Category Archives: abortion

Abortion and Slavery

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If you’ve spent much time in Civil War discussion groups you’ve probably run into the argument that slavery would have ended in the South without the Civil War; therefore, the War hadn’t needed to be fought. Indeed, occasionally some southern apologist will insist that the South was well on the way toward giving up slavery and would have done so freely had the statist, Big Gubmint damnyankees not pushed the issue prematurely.

Well, certainly, by now slavery would have ended, although probably not by the free will of the slave states. It more likely would have ended by constitutional amendment once enough “free soil” states had entered the Union to form a majority.

In fact, that is what the plantation owners feared. And in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected on a platform of keeping slavery out of the territories, which would ensure that new states entering the Union would be free soil states. Thus the election of Lincoln touched off the secession crisis, which in turn took the nation to war.

The southern plantation class, which controlled the South economically, politically and socially, was certain that the abolition of slavery would ruin them. They were prepared to fight to the death (or compel non-slave-owning whites to fight to the death in their place) to preserve slavery. The Declaration of Causes documents adopted by the states of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas make it clear that secession was all about preserving slavery.

And may I suggest that a people determined to fight to the death to preserve something are not on the brink of giving that something up?

Anyway, the South started the war when South Carolina fired on the federal military reservation of Fort Sumter, and ever after they have blamed Lincoln for making them start it (that’s why it’s called the “War of Northern Aggression,” see; the damnyankees fought back). And after the war the former secessionists blamed Reconstruction for making them engage in race riots, lynchings, and other violence perpetrated upon the freed African Americans (even though much Reconstruction policy was enacted in reaction to the race riots, lynchings, etc.). Had the white plantation class been allowed more time to change their minds about slavery and end it on their own, which they would have done someday, then white southerners wouldn’t have been left with all those hard feelings that made them so violent. And then there wouldn’t have been a Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow or any of that stuff.

But after the war those damnyankee carpetbaggers conspired to temporarily disenfranchise southern white men just because they had engaged in armed rebellion against the government and thereby forced through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And then the poor downtrodden southern white people just had no choice but to form the Klan and enact Jim Crow laws, because they hadn’t been given enough time to adjust.

Those of you who are much younger than I am and/or did not grow up in hollerin’ distance of Dixie might not have been exposed to this line of reasoning much, but believe me, it was common. Still is, in some circles.

Fast forward to today’s anti-abortion rights movement. Fetus People like to see themselves as the heirs of the abolitionists, and they compare the struggle to protect fetii with the stuggle to end slavery. And they like to evoke the Dred Scott decision, which declared that a black man could not be a citizen and could have no standing to bring suit against a white man. The “antis” want fetii to be given full citizenship status; those who would deny them that status are bad people, just like the justices who ruled against Dred Scott.

But in truth, the anti-choicers more and more remind me of the old white supremacists and Klansmen, not the abolitionists.

First, the line of reasoning that blames the abortion wars on Roe v. Wade (see previous post on abortion) and not on a faction of fanatics who will try to stop abortions by any means is just too much like saying the 13th Amendment was responsible for the formation of the Klan. Let’s pretend that tomorrow Roe is reversed. Does anyone seriously believe that states which allowed abortion to remain legal would not be descended upon by Randall Terry and the screaming culture of death hoardes? Puh-leeze …

The Right argues that the Roe v. Wade decision amounted to judicial activism and judges “ruling from the bench,” which is exactly the same thing they said about Brown v. Board of Education. Many on the Right insist they don’t really want to impose a ban on abortion; they just want the question to be decided by elected state legislatures according to the democratic process. Does anyone really think that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, and abortion given a full and fair debate in every statehouse, and the 50 states separately wrote abortion law that reflected majority opinion in each state, that the Fetus People would accept any state’s decision to keep abortion legal?

Hah.

The Fetus People simply do not accept any position on abortion but theirs, and they will not give up until their will is law. For the past 33 years these people have engaged in systematic intimidation and terrorism to impose their will. Let me repeat this passage from Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion Wars” …

The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

These are not people who give a bleep about debate or the democratic process. And they are the cause of the abortion wars, which would be waged Roe v. Wade or no.

Some might argue that the pro-privacy Left is just as adamant to have its way, but when has anyone on the pro-privacy Left committed arsons and bombings, butyric acid attacks, and murders to get their way? In the 90 or so years in which abortion was illegal in most states — abortion didn’t become illegal until the late 19th century — I do not believe activists for abortion rights killed anyone, bombed anyone, or issued fatwas against the opposition. Instead, they worked within the system, which includes court challenges.

Let us revisit the old plantation slaveowners and ask another hypothetical question. Let’s say they’d been allowed more time to decide to give up slavery. Surely another generation, probably two, maybe more, of human beings would have lived their lives enslaved. And even if the slave states had been given more time, there is no guarantee that all slaveowners would have given up without a fight, or that slavery would not have left a residue of white supremacy no matter where or how it ended.

Today some on the Left argue that giving up Roe v. Wade would be smart strategy. Republicans have hidden behind Roe v. Wade long enough, they say. Without it, they’d be forced to deliver on their promises to ban abortion, thereby alienating the majority of voters. Or, they’d be forced to disappoint the Fetus People and forfeit their votes. Yet this would not end the abortion wars, and many women would suffer. And where abortion becomes illegal, the Fetus People will press for more — banning birth control and sex education, for example. The war will continue as long as the Fetus People choose to wage it. They will not be appeased.

