tissue procurement company, Biomax.

Free fraud! That doesn’t sound quite as good, does it.

More war on women sadism, this time from North Carolina.

A state law requiring that doctors who perform an abortion after the 16th week of pregnancy supply an ultrasound to state officials has sparked a new and bitter front in the war over abortion here, with stakes that are both personal and political.

Supporters say the purpose of the law is to verify that doctors and clinics are complying with state law, which outlaws abortions after 20 weeks but with an exception made for medical emergencies. Critics say the purpose is to intimidate and provide hurdles to women and doctors.

Oh come now, why wouldn’t women seeking abortions want state officials looking at their ultrasounds? They’re not as fragile as all that, are they? This is just victim feminism!!1

Melissa L. Reed, the vice president of public policy at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which operates clinics in four states, said state inspectors already had the ability to go to abortion clinics to review medical charts. She said she believed that the purpose of the new law was to intimidate doctors, particularly, she said, because the determination of fetal age is “not an exact science.” Ms. Reed also accused lawmakers of trying to intimidate women by requiring that “the most intimate piece of a woman’s medical record” be shared with a government agency.

Pff. It’s everybody’s business what’s going on inside a pregnant woman’s body. She’s public property after all.

The law, which was approved in June, also extends the mandated waiting period for women seeking an abortion to 72 hours from 24. That is the longest waiting period in the nation, and one that exists in four other states, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

So women who have to travel to get an abortion have to spend three nights away from home. That’s a lot of money, a lot of time off work, a lot of time to have a car tied up, a lot of time away from the kids. It’s what I would call a significant burden.

In a statement on Thursday, Graham H. Wilson, a spokesman for Mr. McCrory, said the law “includes common-sense measures aimed at protecting women’s health by ensuring medical professionals use proper safety precautions, and this commitment is consistent with the governor’s pledge.”

Gerrick Brenner, the executive director of Progress NC Action, a liberal group, recently sent an email to supporters that accused Mr. McCrory of “breaking his promise to women.” The new law, Mr. Brenner wrote, was a “creepy scheme” that could be mistaken for “something out of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ ”

What, because women have a right to privacy just as men do? Don’t be silly.

Nope nope nope nope.

Twitter.

A Conceited Empress ‏@TheAngryFangirl Jan 7
Let’s clarify a few things about reproductive health and abortion specifically.

Abortion IS NOT a cis woman only issue. Cis women ARE NOT the only people on hearth who get, want, or need abortions.

When you center cis women in your speech and activism around abortion, you’re excluding the other people who need access to it.

Who are these other people? Trans men, non binary people, agender individuals, etc. In short, a whole lot of folks.

Changing your language to say “pregnant people” or “people with uterti” is easy and super inclusive.

NO ONE is saying “women” is a dirty word. NO ONE is saying you should erase the word women from your vocabulary.

We’re asking you to EXPAND your vocabulary to INCLUDE all of these people so they’re not erased and forgotten.

Now, if you wanna talk about what cis women go through because you’re a cis woman and that’s what you know? That’s cool.

Speak about what you know and amplify the voices of others to educate not only yourself but your followers.

You do not, however, get to sit around and pretend like cis women are the only people on earth who need/get abortions.

Women are in fact the people who need abortions. Men don’t need abortions; women do.

When you remove the word “women” from your speech and activism around abortion, you’re obscuring the fact that abortion rights are contested because women are subordinated.

Trans men, non binary people, and agender individuals who get pregnant have the bodies of women and they share in the subordination of women for that reason. It doesn’t do them any good to pretend the war on abortion rights has nothing to do with women and the way women are treated as public property.

Changing your language to say “pregnant people” is politically imbecilic.

You do not get to pretend (whether you do it sitting or standing) that the war on abortion rights doesn’t target women.

Last month the NY Times did an unsigned editorial on the nonstop erosion of reproductive rights over the past year.

How many laws making it harder to get an abortion will pass before the Supreme Court sees them for what they are — part of a tireless, coordinated nationwide assault on the right of women to control what happens with their own bodies without the interference of politicians?

One answer is, no fewer than 288. That’s how many abortion restrictions states have enacted since the beginning of 2011, when aggressively anti-choice lawmakers swept into statehouses around the country.

The trend accelerated in 2015, as state legislators passed 57 new constraints on a woman’s right to choose. Hundreds more were considered, most of which could come up again in 2016. Most of the time, lawmakers are clever enough to disguise their true intent by claiming that their interest is in protecting women’s physical or mental health. But now and then the facade falls away, as when the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, called a set of restrictions he signed into law in 2012 “the first step in a movement” that aims to “end abortion in Mississippi.”

This couldn’t be happening were it not for the fact that many people think women’s rights are trumped by their own pregnancies.

The Times urges the Supreme Court to keep this in mind when hearing the Texas lawsuit early this year.

