Thirty five years ago (22 January 1973) the Supreme Court decided a case titled Roe v. Wade which held that until a fetus is viable outside its mother's body (twenty eight weeks), it is not a legal individual whose rights extend beyond the rights of its mother, that in fact the mother's health preempts any rights the partially formed embryo has.
This case overturned a law in Texas that criminalized abortion and reverberated through the states. According to the Roe decision, laws against abortion violated a woman's right to privacy under due process (in the Fourteenth Amendment). This decision superceded state laws restricting abortion.
Roe v. Wade is one of the most controversial cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. Even before it was decided there were men and women whose stomachs turned at the idea of abortion. The issue had been argued many times before in fairly recent history. In 18th century England, mothers accused of murder were not put to death if they could prove they were "with child." In infamous London prisons of the day there were "child-getters"--fertile men who could reliably make a woman pregnant. Some female criminals availed themselves of their services repeatedly so as not to be hanged.
In the early Soviet Union, abortion was freely available. It was later abolished because too many women were using it in place of birth control--which was hard for most women to get up until the sixties and seventies. Rich women had it, but often not the working classes. Remember Mary McCarthy's The Group? Vassar girls had diaphragms in the thirties--but not blue collar women who relied on condoms and men who would wear them or withdraw before ejaculation. As a seventeen-year-old freshman at Barnard, I got my first diaphragm from Planned Parenthood (a college tradition). I never got pregnant accidentally because I knew that an abortion would make me terribly sad. I loved children, dogs, cats and other living things, and I understood that terminating a pregnancy would be extremely hard for me emotionally. (But then I had sophisticated New York gynecologists all my life and grew up in liberal, enlightened Manhattan with parents who were bohemians of the thirties before they surprised themselves by getting rich).
In my own Manhattan high school years, girls disappeared from New York to darkest New Jersey or Pennsylvania to seek the services of illegal abortionists and many of them were accidentally sterilized while others may have died. Rich women in New York went to Flower Fifth Avenue hospital for a "D & C." My mother did this as late as 1960, but our housekeepers and baby nurses from Jamaica or the Deep South didn't have that option. A safe medical abortion (my mother referred to it in whispers as an "a- b") was expensive and hard to find. Many poor women got infected and died. In my mother's case, as I later learned, my father was adamant about not having another baby. There were already three girls growing up and needing private schools, hand-smocked party dresses, music lessons, art lessons, ballet, figure skating, charge accounts at Saks, Best and Company and Bergdorf's, Doubleday book stores (with their listening booths for LPS--which we quaintly called "records."
How interesting that the thirty-fifth anniversary of Roe comes on the very day that my daughter will go home from the hospital after having had twins. She had a really tough time, and has been warned that she would be at risk if she got pregnant again. She is not yet thirty and has had, thank the goddess, three beautiful children and a lovely husband. She also has generous parents and in-laws, step-parents who adore her and can refuse her nothing. But she was still terrified by a very difficult delivery (the details of which are hers not mine to describe. Since she is a much-published novelist, I'm sure she will).
The babies, a girl and a boy, are miraculous--like all babies--bringing back to me Ordinary Miracles, a book of poems about childbirth I wrote when Molly was born. (The phrase has entered the language--or been ripped off by various ASCAPniks and jingle writers). Babies are miraculous, especially just when they just wake to the world.
They seem to come from a better place which some call 'God,' some call 'Mother Nature,' and some call human evolution, depending on your point of view. (I happen to think that evolution is every bit as numinous as 'God'). But one thing is clear: Having them ain't easy. And that's long before you have to raise them.
For centuries, death in childbirth was woman's lot. In some places, it still is. In mountainous Afghanistan where women can't get to hospitals or there are none, in war zones, in occupied zones with barriers or curfews, in many parts of Africa, in rural India, and China, in rural America, giving birth is still no joke. Even in big cities, it can be dangerous. There is massive bleeding, the placentas don't always detach promptly, babies are often transverse or breach, just for starters. Then there is the question of medical care.
Again, in the eighteenth-century, my favorite period in English Literature, (at the dawn of the modern era--but before Louis Pasteur), accoucheurs (the precursors of obstetricians) killed many women with the microbes they unknowingly carried from the sickbeds of other patients. There was a great political struggle between midwives, who only dealt with women, and doctors who treated everyone, because the doctors wanted their monopoly.