So let’s stop kidding ourselves that there is anything that can be done to end the abortion wars. Like extremist Islamic terrorists, the Fetus People believe in their own absolute righteousness and will not stop fighting — to the death — to get their way. Like the slaveowners of earlier times, there is nothing else to be done but oppose them.

See also: Fetus People Follies.

Blog for Choice Sunday

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Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion War” in today’s New York Times magazine is a sometimes sobering, sometimes frustrating reflection on Press’s father, an ob-gyn who devotes part of his practice to performing abortions, and the larger struggle over choice.

Eyal Press provides keen insight into opposition to abortion — the sobering part — but blames Roe v. Wade for the ongoing abortion wars — the frustrating part.

Dr. Press’s medical practice is in Buffalo, New York. Until 1998 he and Dr. Barnett Slepian often covered for each other on weekends at a Buffalo abortion clinic. Then Dr. Slepian was murdered — shot in the back by an anti-choice fanatic — and Eyal Press feared his father was next. Both Dr. Slepian and Dr. Press had been “subjected to abrasive treatment – protests in front of their offices and homes, harassment of their patients, death threats,” writes Eyal Press. “I had witnessed some of this firsthand while growing up.”

After Dr. Slepian’s murder, Eyal Press tried to persuade his father to retire.

There was silence. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed. Then, looking over in my direction, with weariness but no hint of acquiescence in his eyes, he started telling me about his upbringing in Israel, how he got used to living in a world full of danger and not allowing it to deter him from doing what he felt was right.

“It’s wrong, wrong,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“To give in to fanatics, to terrorists.”

The very next morning, around 10, as I was talking to my mother, the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Death threat?” she said. “Death threat?. . .Excuse me, you’ll have to speak with my son.”

Her hand shook as she passed me the phone. It was a detective from the Police Department. He was calling to inform us that a newspaper in Hamilton, Ontario, which days earlier received a package containing a photograph of Slepian with an X drawn through his face, had just received an anonymous threat that my father was “next on the list.”

After interviewing a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated her life to abortion clinic protests — Eyal Press doesn’t say if he told her his father was an abortion provider — Press praised her religious sincerity, and added,

Yet as the scholar Jessica Stern notes, there are two sides to religion – “one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other particularist and sectarian.” The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

I call Eyal Press’s work frustrating because it is too much written through the prism of his experiences in Buffalo, New York, a city with a large Catholic population that is far, far away from the Bible Belt. In Eyal Press’s version of anti-choice history, abortion didn’t become a hot-button issue until after Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice movment didn’t get organized until well into the 1980s. “During the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics – the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo – the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical,” he writes. But the mid-1980s saw the “political reawakening of evangelicals” who began “filtering into the movement.”

Had Eyal Press grown up closer to the Bible Belt, he would have seen a very different history. The way I remember it is that before Roe v. Wade the Missouri state legislature was engaged in a Second Civil War over whether to legalize abortion. The state capitol at Jefferson City was besieged with pros and antis, and it seemed little else was on the legislative agenda. In 1972, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri, contingents from various evangelical student organizations regularly marched into the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian (the J School publishes a community daily newspaper to provide students with real-world experience) demanding that their anti-abortion press release du jour be given space on page 1, unedited. (Fortunately the “professors,” who were mostly former newspaper reporters, were a thick-skinned crew who didn’t like being told what to publish.)

Eyal Press of Buffalo, New York, thinks that Roe v. Wade began the abortion wars, but in Missouri and other midwestern states the announcement of the Roe decision in 1973 brought about a temporary cease-fire. State legislatures were allowed to turn their attention to other matters, and anti-choice groups withdrew to consider new strategies.

Abortion clinic arsons began three years later, in 1976. Bombings began in 1978.

Other nations are not tearing themselves apart over abortion, writes Press.

“No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do,” the columnist Michael Kinsley noted recently. Not Italy, home to the Vatican; not France, England or Germany. Only in America is a medical procedure that was legalized more than three decades ago at risk of once again being criminalized. Only here have doctors routinely taken to wearing bulletproof vests and hiring armed guards for protection.

He blames Roe v. Wade for this. “By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell.”

Many argue that if only the SCOTUS hadn’t handed down Roe v. Wade, by now most state legislatures would have at least partly legalized abortion, and the American people would have reached something like a consensus. Some even argue that most states were well on the way to legalizing abortion, and the Roe decision had the effect of making anti-choice opinion more entrenched. To which I say … hooey. In a large part of the country the abortion wars were hot and heavy before Roe v. Wade was decided, and I believe that in most of the South and Midwest abortion would never have been legalized.

The argument is that most citizens, even in the South and Midwest, support keeping abortion legal; therefore, state legislatures would have bowed to the will of the majority and legalized it. Maybe; maybe not. A pro-choice majority nationwide doesn’t seem to stop the U.S. Congress from passing anti-choice legislation. And geographic proximity does not make state legislatures more sensitive to the public will; if anything, most citizens know less about what their state legislature is up to than they do about what goes on in Washington. As long as social reactionaries are able to swing close elections (or convince politicians that they can), politicians will cater to them.

