This week — how fitting for Women’s History Month — the Supreme Court hears a case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, that decides the most fundamental right of a woman: the right to control her body, the right to make her own reproductive decisions, the right to make her own medical decisions.
In fact, the right to access health care. The right to her life and to forge her own destiny. And if Whole Woman’s Health loses, what’s happening in Texas will go nationwide.
The Supreme Court 43 years ago, in Roe v. Wade already determined that a woman had a right to make her own choice, using a right-to-privacy argument.
That right to privacy did not stop Virginia and other states from mandating intrusive, medically unnecessary ultrasound probes of a woman (a violation of limits on search).
The right to free speech, along with a doctor’s Hippocratic Oath, doesn’t stop states from requiring doctors to lie to their patients about abortion having some causal connection to breast cancer.
But the Supreme Court has used free speech to allow providers and women to be badgered, intimidated and threatened as they attempt to enter a clinic (while making sure protesters keep a far distance from the Supreme Court, itself).
Somehow under the guise of “religious freedom,” a corporation’s dubious “conscience” or “soul” trumps a woman’s own religious or moral conviction, and allows employers to practice discrimination (a violation of equal protection).
In fact, a zygote has more rights than an adult woman under the preposterous notion that the zygote is not able to choose for itself. I suspect that if a zygote had a soul, it would choose a different biological unit to inhabit than one that would guarantee a lifetime of misery, pain and deprivation.
Reproductive rights, however, go well beyond the privacy issue, under which Roe v Wade was decided. It has to more to do with that principle of Equal Protection — a woman should be entitled to access medical care, should have contraception covered under health insurance, there should not be undue burdens placed on a woman’s access to treatment (are men required to wait 72 hours, have an ultrasound and get spousal permission for a vasectomy; are doctor’s offices where a vasectomy is performed required to have hospital privileges and meet the threshold of a surgical clinic, and is health insurance coverage barred for vasectomies?
And access to a medical procedure should not depend upon a woman’s financial ability to hop on a plane and travel to a more accommodating place — that, too, is a violation of equal protection.
The tactic that anti-choice activists have begun to employ is to charge that the added regulations are for the purpose of “protecting the health of the woman” — as fraudulent a claim as using phantom incidents of voter fraud to justify voter suppression. Indeed, in a similar burst of candor the former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was caught tweeting out a map that showed all the abortion clinics that would have to close: “We fought to pass S.B. 5 thru the Senate last night, & this is why!”
That’s because — as Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times (Why Courts Shouldn’t Ignore the Facts About Abortion Rights, Feb. 28), actual facts would torpedo any justification for the Texas law that will be before the Supreme Court.
In fact, facts show that abortion is one of the safest procedures — if early enough, involves taking medication and no surgical procedure – a legal abortion has a mortality rate of .00073 percent, which is comparable to death by colonoscopy, John Oliver joked in his own stunning skewering. Other procedures that are more dangerous are not being subjected to these additional constraints.
You want to talk about women’s health? Without access to safe, legal services, hundreds of thousands of women — mostly poor — have tried to self-abort, or go to Mexico to purchase drugs that do more harm.
The longer women are forced to delay the procedure, the more dangerous it becomes.
John Oliver on Last Week Tonight had a brilliant take on the abortion rights issue, beginning with the fact that only 19 percent of Americans want to ban abortions altogether — even to save the mother’s life, or where the woman has been the victim of rape or incest.
That means that 81 percent either want abortion to be available on demand, mostly on demand, or for special circumstances. But the TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws that have swept Republican-led states have effectively eliminated access to the procedure altogether.
On the other hand, the reality is that half of all American women will face an unintended pregnancy by age 45 and, at current rates; about one-third will have had an abortion.
Teenagers account for 17 percent of abortions. Each year, 13,000 women have abortions because they became pregnant as a result of rape or incest.