Laws like this — known as TRAP laws, for targeted regulation of abortion providers — have sprouted up in dozens of states as abortion opponents test the limits of the Supreme Court’s vague standard on abortion rights, which asks whether a restriction poses an “undue burden” to a woman’s right to choose.

In many states, including Texas, these laws have resulted in the shuttering of all but a few clinics that perform abortions, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles for the procedure. Among other burdens, this increases the chance that a woman will try to end her pregnancy on her own. This is extremely risky, and in some states it is even grounds for a charge of attempted murder. One study, based on a recent survey, estimated that 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted a self-induced abortion without medical assistance. These women, the study found, were significantly more likely than average to have less access to basic reproductive-health services like birth control.

And TRAP laws aren’t the only obstacle.

Five states enacted or extended waiting periods for abortions, joining the more than two dozen states that already had such laws. Some of these laws also require a woman to undergo in-person counseling, which means two separate trips to a clinic or hospital. Two states, Arizona and Arkansas, passed laws requiring doctors to give women misleading information about the possibility of “reversing” a medication-induced abortion. Arkansas also became the third state to ban the use of the modern, evidence-based drug protocol for medication abortion, which is cheaper and more effective than what the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000.

And then there is the unrelenting, but politically unpopular, campaign by Republicans in Congress, in statehouses and on the presidential campaign trail to deny funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization, which is the only reproductive-health service provider for millions of poorer women, is already prohibited by law from using federal funds for almost all abortions.

doesn’t matter to anti-choice activists in places like Wisconsin and Indiana, where efforts by conservative lawmakers and governors have forced even those Planned Parenthood clinics that don’t perform any abortions to shut down. Aresult is that many lower-income women lose access to basic health care as well as contraceptive services that would make them less likely to have unintended pregnancies.

By any reasonable measure, Texas’ law places an undue burden on women seeking abortion services and should be struck down. Beyond doing that, the justices must send a clear and broad message affirming the constitutionally protected right of women to determine the course of their reproductive lives. Political opponents have shown how quickly they can regroup and find ways to restrict or obliterate programs and services women need.

Women are the subordinate sex, and don’t you forget it.

Planned Parenthood thinks the shootup at its Colorado clinic was motivated by something as opposed to being random. Planned Parenthood thinks the shooter didn’t select its clinic just as he might have selected a Burger King or Applebee’s, but rather, on purpose, because of what it is – a place where women can end pregnancies they don’t want to or aren’t able to continue.

Planned Parenthood said on Sunday that news reports that the gunman who attacked its Colorado health clinic had uttered “no more baby parts” during his arrest showed that the suspect was motivated by an anti-abortion agenda.

The remark attributed to the 57-year-old suspect, identified by police as Robert Lewis Dear, was an apparent reference to Planned Parenthood’s abortion activities and its role in delivering fetal tissue to medical researchers, a hot button issue in the 2016 race for the presidency.

“We now know the man responsible for the tragic shooting at PP’s health center in Colorado was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion,” the organization said on Twitter.

It would have been a safe guess anyway.

Of course, the police and the media can’t decide things on that basis; it’s their job to be more careful than that.

But we can; the general public can; bloggers can.

Conservatives have accused Planned Parenthood, a non-profit that provides a range of health services, including abortion, of illegally selling baby parts, an accusation it has strenuously denied.

…

While calling the shooting “an incredible tragedy,” Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Sunday dismissed talk that harsh anti-abortion rhetoric may have contributed to the attack.

“What he did is domestic terrorism,” the former Arkansas governor told CNN, referring to the gunman.

“There’s no excuse for killing other people, whether it’s inside … Planned Parenthood clinics, where many millions of babies die, or whether it’s people attacking Planned Parenthood,” Huckabee said.

No. A pregnancy is not a baby, and ending a pregnancy is not killing a baby. Huckabee is justifying the shootup. If people really were killing babies inside that clinic, violence might be justified in an effort to stop the killing.

The Colorado Springs attack led Governor John Hickenlooper to call for both sides of the debate over Planned Parenthood’s activities to “tone down the rhetoric.”

Both sides? When’s the last time supporters of abortion rights killed an opponent? Besides never?

At Feminist Current, Susan Cox interviews Mary Lou Singleton.

Who gives birth? The answer used to be: females. Today, it’s considered politically incorrect to say that it is women, specifically, who get pregnant and become mothers. Thus, in the name of inclusivity, a number of women’s reproductive health groups are changing their terminology in order to degender the language of birth. Several organizations now refer to “pregnant people,” “pregnant individuals,” and “birthing parents” instead. Feministing writer Jos Truitt recently demanded we “Stop saying and stop thinking that abortion is a women’s issue.”