Press writes that, in Europe, nations “decriminalizing abortion on the grounds of health rather than rights” and left open the possibility that abortion could be re-criminalized through regular legislative channels. Hence, anti-abortion terrorism didn’t catch on there. But according to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money,

What’s interesting about this is that Canada’s abortion policy–there are no legislative restrictions on abortion at all–was created by the judiciary, which struck down a national abortion law. While many people assert that judicial policy-making is much more “divisive” than when issues are resolved by legislatures, the court’s intervention is so popular 15 years after the fact that proposing even modest abortion legislation is electoral suicide. The lesson of this is obvious: people evaluate judicial policy-making the same way they evaluate other forms of policy-making. The idea that prior to Roe v. Wade American abortion policy was represented by a stable consensus is absurd, but a convenient myth for people who oppose abortion, because the legislative status quo was heavily slanted against the pro-choice majority. Abortion policy in the U.S. is divisive because it’s divisive; it doesn’t matter whether it’s courts or legislatures that do the policy-making.

I agree with Scott. I believe hysteria over abortion reflects something in American culture; the same something that keeps us fighting over evolution and other aspects of modernity long accepted in the rest of the civilized world. And later today or tomorrow I want to blog about the parallel between the abortion controversy and the abolition of slavery — and it’s not the parallel the Right sees, believe me.

See also: Other recent Mahablog posts on abortion; Blog for Choice.

SCOTUS Punts on Abortion

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Just posted at the New York Times, by the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a lower court was wrong to strike down New Hampshire abortion restrictions, steering clear of a major ruling on they placed an undue burden on women. …

… Justices said a lower court went too far by permanently blocking the law that requires a parent to be told before a daughter ends her pregnancy.

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth’s health.

The opinion was written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The AP points out this may be the last SCOTUS opinion she will write.

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth’s health.

I’d like to read the decision before writing much about it. The AP story highlights the fact that the justices had been asked to decide if the Nebraska law had put an undue burden on young women seeking an abortion. Instead, the court punted the decision back to lower courts.

Update: Carnival of the Feminists at Feministe.

Update update: Written decision here (PDF).

Distant Thunder

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Unfortunately, in this editorial the Washington Post is more right than wrong about the Alito hearings:

Democratic senators often seemed more interested in attacking the nominee — sometimes scurrilously — than in probing what sort of a justice he would be. Even when they tried, their questioning was often so ineffectual as to elicit little useful information. Republican senators, meanwhile, acted more as fatuous counsels for the defense than as sober evaluators of a nominee to serve on the Supreme Court. On both sides, pious, meandering speeches outnumbered thoughtful questions. And the nominee himself was careful, as most nominees are, not to give much away. The result is that Americans don’t know all that much more about Judge Alito than they did before.

There were some exceptions among the Dems — Senator Schumer comes to mind — but unless you were curled up in front of the TV for gavel-to-gavel coverage, you didn’t see Senator Schumer. More casual news consumers saw the clip of intra-senatorial snarking between senators Kennedy and Specter (although clear explanations of what the snarking was about were hard to come by). They saw Mrs. Alito bolt from the chamber in apparent distress. They saw Senator Biden wearing a Princeton cap. That’s about it.

Although I don’t agree with the editorial that the Vanguard and Concerned Alumni of Princeton issues were frivolous, I’m afraid they came across to most news consumers as frivolous. The Senate Dems rumbled away like distant thunder while Judge Alito sat, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

E.J. Dionne writes,

It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don’t want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing — as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.

Alito, an ardent baseball fan, established himself as the Babe Ruth of evasion.

What news consumers did not hear is that Alito is a guy who doesn’t understand why the strip-search of a ten-year-old girl is a big deal (disagreeing even with Michael Chertoff, for pity’s sake). They didn’t hear that he thinks police were correct to kill an unarmed 15-year-old boy by shooting him in the back of the head. The boy, after all, had not obeyed an order.

By now, only the brain dead don’t realize that Alito is itching to overturn Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity. But it seems hardly anyone outside the Left Blogosphere gives a damn about Alito’s alarming — and un-American — theories about presidential power.

I realize that these issues were probably brought up by some Dem or another during the hearings, but they’ve been left out of the “story about the hearings” as told by news media. So the public isn’t hearing about them.

Paul Brownfield writes in the Los Angeles Times,

The hearings are monumental enough to be carried live on cable news, home of the video sound bite and the whir of instant dissection, but entirely ill-suited to the constant churn of a 24-hour news network.

Inside the Hart Senate hearing room, we watched two competing shows — the Republicans making like Regis Philbin, plugging Judge Alito’s latest vehicle (“So tell me about this Supreme Court nomination … “), the Democrats conducting an episode of CBS’ missing persons drama “Without a Trace,” poking at Alito’s past decisions and his membership in the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton but unable to place him, in the present.

Alito’s membership, and the fact that his wife Martha broke down in tears over the controversy Wednesday, gave the networks something to chew on, which is to say a way out of penetrating the gamesmanship of the hearings — senators preambling their way to question the discursively elusive witness.

Martha’s running mascara was the perfect diversion. Even if it wasn’t staged, something like it will be next time there’s a hearing on something the GOP doesn’t want you to know about.

