Oh no

[pastwatcher]

I'd heard the phrase "war on women" used recently and thought it was hyperbole; looking at the article below, I'm actually scared. Trigger warning: repeated mention of forced childbirth, and failing to deal with medical emergencies. No seriously, looking at it made me shudder.
The GOP house is waging war on women and poor people.


A friend of a friend related to most of the people in a remote village in China (and I've already forgotten which province), spent a summer there doing thesis research about the One Child policy. Some things she told me:

1) Women were accustomed to having mandatory ultrasounds every 3 months. They described appointments made alphabetically, that you could /maybe/ move but could not skip, and they were in-and-out ultrasounds. Even "approved", i.e. first, pregnancies would be noted; others would probably be aborted.
2) There were forced-abortion campaigns in China in several provinces a couple of times, most recently in 1991. My *sister* was born in 1991, and I'm proud to say my mother believes becoming a mother should only be the woman's choice.
3) Nevertheless people would have more children, having to bribe and use connections to get away with it. That's probably why the measures were so extreme.

I know it's not rational to feel sick when I think about the laws forcing ultrasounds on women who want abortions, but it reminds me of nothing so much as that. It doesn't make sense to be triggered, either, in that no-one's ever tried to force me to have a baby or not to, but I've imagined it, sometimes wonder if it will happen to me, and it's horrifying.

Compare that to the Romanian dictator who would force women to get pregnant, imposing some high "fertility tax" nonsense and also checkups. The resulting larger population, when in their twenties, were the ones to tear him down. I heard this from Ana; I suppose I don't go looking for stories like this, nor have I come across them in most discussions.

I don't even /know/ which would be worse, being forced to abort or forced to birth--both are highly physically and emotionally traumatic. But controlling the country's population by using its women like chattel--very sickening.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree on a gut level that I wouldn't want to get a late-term abortion, but I think it's important to emphasize that the vast majority of late-term abortions are more like emergency procedures than anything else--they're done because of physical complications among other things. In fact I challenge you to fact-check me on that, and mention that every time late-term abortions come up in conversation, because it's *so* inhumane to stop emergency abortion procedures.

If you know you would want someone to remind you of the baby's personhood, you could always tell someone that beforehand. That talk you envision does not sound like the talks one gets from picketers, because in it there's an underlying respect for your own need to make the decision that is missing from those who would really *push* a "pro-life" agenda. Maybe some of the talks mandated by law would be as sensitive.

The thing is not that we can't value a baby's life. It's that forcing a woman's body against her will is so monstrous that we can't afford to make the baby's rights trump her choice until the two can be separated. (If there were artificial uteruses in common use, that would be another thing. Just like at 36 months you do a C-section, not an abortion.) Giving up a baby for adoption is hardly a "choice," either, it's something usually done of necessity and has its own harsh emotional consequences for mother and (probably) child. That is *why* we expect women to make their own choices, and recognize that they are often hard choices. You know all of this. It's one reason why infant baptism was actually a good idea: before the baby was a few days old there was such a high risk of loss that it could have been easier to believe that if the baby died, the soul would come to another baby instead. Of course that also makes infant exposure easier to conscion; fortunately, we no longer lack the public resources to care for infants once they are born. (We just don't have very good ones...I don't know where I stand on quantity vs. quality of life, but I believe anyone who is for not supporting people who need support has no moral ground to stand on when it comes to abortion.)

You know, too, that some of the "pro-life" arguments are actually done by people who want to put women in their "place". The above bills are ample evidence of this tendency, and that is what really makes me sick.

[pastwatcher]

Sorry, that was me.