Well, okay then! Degendering women’s issues — I mean, “people’s issues” — is way progressive. But what are the costs of doing that? What are we losing in erasing women from the language of such a fundamental aspect of female bodily reality?

Mary Lou Singleton, midwife, feminist, and reproductive sovereignty activist recently addressed this question, along with many others, in an open letter to the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). The letter asks MANA to reconsider the revision of their core competencies to remove all references to women and mothers. I recently spoke with her about these events and her upcoming actions at MANA’s annual conference.

It’s ironic, or something…The problem used to be that all women were assumed to be mommies or wannabe mommies, now the problem is that women are tactfully concealed from the whole child-bearing thing.

Susan: Is there a history of women and women’s anatomy being erased from language and the conceptualization of sexual reproduction?

Mary Lou: Absolutely. I mean we can look at the anti-abortion movement since the 70s — possibly even longer, since the women’s liberation uprising in the late 60s/early 70s that clamored for abortion rights, then with Roe v. Wade saying that abortion was legal and between a woman and her doctor — whenever women won abortion rights, the right wing began a huge campaign to erase women from language and focus on the fetus. They focused, instead, on the fertilized egg, the embryo, and the fetus, which they called the “baby,” when obviously it’s not actually scientifically a baby until it’s born. There’s a great Stop Patriarchy chant: “A baby’s not a baby till it comes out. That’s what birthdays are all about.”

But to the anti-choice crowd a fertilized egg is a baby, an embryo is a baby, a fetus is a baby. All of their literature is about these pictures of fetuses, these pictures of embryos saying, “I have a heartbeat at this many weeks.” “I have fingerprints at this many weeks.” And the woman is completely erased from the dialog. The only time the woman might be mentioned is when they use infantilizing terms like “mommy” — “Mommy don’t kill me!” Or sometimes they will call the pregnant woman a mother, when she’s not yet a mother. She’s a gestating female and she’s in the process of deciding whether or not to stay pregnant and she’s deciding whether or not to become a mother. Yet she’s put into this societal gender role of “mother” and this fetus is a “baby,” and never ever ever is the word “woman” mentioned. So there is an absolute erasure of women in the abortion debate on the right.

It was very much a calculated move on their part to erase women from the language of pregnancy and put their focus on “saving babies”… “Saving babies” by treating women like incubators, that is. “Saving babies” by forcing women to go through all the full physical and emotional risks of term pregnancies against their wills. “Saving babies” by enslaving women is the part of the conversation that’s never mentioned. And even in the liberal press, nobody calls them on that. The question isn’t: When does a fertilized egg become a human being? The question is: When does a woman stop being a human being and become a state-regulated incubator? So even on the left there isn’t a whole lot of advocacy for women as full human beings — full citizens with the right to bodily autonomy.

The whole thing is a tight unbreakable circle. Women are enslaved because they’re the ones who have the babies, and they can be enslaved this way because they are women – second class, subordinate, inferior – lesser, lower, slavish, thing-like, property. That’s why I think it’s a bad mistake to erase women from the politics of abortion and contraception rights: it’s because it’s political, and it’s political as the class of men subordinating the class of women.

Susan: This more current erasure of the role of women in reproduction reminds me of the way it’s been done throughout history, all the way back to antiquity. For example, Aristotle said that men provide the seed for reproduction and women are merely the soil. The idea being that the man’s sperm does everything to create the baby and the woman is merely the space in which it occurs — an incubator.

MaryLou: And isn’t that just what we’re still saying? By saying that life begins at fertilization, we are essentially saying that life begins at ejaculation. That a baby is something a man ejaculates into a woman.

Oh zing – so it is. I hadn’t made that connection before. I knew the Aristotle claim, and have cited it, but I didn’t connect it with the “life begins at conception” mantra.

MaryLou: Yes, they’re saying that it’s not something a woman creates with close to 10 months of physical labour — that’s what a baby is. A baby is a new human being that a woman creates over the course of 10 months of physical work. Life-begins-at-fertilization is saying that a baby is something that a man ejaculates into a woman and that woman is then obligated to bring that baby to term, because it’s a full human being at ejaculation. So… we haven’t progressed since Aristotle! [Laughs]

Susan: It’s as if men want to take credit for birth.

But Singleton goes on to say things I don’t agree with.

MaryLou: Yes, and women’s labour is made invisible all over the world. I mean, the world runs on the uncompensated labour of women. And that’s part of sex-based oppression. We have to be able to discuss that. In midwifery this is so important because midwifery is a place where women have authentic power. This is a woman’s tradition. It’s women’s work to give birth. You can’t think of a more woman-centered profession and reality than the place where we focus on gestation, birth, and early mothering.”