Brownfield continues,

To watch the hearings at any length has value, but only if you watch them at any length — the straight stuff on C-SPAN, preferably, if you can stomach it. Because then you can see the chasm that exists between the dense thicket of speechifying and stonewalling in the hearing room, and the way it’s squeezed down and sized to fit our many-screened lives, above the crawl that tells you the “gay cowboy movie” “Brokeback Mountain” took home the Critics’ Choice Award or that Lindsay Lohan, distancing herself from her own sort of controversial membership, denied statements attributed to her in Vanity Fair about battles with bulimia.

Fact is, the Republicans do the sound-bite, made-for-TV-camera-moments thing extremely well, and the Dems can barely do it at all. That’s why, John Dickerson writes at Slate, the White House wants hearings on Bush’s NSA warrentless wiretapping. Bush wants hearings not because he wants to explain and defend his policy. Rather, Dickerson writes, “He’s inviting Democrats to another round of self-immolation.”

In 2002, the Republican Party used the debate over the Department of Homeland Security to attack Democrats in the off-year election by arguing the party was soft on terror. The president and his aides hope the NSA hearings will offer the same opportunity in 2006. …

… Bush and his aides are eager to talk about the National Security Agency’s activities because they think the issue benefits them politically. While Democrats are often confusing, with too many leaders and no clear message to push back against the commander in chief, the president is passionate when he talks about fighting terrorists, and a majority of voters still approve of his handling of the issue. And because the spying program was initiated soon after 9/11, it offers Bush an opportunity to discuss his more popular days as a take-charge executive after the 2001 attacks. “We’re very comfortable discussing the issue for as long as they want,” says Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett.

I can see it already. The GOP will be prepared in advance to smear and discredit anyone who testifies the program is illegal. Anyone tuning in to Meet the Press or The Situation Room or Hardball (and don’t even think about Faux Nooz) will see the usual conservative shills expounding long-discredited nonfacts and junk legalosity to argue the accusations of illegality have no merit. And Tim, Wolf, and Tweety will nod, politely, and frame their questions in a way that legitimizes GOP talking points, however frivolous.

“Democrats will be frustrated and antagonized,” writes Dickerson. “The president hopes they will get red-faced and obstinate.” The Dems will rumble away like distant thunder, and White House representatives will sit, unperturbed, in the shelter of a Republican majority.

And if, by accident, someone on the Dem side actually lands a blow, expect Condi to spring a leak and dash for the door.

Update: See also Steve Soto, “Democrats Punt Another One Away On Alito.”

Truth Hurts

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A case study in rightie “logic” — Captain Ed writes that “Alito blew Chuck Schumer out of the water on abortion.” Here is the section of Senator Schumer’s questioning to which the Captain refers.

SCHUMER: Does the Constitution protect the right to free speech?

ALITO: Certainly it does. That’s in the First Amendment.

SCHUMER: So why can’t you answer the question of: Does the Constitution protect the right to an abortion the same way without talking about stare decisis, without talking about cases, et cetera?

ALITO: Because answering the question of whether the Constitution provides a right to free speech is simply responding to whether there is language in the First Amendment that says that the freedom of speech and freedom of the press can’t be abridged. Asking about the issue of abortion has to do with the interpretation of certain provisions of the Constitution.

SCHUMER: Well, OK. I know you’re not going to answer the question. I didn’t expect really that you would, although I think it would be important that you would. I think it’s part of your obligation to us that you do, particularly that you stated it once before so any idea that you’re approaching this totally fresh without any inclination or bias goes by the way side.

But I do have to tell you, Judge, you’re refusal I find troubling. And it’s sort as if I asked a friend of mine 20 years ago — a friend of mine 20 years ago said to me, he said, you know, I really can’t stand my mother-in-law. And a few weeks ago I saw him and I said, “Do you still hate your mother-in-law?”

He said, “Well, I’m now married to her daughter for 21 years, not one year.”

I said, “No, no, no. Do you still hate your mother-in-law?”

And he said, “I can’t really comment.”

What do you think I’d think?

ALITO: Senator, I think…

SCHUMER: Let me just move on.

Just who blew whom out of the water? I think your answer depends on your values. If you value honesty; if you value liberty; if you value the principle that We, the People, rule this country — Schumer wins. If, instead, you value raw power and winning at any cost — Alito wins.

It’s obvious to everyone on both sides — although not to most reporters — that Alito is evading questions. There is only one reason he couldn’t give Senator Schumer a yes or no answer — he doesn’t want the Senate, and the nation, to know what he really thinks. Certainly a nominee shouldn’t answer questions about cases that might come before the bench. But let’s look at how Ruth Bader Ginsburg handled similiar questions [PDF]:


Senator Leahy [D-Vt.]: Senator Metzenbaum had asked you whether the right to choose is a fundamental right. Is there a constitutional right to privacy?

Judge Ginsburg: There is a constitutional right to privacy composed of at least two distinguishable parts. One is the privacy expressed most vividly in the fourth amendment: The Government shall not break into my home or my office without a warrant, based on probable cause; the Government shall leave me alone.

The other is the notion of personal autonomy. The Government shall not make my decisions for me. I shall make, as an individual, uncontrolled by my Government, basic decisions that affect my life’s course. Yes, I think that what has been placed under the label privacy is a constitutional right that has those two elements, the right to be let alone and the right to make decisions about one’s life course.

….

Judge Ginsburg: [Y]ou asked me about my thinking on equal protection versus individual autonomy. My answer is that both are implicated. The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

Now, is there any question about what Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought about a woman’s right to choose an abortion? On the other hand, all we get out of Alito is, in effect, It depends on how you interpret the Constitution, but I have an open mind.

