Eye Recommend --- Pregnant and No Civil Rights

PREGNANT AND NO CIVIL RIGHTS, by Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin -- 
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/opinion/pregnant-and-no-civil-rights.html?_r=0

If this doesn't incense and frighten every supporter of a woman's right to choose, then nothing will. (Any underlines are mine.)

"With the success of Republicans in the midterm elections and the passage of Tennessee's anti-abortion amendment, we can expect ongoing efforts to ban abortion and advance the 'personhood' rights of fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses...

...Anti-abortion measures pose a risk to all pregnant women, including those who want to be pregnant.

Such laws are increasingly being used as the basis for arresting women who have no intention of ending a pregnancy and for preventing women from making their own decisions about how they will give birth.

How does this play out?  Based on the belief that he had an obligation to give a fetus a chance for life, a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a critically ill 27-year-old woman who was 26 weeks pregnant to undergo a cesarean section, which he understood might kill her.  Neither the woman nor her baby survived."

This judge's narrow interpretation of the law ruled that attempting to save a barely viable fetus took precedence over the health and life of this young woman.  In the end, by denying her the abortion she requested, he killed both of them.  

"In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down a flight of stairs was reported to the police after seeking help at a hospital.  She was arrested for 'attempted fetal homicide.' 

In Utah, a woman gave birth to twins; one was stillborn.  Health care providers believed that the stillbirth was the result of the woman's decision to delay having a cesarean.  She was arrested on charges of fetal homicide.

In Louisiana, a woman who went to the hospital for unexplained vaginal bleeding was locked up for over a year on charges of second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Florida has had a number of such cases.  In one, a woman was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage.  She was forced to undergo a cesarean.  Neither the detention nor the surgery prevented the pregnancy loss, but they did keep this mother from caring for her two small children at home.  While a state court later found the detention unlawful, the opinion suggested that if the hospital had taken her prisoner later in her pregnancy, its actions might have been permissible.

In another case, a woman who had been in labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, strapped down in the back of an ambulance, taken to a hospital, and forced to have a cesarean she did not want.  When this mother later protested what had happened, a court concluded that the woman's personal constitutional rights 'clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.'...

...These are not isolated or rare cases.  Last year, we published a...study documenting 413 arrests or equivalent actions depriving pregnant women of their physical liberty during the 32 years between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005...

...Since 2005, we have identified an additional 380 cases, with more arrests occurring every week.  This significant increase coincides with what the Guttmacher Institute describes as a 'seismic shift' in the number of states with laws hostile to abortion rights.

The principle at the heart of contemporary efforts to end legal abortion is that fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses are persons or at least have separate rights that must be protected by the state.  In each of the cases we identified, this same rationale provided the justification for the deprivation of pregnant women's physical liberty, as well as of the right to medical decision making, medical privacy, bodily integrity and, in one case, the woman's right to life."

Effectively, what they are saying is that the mother's freedom--even her life--should be viewed simply as collateral damage in the fight to save the fetus.  The fact that pro-life supporters are blind to the paradox they have created is unfathomable to me.

"Many of the pregnant women subjected to this mistreatment are themselves profoundly opposed to abortion.  Yet it was precisely the legal arguments for recriminalizing abortion that were used to strip them of their rights to dignity and liberty in the context of labor and delivery...

...If we want to end these unjust and inhumane arrests and forced interventions on pregnant women, we need to stop focusing only on the abortion issue and start working to protect the personhood of pregnant women.

We should be able to work across the spectrum of opinion about abortion to unite in the defense of one basic principle:  that at no point in her pregnancy should a woman lose her civil and human rights."

As laws continue to pass restricting a woman's right to abortion, even a woman's freedom to give birth as she chooses is becoming secondary to hospitals and judges as they try to out-conservative each other with their narrow interpretation of those laws.   

And now, Mitch McConnell has announced that, under his control, the Senate will take up the question of banning abortion after 20 weeks.  This is despite the fact that the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that a fetus is not viable until 24 weeks.  One ACOG study says that "the vast majority of infants born prior to 24 completed weeks...died prior to or during birth.  In this study, 93% of infants at 22 weeks died, 66% at 23 weeks and 40% at 24 weeks."

When a woman cannot go to a hospital to seek help for fear that she will be detained or arrested, we have taken the argument for fetal rights too far.  When a judge, rather than a licensed medical doctor, is given the power to choose between fetus and mother, we have gone too far. 

Anti-abortion laws have, in increasing cases, crossed to the wrong side of the chasm of common sense.  Now how do we get back?