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

[gleameil.livejournal.com]

I'm a little extreme here, but I hope for my own part that I would never, ever get a late-term abortion--by which I mean pretty much anytime after the fetus is anything like a person at all.... At this point in my life I would then try to find a good adoptive family unless I turned out to be one of those lucky people whose chemistry makes them be all, "I love this maniac more than life itself." If I HAD to raise the child, I would begin to feel differently about abortion, although frankly, that's something that scares me about myself.

Because I, like so many people, don't really function in a crisis, I'd probably benefit from having someone sit down with me if I discovered I were pregnant well into my second trimester and say, "Let's take a look at your baby. I know your life is falling apart in a hundred different ways right now. I know that having a child, even if you give it up for adoption, will earn you social condemnation. That is terrible. I'm not trying to make you feel worse, though you might. I'm just trying to make sure you understand that this person you're about to kill is a person. He hears your voice. He'll remember the stories you read aloud right now years later. Yes, if you kill this person, your life will be easier, because society and biology are %@#!*in' screwed up. But do you really, really want to do this?"

I understand that pregnancy is horrifying and that a pro-life stance often comes along with social views I hate. I'm 100% in favor of readily available birth control, morning-after pills, ample social support for mothers, and better child protection services (from what I’ve heard the foster care system is made of solid hell). I personally don't know where I stand on abortion, but at least I can understand someone who says "It is wrong to kill blameless, helpless human beings NO MATTER WHAT" even when they see saving those lives as more important than pretty much any other political goal, including supporting mothers.

In fact, pro-lifers get more gut-level sympathy from me, although I truly can see both when I think about it. Maybe I just don't have a strong enough sense of ownership of my own body, but whether or not someone else is saying, "You must bear this child," and however gross their attitude is as they say it, the idea that nine months of physical discomfort, hormonal confusion, and risks that modern medicine has reduced enormously is really worse than ending a human life is very strange to me.

[(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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

I'm not sure where the idea that people somehow just don't notice they're pregnant or forget to schedule their abortion appointment until they're 8 months along and then run out for an abortion during their lunch break comes from.

It really just doesn't work that way.

I mean, on just a totally superficial level, most pregnant folks are so fat by 6 months that they have to buy a whole new wardrobe. You don't go through all that just to go get an abortion.

By the third trimester, most pregnant people have decorated their nurseries, picked out names, notified the relatives, and generally come to think of themselves as parents and the fetus as their baby. The vast majority of third-trimester abortions, therefore, are really tragedies, precipitated by extreme physical defects or significant threats to the mother's life. They aren't undertaken lightly, and most of the people who get them have already sat down and had real, serious, heart-to-heart talks about the ethical and practical ramifications.

The gov't forcing people to get ultrasounds or otherwise interfering isn't going to make people more thoughtful or make better decisions. It's a short-sighted and rather stupid response to the assumption that women who get late term abortions are simply idiots who forgot to schedule their abortions until they were 8 months along and lack the moral and intellectual development to understand that a fetus is a baby, or a calculated attempt to make abortion inconvenient and difficult enough that people who actually need one won't be able to get it.

[gleameil.livejournal.com]

Thanks for responding. I agree with you on 99% of this, and even if I could be in some sense theoretically pro-life, practically it seems that support for women and different education is probably a better and less destructive step toward reducing abortion than making abortion more difficult and penalizing it (or denying medical care for its bad consequences! wtf?).

One of my main points was that each side could stand to remember--and consistently acknowledge in their rhetoric--that the other side has at least a powerful motive and, if you ask me, a powerful argument (I mean, if you're not a materialist you have no reason at all for thinking that life or personhood or whatever begins only once the fetus has reached a certain stage of development).

So quickly branding anti-abortion measures a "war on women" is problematic to me, since it seems like a sane pro-life stance (which perhaps many aren't?) is only incidentally anti-women's rights. Though I guess it's hard to say to what extent one can focus on the underpinnings of a political argument rather than its effects, I feel that it is quite possible to be militantly pro-life in good conscience, fully recognizing that what it entails is, as you say, monstrous. The basic ethical issue is hard enough that too many liberals seem to me to take pro-choice for granted.

[gleameil.livejournal.com]

little e-- if you're really obese and already have irregular periods? (I wrote the previous comment before I read yours, sorry). But I know that's the exception, and I'm speaking more theoretically. I said late-term above because that's when I'd put personhood, but I'm not THAT sure, and I know that there are a million different definitions and benchmarks out there. I should have been more careful writing that. ...and I was anything but morally and intellectually mature in high school, e.g. Though I may be a little less so than most women, I know that if I'd suspected or discovered I was pregnant, I could have been too dumb and terrified to talk to anyone for a long time because of the assumptions they'd make, despite having a better support system than many.

Elizabeth-- Also, I'm sorry also for derailing the post. I can see you're bringing up more complex issues and I'm happy to leave off, and this is probably a pretty unfortunate way to poke up my head on livejournal.