Sure you do, son. And I’m Queen Victoria.

The PDF document I cite above as a reference to Ginsburg contains more quotes relating to the infamous Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision, in which Judge Alito played a part. If you compare Ginsburg’s views on Casey to Alito’s, it is obvious that their ideas on what “privacy” actually means — indeed, on what liberty and personal autonomy actually are — are worlds apart. Alito may say he supports a “right to privacy,” but clearly there should be big, prominent warning labels on that assertion — restrictions may apply; void where prohibited.

I’ve written in the past that, IMO, the notion the Constitution does not protect a right to privacy (because, you know, the word privacy just isn’t in there anywhere) misses the whole meaning and purpose of the American Revolution and Bill of Rights —

… the Constitution recognizes all kinds of rights to be “left alone by the government.” Roe v. Wade argues that the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments put together protect a right to personal privacy, and that this right had already been recognized by many prior decisions. I’ll paste a part of the Roe decision explaining this at the end of this post.

But for the moment let’s step away from examining clauses under a microscope and look at the bigger issue of political liberty. The whole point of it, and the raison d’etre of the Bill of Rights, is the notion (revolutionary in the 18th century) that citizens of the U.S. were not subjects whose lives and property could be messed with on the capricious whims of the sovereign. The underlying philosophy of our government is that citizens are to be free of interference by government unless government has a compelling reason to countermand the free will of citizens. And even then, government must jump through various hoops–the due process of law thing–before requiring a citizen to do something he or she does not want to do.

You know how it is with righties — they like to talk about freedom, but really, to them, freedom’s just another word. And it’s a word that applies only to them and their agenda. They don’t mean for the rest of us to have it.

Update: See Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Control

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The New York Times catches on to something I’ve been saying for a while:

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn’t reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia – where abortion is illegal even if a woman’s life is in danger – averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In all of our endless fighting over abortion law, one never hears the simple fact that making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. Indeed, as I argued in this post, we don’t know for sure if the rate of abortions in the U.S. is higher now than it was pre-Roe. Estimates of the number of abortions performed in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s put the number as high as 1.2 million per year. That’s the same approximate number of abortions performed annually in the United States right now, and in a larger population.

Studies of contraceptive practices in several nations before and after legalization reveal no indication that abortion replaces contraceptive use, as some anti-privacy activists claim. On the other hand, there is copious data that shows making contraceptives easily (and legally) available does lower abortion rates. (See “Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society & Abortion Worldwide” [Alan Guttmacher, 1999, PDF].)

The New York Times editorial continues [emphasis added],

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

According to the Center for Disease Control, in the U.S. 14 women died as a result of complications from known legal induced abortion in 1998 and 1999. The mortality rate related to abortion in the U.S. is <1 death per 100,000 abortions. This is a much lower mortality rate than for pregnancy — in 1999, says the CDC, there were 12 deaths resulting from pregnancy per 100,000 live births.

Every time news media carries a story about an American woman dying after an abortion you can count on the anti-privacy army to march forth screaming that abortions are medically risky and must be banned. This, of course, would make abortion a whole lot more risky, but try to explain that to the Fetus People. Just try. It’s like explaining algebra to spinach.

Back to the New York Times editorial:

Latin American women, who are increasing their participation in the work force and in politics, have also become more vocal. Their voice would be much louder were it not for the Bush administration’s global gag rule, which bans any family planning group that gets American money from speaking about abortions, or even criticizing unsafe illegal abortions. This has silenced such respected and influential groups as Profamilia in Colombia. Anti-abortion lawmakers in Washington can look at Latin America as a place where the global gag rule has worked exactly as they had hoped. All Americans can look at Latin America to see unnecessary deaths and injuries from unsafe abortions.

You aren’t going to budge the anti-abortion lawmakers with sordid tales of maternal mortality, of course, because they don’t care if women die. It’s more important to control women’s behavior and punish them for being sexual than to care about their health and well-being. But the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal. And making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. So, one might ask — what are we arguing about, again?

Here’s what we’re arguing about:

Next week the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Sam Alito will begin. NARAL is sending out a fact sheet on Alito and birth control saying that Alito considers some birth control methods — such as birth control pills, the contraceptive ring, the IUD (intrauterine device), and the birth control patch — to be “abortifacient” rather than contraceptive. He has also argued in favor of requiring women seeking abortions to be given misleading and counter-factual anti-reproductive-rights propaganda. Alito “appears to question the competence of women to make their own choices,” the fact sheet says. “Alito urges that the state become the moral guide of the woman facing a crisis pregnancy, that the bedrock principle of informed consent be twisted beyond all recognition into a political instrument.”

Alito is one more right-wing control freak who doesn’t trust you to live your own life. It’s not about babies (states with the most restrictive abortion laws tend to have higher infant mortality rates than more liberal states). It’s not about women’s health. It’s not about conscience. It’s about control.

Some Things Aren’t Equal

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I remember a workplace rumor of several years ago — the company I worked for allegedly was considering more “personal” time for employees with children. Whereupon the single and childless among us put up a howl that the policy wouldn’t be fair.

At the time I was employed full time and raising two kids by myself, so I had some pretty strong opinions about what was fair.

An unmarried woman in the next cubicle was howling about how “some people” were going to get a special advantage.