Many women died of infection--like Charlotte Bronte--or nearly died like Mary Shelley. Women's health had always been a political football in the supposedly "civilized" Christian era. Many midwives (always specialists in women's health) were burned as witches throughout modern history.
Now we know about bacteria and viruses and we are much more aware of unconscious infection, but childbirth can still be a big deal--especially for older women, very young women, the ill, the malnourished, the poor, the mothers of multiple babies. It seems to me incredible that anyone without a uterus would try to dictate what a woman should do with hers.
So I am appalled that abortion remains under attack--and that birth control in America has been impeded. We came so far with so much struggle. To give it back now is no less than an assault on women's health.
Of course babies are precious and should be cherished. Nobody doubts that. But should a woman be forced by the law to give birth if she has health issues, a dead baby, twins or triplets, or can't get to a hospital or must be accompanied but a male relative--who may be at war or dead or unwilling? Fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalist Christians would deny her that.
No wonder the late great Florynce Kennedy said: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."
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Human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are human; they are not persons. Personhood is a political and legal concept. Got it?
The state does not have the Constituti
Abortion kills a human life; it does not kill a person. A woman is a person; she has rights, and one intuitive right is the control of her body.
Then don't have one.
I think you mean "sacrosanc
To speak the truth, it is all left to chance, and to those who have the means, or are lucky,
to be sent to those precious private schools, you mention. Although, I think, and the evidence proves it, that a lot of these private schools do not teach people how to speak with candor, how to be sincere, and how to be honest. Parental love is the only thing capable of teaching those.
We need a big look, a great re-structu
at how we go about educating human beings to be humans and to be part of civilized society, so that we can eradicate poverty, envy, corruption
They call it Utopia; I call it being really truly educated about what it is to be human.
I think we are all the victims of defective love. Anger and resentment are the order of the day; and until we harness positively the love that exists within us, by imparting it, as parents to our children, abortions, injustice, robberies, poverty, Giulianis, Keriks, and Bushes will never end.
The point is that yes, let’s advocates for a woman's right to privacy; but let's advocate
for an idea whose time has come: The education of human beings as to what it entails to be human, and the price that must be paid to be in a relationsh
The teaching of how to behave as human beings must be made a sacrament.
Yes, we can!
Enough said.
I definitely support a woman's right to privacy, although I am a man, and the right to privacy of everyone else.
But our reasoning, so far, has been fundamenta
A bear is a wild animal; it does not think, it does not reason; it lives a life of merely fodding for food and protecting itself from other animals. I mention this to make a point.
A child wanders into the bear's lair...may
I guess, the bear must pay the ultimate price....i
(I do not fail to see the irony in all this)
It seems to me though, that the bear is not guilty because it does not reason, it does not think, and it is a wild animal that humans are keeping for their viewing pleasure.
I take this far-fetche
Nowhere in nature is every seed brought to fruition. The idea that a woman must bear whatever gets fertilized in her womb is unnatural, an abominatio
All men who oppose abortion should sign up to be fitted to carry unwanted fetuses to term. Let those men work three jobs while pregnant, pick up kids, make dinner, do the housework, and give birth over and over and over and over....as for the women who oppose safe health care for their sisters, I have no comment, except they are deluded by propaganda
Those who wish to ban this medical procedure want to control women lives.
"be fruitfull and multiply"
Successful
and you will no longer have to fight against those who incorrectl
http://www
Why Lorna Brett Howard, former President of Chicago NOW, switched from Clinton to Obama:
http://www
I always love to point out that female animals STOP reproducin
then, we won't have to have this discussion
It does not treat the question of when life begins lightly!It does illustrate that there really is no scientific
Another poser is,when we use the term "life"what kind of life are we talking about?Plan
These questions are never answered beyond their religious or emotional signifigan
And who is asked to pay the consequens
Where is the justice in this attitude??
1) The title is my least favorite and the most absurd slogan of the pro-choice movement. It's simply untrue. At best you could argue that if men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be a legal issue. But the "sacrament claim" is immediatel
2) I don't refrain from getting abortions because I love puppies and kittens and other living things and an abortion "would make me sad". I don't do it, and women shouldn't do it, for the same reason I don't torture animals - it's the taking of a human life and, therefore, an immoral thing to do.
3) The pro-life movement does not oppose abortion because babies are cute. They are not trying to convince pro-choice advocates that babies are precious. We don't refrain from killing things because of their affect on our senses. We don't kill because of a moral code, wherever that code may come from (God, Mother Earth, evolution)