Since Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, abortion is (technically) legal in the United States, reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (co-written by Anthony Kennedy who was appointed in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s term) which specifically bars regulations that place an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to exercise her reproductive rights, and while states may impose regulations ostensibly to protect the fetus, the Casey ruling said the means of furthering that interest “must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it.”. Free choice.
Last year alone, 300 anti-choice bills were introduced in 43 states; 15 states have passed laws banning abortion after 20 weeks, nearly all without exceptions for rape or incest or to protect a woman’s life.
Regulations on abortion clinics are designed to force them to close: North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi and Utah now only have one clinic per state.
Half of Texas’ clinics have already been forced to shut down, if the Texas law is allowed to stand (as a 4-4 split among the Justices would do), that would result in the closure of most of the remaining clinics in a state the size of some countries. Just since 2011, 162 abortion providers have closed (not to mention a couple of abortion doctors have been murdered.)
The sheer distance are forced to travel (not to mention the inability of a clinic to handle the demand) that women — including working women, single mothers — combined with rules that require 24- to 72-hour waiting period, multiple visits to the clinic, forced review of ultrasound and forced listening to lectures (a woman is allowed to put her hands over her eyes and ears), means that whereas a wealthy woman can simply hop on a plane and go to a clinic in a more accommodating state and have the procedure in a timely way when the procedure is safest, a poor woman or a teenager is indeed trapped in an untenable situation: try to take matters into her own hands, get an illegal abortion, or have the baby which could quite literally destroy her life.
When the ability to get medical treatment is based on income, race, age or zip code, that’s unequal protection — and unconstitutional.
John Oliver spoke of one such woman: she had been raped and could not get to a clinic, so called to find out if there was anything in the kitchen cabinet she could take that would end the pregnancy. She was 13 years old.
“A majority of pregnancies in the South are unintended,” wrote Willie J. Parker is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist in an op-ed in the New York Times, Nov. 18, 2015. “More than a quarter end in abortion. The rest are more likely than pregnancies that are chosen to lead to low birth weights and other poor outcomes. In some areas of Mississippi, the rate of death for black pregnant women mirrors that of countries in sub-Saharan Africa.. The deaths are a function of the bad health status of poor minorities.”
Mississippi now has only one abortion clinic.
“I want for women what I want for myself: a life of dignity, health, self-determination and the opportunity to excel and contribute. We know that when women have access to abortion, contraception and medically accurate sex education, they thrive.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/opinion/why-i-provide-abortions.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)
In the 2007 case, the court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban by asserting that women were not in a position to make a rational choice, so the government would make it for them. Paternalism doesn’t begin to describe that statement. Women are considered lesser people, not adults capable of making their own judgment.
To show how the Texas case has nothing to do with women’s health or protecting “life” but rather advancing a fundamentalist religious position that also reinforces a male-dominated society that subjugates women, a second case the Court will hear concerns the ability of a corporation, on religious grounds, to refuse to allow health insurance to cover contraception without having to go through the “trouble” of filling out a form — as if a woman’s burden in paying for contraception, or the consequences of not using contraception are equivalent to filling out a form.
If the goal is to reduce abortions, you support expanding access to contraception — Planned Parenthood – not restricting it.
This is the slippery slope that goes to “personhood” which has already seen women prosecuted for manslaughter if they miscarry, or if they are found to have drunk alcohol or taken drugs during pregnancy.
Denying a women reproductive rights, renders them mere vessels, a host in which an embryo can grow, a baby factory with no more right to self-determination than a machine.
But it is also an economic issue because having a child impacts significantly on a woman’s future and what opportunities she can pursue. A family might not be able to handle the burden of another child, especially a special needs child for which they are unprepared (and not getting much support from the state), but which also impacts the futures of the siblings.
“All of our courses of economics should start off with reproduction, not production,” said the pioneering Woman’s Rights advocate Gloria Steinem, who dedicated her memoir to a doctor who performed an abortion on her when it was illegal. The doctor told her, “Make the most of your life.”
“Reproductive rights are a fundamental human right, like freedom of speech,” Steinem said.
It’s another reason why it is time for a woman president.