You already have an advantage, I said. Your advantage is that you don’t have children.

She did a double take. What was I talking about?

I tried to explain that the responsibility of children could be crushing, and that their needs didn’t always neatly coincide with out-of-office hours, and that employees who are parents come with built-in time restraints and stresses that the childless don’t have to deal with.

You chose to have kids, she said. Yes, but somebody’s got to do it, I said. Perpetrating the species and all. Not to mention funding Social Security and raising a new generation of consumers. We’re serving a function necessary to the nation and to society. And the company probably figured the cost of the privilege would be made up by increased productivity, which would not be the case if extended to the childless.

You’ll feel differently after your kids have moved out, she said. No, I won’t, I said. They did, and I don’t.

The policy was never instituted, possibly because childless employees put up such a stink. In their next lives they will be brood sows. But my point is that not everything is equitable, and we’re not all playing with the same hand.

I bring this up because some poor deluded girl-child named Meghan Daum actually wrote an op ed in the Los Angeles Times that advocates “choice” for men.

I don’t know Ms. Daum, but I take it the twit-ette is young, childless, and has a boyfriend who spouts this crap.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The “choice” in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead. … If abortion is to remain legal and relatively unrestricted — and I believe it should — why shouldn’t men have the right during at least the first trimester of pregnancy to terminate their legal and financial rights and responsibilities to the child?

Daum acknowledges that this policy would leave to some unfortunate consequences, such as financially undersupported children, but she thinks it’s more important that we be fair.

News flash, toots: Some things can’t be made fair.

Pregnancy and childbirth are unique conditions that have no equivalence in males. Requiring the poor boy to pay child supports is not equivalent to pregnancy and childbirth, which are conditions of the female — and only the female — body. That’s why she gets to choose. But once there is a child, that child is owed the support of both parents.

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog has written about “choice for men” at some length. Ampersand is a lot nicer about it than I am, as I believe categorically that any male who argues in favor of this nonsense is no man. He is an emotional adolescent, a weenie. In the past whenever I’ve written on the topic of men, some weenie will drop by and say that I must not like men. Au contraire. I like men, a lot. It’s weenies I can’t stand.

Anyway, here Ampersand argues that “Both men and women should have every reproductive choice biologically possible.” But trying to balance the facts of biology with a non-biological “equivalent” in the interest of fairness is neither fair nor equitable. It cannot be made equitable.

Period. End of story. And don’t come whining to me about what’s “fair.” Life ain’t fair. Get used to it.

Why We Fight (Alito)

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Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the developing world’s highest rate of abortions – a rate that is far higher even than in Western Europe, where abortion is widely and legally available. [Juan Forero, “Push to Loosen Abortion Laws in Latin America ,” The New York Times, December 3, 2005]

Usually left out of our endless abortion debates is the simple fact that making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. Making abortion illegal only drives it underground, where it is unregulated.

Forero of the New York Times continues,

Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute,

Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland have abortion rates below 10 per 1,000 women of reproductive age; in all other countries of Western Europe and in the United States and Canada, rates are 10-23 per 1,000.

Romania, Cuba and Vietnam have the highest reported abortion rates in the world (78-83 abortions per 1,000 women). Rates are also above 50 per 1,000 in Chile and Peru.

Abortion is legal (with varying gestational limits) in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Cuba, and Vietnam. It is banned in Peru except to save the mother’s life. It is banned completely in Chile. Clearly, there is no correlation between abortion rates and abortion laws. (More on abortion laws worldwide here.)

The evidence suggests that legal status makes little difference to overall abortion levels. Levels are very high in Eastern Europe and low in Western Europe, yet abortion is broadly legal in both. And levels are far lower in Western Europe than in Latin America, where abortion is highly restricted (except in Cuba and Guyana). [“Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society & Abortion Worldwide” (Alan Guttmacher, 1999), p. 28 (PDF)]

If laws against abortion don’t stop abortion, why bother? The usual rebuttal to that question is that there is still murder and theft in spite of laws against murder and theft. My response is that (I suspect) such laws, and vigorous prosecutions thereof, slow murder and theft down a lot. That’s not something I can prove with comparative data, since I’m not aware of any place with no restrictions on homicide or theft, other than places so violent that no civil authority exists. But if you think about it, the building of communities–civilization itself–would be pretty much impossible with no safeguards against slaughter and pillage.

Yet Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, etc. are all civilized, last I heard.

I think laws banning abortion are comparable to one of America’s great failed social experiments, prohibition. Driving liquor underground didn’t exactly stop drinking, but it was great for organized crime.

A Guttmacher study of abortion in Latin America describes what happens underground:

A 1993 study in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Peru showed that women everywhere are familiar with teas and infusions made from herbs and other vegetable products that are believed to induce abortion (Table 5 [at the bottom of this post]).

If these products do not have the desired effect (and nobody knows whether they are genuine abortifacients), women are then likely to resort to riskier methods: the insertion of a rubber tube, caustic liquids or other foreign objects into the uterus; or the oral or vaginal application of powerful pharmaceutical and hormonal products. In Brazil, a pharmaceutical product usually prescribed for the treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcers, misoprostol (Cytotec), is widely used to terminate pregnancy.

In the six countries studied by Guttmacher (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru), each year half a million women are hospitalized because of injuries received from crude, underground abortion.