No, I don’t buy that. It’s too “essentialist” for my taste – too close to agreeing with the old idea I just mentioned, that all women are mommies or wannabe mommies, and that if they’re not there’s something wrong with them. It also excludes men, when the healthier approach is surely to involve fathers as much as possible. I think it makes sense to involve men in the birth process, but I think it does not make sense to delete the word “women” from the politics of abortion.

Of course. The #ShoutYourAbortion campaign has provided yet another pretext for threateners to threaten.

The goal, according to Amelia Bonow, 30, who posted on Facebook on Sept. 19 that she had had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Seattle last year, was to encourage women who have kept their abortions secret to speak up — in an effort to reframe the debate on the subject.

“A shout is not a celebration or a value judgment, it’s the opposite of a whisper, of silence,” Ms. Bonow said in an interview. “Even women who support abortion rights have been silent, and told they were supposed to feel bad about having an abortion.”

But less than two weeks after she and a friend, Lindy West, created the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion on Twitter, Ms. Bonow’s building name has been made public, and she has temporarily left her apartment, bothered by angry tweets wishing her dead.

Bothered by? No. People don’t leave their apartments because they’re “bothered by” something. Death threats are not just a “bother.” She left her apartment for safety reasons.

The effort went viral and drew more than 150,000 tweets, showing how volatile and emotional an issue abortion still is four decades after the Supreme Court declared it legal.

And while godbotherers and legislators are straining every nerve to make abortion unobtainable.

While the campaign was started in response to the Republicans, the organizers were also challenging the traditional Democratic mantra first articulated by President Bill Clinton, and repeated by Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama — that abortion should be safe, legal and rare.

Exactly. So typical of Democrats, to spit on the left and give everything away to the right.

Abortion rights? What are they?

[Renee] Chelian is now 64 and has two grown daughters. She’s the founder and CEO of Northland Family Planning Center, a group of three clinics that perform abortions in the Detroit suburbs. A petite woman with a blunt haircut and a round face, Chelian is matter-of-fact and seemingly unflappable. But when we talk about her clinics, her tone intensifies. Her business is under constant threat of closure from the conservative Michigan Legislature, which has spent the past four years churning out a string of arbitrary new abortion restrictions designed to shut clinics like Northland down. One proposal required Northland to have one bathroom for every six patients.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’ve gone back 40-some years,” she says. “And I can hardly believe that.” Women trek hundreds of miles north from Dayton, Ohio, or east from South Bend, Indiana, for an abortion at one of her centers. Some are already miscarrying—probably after taking pills or herbal concoctions they got from the internet. A few have tried to open their cervix by digging into it with a sharp object.

Why? Because an abortion is harder and harder to get. The war on women, Molly Redden and Donna Ferrato write in Mother Jones, has essentially been lost in many places.

Most abortions today involve some combination of endless wait, interminable journey, military-level coordination, and lots of money. Roe v. Wade was supposed to put an end to women crossing state lines for their abortions. But while reporting this story, I learned of women who drove from Kentucky to New Jersey, or flew from Texas to Washington, DC, because it was the only way they could have the procedure. Even where laws can’t quite make it impossible for abortion clinics to stay open—they are closing down at a rate of 1.5 every single week—they can make it exhausting to operate one. In every corner of America, four years of unrelenting assaults on reproductive rights have transformed all facets of giving an abortion or getting one—possibly for good.

They tell a long detailed story, with graphics, of the places and ways abortion is being whittled away.

The struggle just to stay open is all-consuming. In Texas, the rules, protocols, and requirements for Miller’s entire staff change every two years, she says. Administrative workers must record the same data in twice as many logs. They prepare multiple records fearing still more inspectors.

“We dance faster, and we bend over, and we comply, comply, comply, until we pick up our head and say, ‘What are we doing here?’” Miller said. “I’m trying so hard to keep the doors open, but for who?” The rules change so frequently that even if her lawsuit against the Texas law succeeds, Miller is not sure if she would ever open a new clinic in Texas.

But she acknowledges that the need is desperate. One of the women I met in the Las Cruces waiting room, Suhey, an 18-year-old from El Paso, said she had already tried to give herself an abortion with Mifeprex a friend bought in Ciudad Juárez. (It didn’t work.) Suhey already has a daughter—the lock screen on her phone shows the two of them snuggling—and is caring for her 16-year-old sister. She can’t afford another child.

Researchers are investigating whether self-abortion attempts are on the rise. Chelian doesn’t need convincing. Recently, a woman came to her clinic who tried to pierce her cervix with a drinking straw.

It frightens Chelian that with every passing year there are fewer women like her who can recall what abortion was like before it was legal. “What they don’t know anymore, what’s gotten lost in the history, is how many women died trying to give themselves abortions,” Chelian said. Some time ago, Chelian asked a class of college freshmen what they would do if restrictions kept them from getting abortions. “We’d use a coat hanger,” one young woman replied. “Like our grandmothers did.”

Oh well, it’s only women.