Worldwide, Guttmacher says,

About one-third of women undergoing unsafe abortions experience serious complications, but fewer than half of these women receive hospital treatment.

Of the estimated 600,000 annual pregnancy-related deaths worldwide, about 13% (or 78,000) are related to complications of unsafe abortion.

Where abortion is legal and performed by medical professionals, however, “The risk of abortion complications is minimal; less than 1% of all abortion patients experience a major complication. … The risk of death associated with childbirth is about 11 times as high as that associated with abortion.”

Forero at the New York Times describes an incident in Pamplona, Colombia.

In this tradition-bound Roman Catholic town one day in April, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room – then promptly arrested.

This incident helped galvanize a movement to loosen restrictions on abortion in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America.

So far, no country has dropped its ban. But the effort, spurred by the high mortality rate among Latin American women who undergo clandestine abortions, has begun to loosen once ironclad restrictions and opened the door to more change.

And change is needed, because …

In an interview, a doctor in Medellín, Colombia, said that while he offered safe, if secret, abortions, many abortionists did not.

“In this profession, we see all kinds of things, like people using witchcraft, to whatever pills they can get their hands on,” said the doctor, who charges about $45 to carry out abortions in women’s homes. He spoke on condition that his name not be used, because performing an abortion in Colombia can lead to a prison term of more than four years.

“They open themselves up to incredible risks, from losing their reproductive systems or, through complications, their lives,” the doctor said.

Would American women be driven to take the same risks if legal abortions were entirely unavailable? If past is prologue, as this Guttmacher paper argues, the answer is yes.

First off, let’s put aside any notion that there were few abortions in America before Roe v. Wade. Since few abortions were officially reported as such before Roe it’s hard to know precisely how common abortion really was. However,

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.

(By some coincidence, currently there are 1.2 million abortions performed per year in the U.S., and in a larger population than in the 1960s. It may be that the actual rate of abortions is somewhat lower now than it was pre-Roe.)

The pre-Roe estimates are based partly on the number of women admitted to hospitals because of complications from illegal abortion.

In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions, which was one abortion-related hospital admission for every 42 deliveries at that hospital that year. In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center, another large public facility serving primarily indigent patients, admitted 701 women with septic abortions, one admission for every 14 deliveries.

A clear racial disparity is evident in the data of mortality because of illegal abortion: In New York City in the early 1960s, one in four childbirth-related deaths among white women was due to abortion; in comparison, abortion accounted for one in two childbirth-related deaths among nonwhite and Puerto Rican women.

Even in the early 1970s, when abortion was legal in some states, a legal abortion was simply out of reach for many. Minority women suffered the most: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 1972 alone, 130,000 women obtained illegal or selfinduced procedures, 39 of whom died. Furthermore, from 1972 to 1974, the mortality rate due to illegal abortion for nonwhite women was 12 times that for white women.

Of course, if Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion wouldn’t be illegal everywhere in the U.S. But if most of the South and Midwest banned abortions, as would probably be the case, women in those states would either go underground or travel to more progressive states to terminate pregnancies. And having to travel tends to delay the procedure, making it more dangerous.

(I have a vision of abortion clinics popping up around state borders, complete with their own motels for out-of-state guests. I can see the signs–Last chance for an abortion before you leave Massachusetts! Some of these place could be fairly posh, since poor women would resort to visiting the neighborhood basement abortionist. Or a coathanger.)

Which brings us to an editorial in today’s New York Times, “Judge Alito and Abortion.”

Judge Alito’s personal views are too well known to be debated – his mother recently told The Associated Press, “Of course, he’s against abortion.” Many people personally oppose abortions while supporting a woman’s right to reach her own decision. But when Judge Alito applied for a promotion to a legal position in the Reagan administration in 1985, he made it clear that he was not one of those people. He was “particularly proud,” he wrote, of his work as a lawyer on cases arguing “that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Judge Alito has tried to explain away that fairly unambiguous statement by saying he was simply an advocate seeking a job. That immediately raised questions about his credibility. Had he misrepresented his views to get a job? Is he misrepresenting them now since he is trying to get an even more important one?

In any case, a memo released later makes it clear that Judge Alito opposed Roe even when he wasn’t a job applicant. In 1985, he told his boss that two pending cases provided an “opportunity to advance the goals of overruling Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects.” It is hard to believe that Judge Alito did not regard Roe as illegitimate when he wrote those words. If he agrees with Roe, it raises serious questions about what kind of lawyer he is, because in that case he would have been working to deny millions of women a fundamental right that he believed the Constitution guaranteed them.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Update: See also “A History of ‘Pro-Life’ Violence.”

Who’s Getting Conned?

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Following up the last post, which explains why Republicans really don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned — Michael Kinsley writes in Slate that most of the talk about precedent on Capitol Hill these days is, of course, all about Roe v. Wade. “[B]y the absurd unwritten rules of these increasingly stylized episodes, they are not allowed to ask him and he is not allowed to answer. So the nominee does a fan dance, tantalizing the audience by revealing little bits of his thinking but denying us a complete view.”

While Roe defenders play this double game, ostensible Roe opponents, especially those in the White House, may be playing a triple game. Their public position is A) Roe is a terrible decision, responsible for a vast slaughter of innocents; B) legal abortion is deeply immoral; C) we ignore all this in choosing Supreme Court justices, and you (Roe defenders) should, too. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not believable. The natural assumption is that Bush is trying to con abortion-rights supporters. Only an idiot would squander the opportunity to rid the nation of Roe because of some fatuous nonsense about picking judges without finding out the one thing you most urgently want to know.

But Machiavellians of my acquaintance believe that it is the anti-abortion folks who are getting conned. The last thing in the world that Republican strategists want is the repeal of Roe. If abortion becomes a legislative issue again, all those pro-choice women and men who have been voting Republican because abortion was safe would have to reconsider, and many would bolt. Meanwhile, the reversal of Roe would energize the left the way Roe itself energized the right. Who needs that?

As I wrote in the last post, for years right-wing politicians have been taking shelter in Roe even as they denounce it. A repeal of Roe would end their little game of making promises to the Fetus People while winking at moderate voters that, of course, we can’t really outlaw abortion.

One tangible example of this are the repeated attempts to ban so-called “partial birth” abortions. Both federal and state legislators continuously crank out laws crafted to both please the Fetus People and displease the courts. And when the laws are bounced–and I think they are written in a way that will ensure they are bounced–the legislators can claim righteous intentions and scapegoat the courts.

But now that the Republicans are in a position to install an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court, the rules of the game are about to change. Conservative politicians will, literally, have to put up or shut up.

It’s for this reason that some lefties think we’d be better off without Roe. I’m not among them. I think if Roe were overturned, statehouses across the land would immediately be thrown into chaos–pretty much where they were before Roe, but worse. Abortions would be unavailable in the South and big chunks of the Midwest, forcing women of means to travel and women without means to perforate themselves with coathangers. Yes, the backlash would be huge, and in time it would drive the almighty “Right to Life” movement the way of the Anti-Saloon League. But it would take years to straighten out the mess, and much suffering would result.

Will Republicans, realizing this, pull back from the brink? Even if they would like to, I’m not sure they can. George W. Bush is the one making nominations, and he doesn’t care about consequences. He just cares about power. Further, the Harriet Miers messs proved that the hard right owns him, and he’s not going to risk “disappointing” them again as long as he’s in office. And even if pigs can fly and either Alito or Roberts were not really anti-Roe, there’s a good chance Bush could get another SCOTUS pick before he vacates the White House.

What about Karl Rove, who has been trying to build a permanent Republican majority? Although Rove is supposed to be some kind of all-seeing evil genius, I wonder sometimes if he isn’t more of an idiot savant. He’s brilliant at doing one thing–building political power through sheer nastiness. He may not be wise enough to see the seeds of destruction he has planted.

If Roe survives the next few years, it’ll be a miracle. But sometimes, as with Prohibition, Americans have to learn the hard way.

The GOP’s Abortion Problem

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Remember last year, when the punditocracy decided that Democrats didn’t know how to talk about abortion? That’s because Dems had to simultaneously promise to honor privacy while showing respect for the anti-privacy position. It’s tricky to do that without coming across as a tad nuanced.

But in the future, Republicans might themselves in the same fix.

This is something I’ve believed for a long time —

The Republican lawmaker who helped guide the GOP to an expanded majority in the House three years ago warned yesterday that a Supreme Court ruling overturning a woman’s legal right to an abortion — a possibility if the high court shifts further to the right — could hurt his party’s political prospects and cause a ”sea change” in suburban voting habits. …

… Davis’s comments underscore the complexities the GOP faces on the issue, at a time when some party strategists worry that the president’s low approval ratings are a drag on Republicans’ prospects in the 2006 congressional midterm elections.

Democratic pollsters have argued that the Republican Party’s firm antiabortion stance risks alienating suburban voters, especially women. But abortion historically has animated conservative voters who overwhelmingly favor restricting or outlawing it and typically vote Republican, said Karlyn H. Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute.

Republican strategists are now pondering whether a Supreme Court ruling that voided Roe would anger moderate suburban voters and galvanize abortion rights activists, giving Democrats an edge.

For years, the Right has been hiding behind Roe v. Wade. Rightie politicians can court the Fetus People vote by calling for the criminalization of abortion, while trusting those “activist judges” to protect them from doing something that would piss off an even bigger chunk of the electorate. The large majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned.

But now that the Right is about to get another right-winger on the Court, at least one Republican is getting nervous.

The abortion rights cases most likely to land on the Supreme Court’s current docket mostly deal with restrictions, but legal observers say the court might still address a question at the heart of Roe: Is there a constitutional right to abortion?

That’s what worries Davis. ”It’s nice to make a stand” against abortion, he said, when ”it’s not a real bullet, it’s more theoretical.”

GOP dominance in the Midwest and South, especially in rural areas, came at a cost. Urban and suburban moderates and independents are getting squeamish about voting Republican. And if Roe v. Wade goes down, expect a stamped to the Left.

One sometimes hears that there was little abortion controversy before Roe, which is a flat-out lie. I well remember the Missouri state legislature did little else but argue about abortion, and I believe that was fairly standard. When Roe was decided, the relief in state capitals was palpable. If Roe is reversed, several states will outlaw abortion immediately, and most of the remainder will be embroiled in abortion wars as the Fetus People demand satisfaction. And Republicans won’t be able to hide any more. Most of ’em will have to find a way to placate the Fetus People while not scaring away everyone else.

Ain’t enough nuance on the planet to pull that one off.