Category Archives: abortion

“Pure Hate”

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Must read opinion piece in today’s Washington Post — “Facing The Reality Of Choice” by Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

The author–40, married, one child–suffered from “blighted ovum,” a type of miscarriage that develops when a fertilized egg implants in the uturus but does not develop. “Instead,” the author writes, “there was no one home inside my womb, only an empty gestational sac and hormones, somehow tricked, careening inside me.”

Instead of waiting weeks to be admitted to a hospital, Mrs. Lee decided to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic to have the contents of her uturus removed.

But, while politically pro-choice, I didn’t think that my situation had anything to do with the whole abortion debate, and so I put it out of my mind, so much so that when my husband and I drove to Planned Parenthood the morning of the procedure and found our car immediately surrounded by gesturing people, we both thought, “How nice of the Planned Parenthood people to make sure we knew where to park.”

As I exited the car like some kind of odd celebrity, I wasn’t prepared for the older woman who shoved her face an inch from mine and screamed that I was murdering my baby. I wasn’t prepared for the looks of pure hate, no, the looks that could kill. I seem to vaguely recall being warned not to make eye contact, but I did, and I saw what I thought was someone who would gladly murder me to keep me from entering the clinic.

“What baby?” I blurted. Then a real Planned Parenthood escort took my arm, told me not to talk to them and led me inside. The two minutes had felt like a siege.

The article is somewhat marred by the obligatory “balance”–

Both sides of the debate are so heavily sunk into their bunkers. On one side, it seems monstrous that a handful of people, mostly men, decide on a procedure that involves, criminalizes and punishes women, and I know there are conservative, Republican, so-called pro-life women who feel they sit on the morally superior side but then end up having an abortion for the same reasons we pro-choice women are driven to it. But pro-choice people must also acknowledge somewhere in their hearts that this procedure is not the moral equivalent of merely surgically removing tissue.

I believe most pro-choice people, especially those who are parents, do acknowledge somewhere in their hearts that this procedure is not the moral equivalent of merely surgically removing tissue. But short of going around in sackcloth and ashes, exactly how are we supposed to communicate to the world that, yes, it’s not just surgically removing tissue. We understand. But if we say it’s a personal choice, then it’s a personal choice, and unlike the haters outside the clinics we don’t go about butting into other people’s personal choices.

That said, I think it would be wonderful if we could be open and honest about our choices. Mrs. Lee mentions that in Japan there are shrines for aborted and miscarried children, and mothers can go there to openly express their grief without being judged or condemned. That could never happen here. If the Fetus People were to catch wind of a shrine like that, by the next day they’d have it surrounded so they could harrass anyone who showed up to mourn.

We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Paternalism

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There was much arguing yesterday about the Casey decision, which struck down a provision requiring husbands to be informed of their wives’ plan to abort. SCOTUS nominee Alito didn’t have a problem with this. Several righties yesterday claimed we lefties were being hysterical when we said such a provision amounted to giving husbands a veto.

Here is an explanation of Casey by Ed Whelan of the very rightie National Review Online:

Subject to several exceptions, that provision required that a physician performing an abortion on a married woman obtain from her a signed statement that she had notified her spouse that she was about to undergo an abortion. Such notice was not required where the woman states that (a) her spouse is not the father of the child; (b) her spouse cannot be located; (c) the pregnancy resulted from spousal sexual assault that had been reported; or (d) that she has reason to believe that furnishing notice would likely result in the infliction of bodily injury on her (by her spouse or by any other person). Notice was also not required in the event of a medical emergency.

As I’ve written earlier, one of the most common qualities of rightiness is an inability to make a distinction between rhetoric and reality. In this situation, righties take the rhetoric at face value (See? She doesn’t have to get permission; she doesn’t have to provide a document if the husband might hurt her) and fail to comprehend how these little requirements might actually function in the real world, in real lives, in real marriages.

It’s not crystal clear to me whose signature would have been required. If she has to get her husband’s signature then we’re essentially looking at a permission slip; a husband who disagrees with the decision is likely not going to sign it. If the wife merely has to sign an affadavit stating that she informed her husband, then most wives who are afraid to speak to their husbands are simply going to lie and say they informed him when they didn’t. And that fear may not be that he will break her teeth; it’s just as likely she fears he will hate her if he found out, and the marriage would be damaged. And an emotionally abusive husband may not strike her but would find other creative ways to make her life hell.

Whelan continues,

All members of the panel agreed that the relevant question was whether the spousal-notice provision constituted an “undue burden” under the analysis that had been set forth in O’Connor’s opinions (which all agreed provided the governing legal standard). … Alito explained at length why the analysis that O’Connor had offered in her opinions established that the spousal-notice provision did not constitue an “undue burden”. … It is of course true that, in the subsequent Supreme Court appeal, O’Connor ruled that the spousal-notice provision did constitute an undue burden. But Alito’s opinion compellingly demonstrates that the body of O’Connor’s writings that was then available to him supported the opposite conclusion.

So a fair summary of Alito’s opinion is that he read O’Connor’s opinions to indicate that a spousal-notice provision that had all sorts of exceptions did not constitute an undue burden. No one should present the case as having anything to do with spousal consent rather than notice, no one should misrepresent the scope of the exceptions, and no one should read the case as expressing Alito’s own constitutional or policy views (as opposed to his reading of Supreme Court precedent) on any aspect of abortion.

Let it not be forgot that O’Connor is more conservative than anything else; just because she expressed a more liberal view in some opinions doesn’t erase the fact that her worldview is more rightie than leftie. In essence O’Connor tends to veer left in those cases in which she might have had some personal experience (such as sex discrimination) and therefore “gets it.” But like most righties, when she wanders outside the realm of her personal experiences the real world becomes a foreign place for her, a place she can’t even imagine. And the fact that Alito couldn’t see the burden is prima facie evidence that he can’t think outside a rightie box.

The only way the notification provision wouldn’t be burdensome to many women is if it wasn’t enforced. If the women could simply swear they spoke to their husband even if they didn’t, without fear of repurcussion, then perhaps it wouldn’t be all that burdensome. But the only purpose of such a law would be to cause the woman seeking an abortion more stress and grief. In other words, the essential point of such legislation is to be burdensome.

Righties tend to fall into the argument that the provision wasn’t burdensome because it was toothless, which ought to be a clue to them that the intent of the law was burdensome, indeed.

And if the lie was something that could come back to bite the wife someday, then it would be very burdensome. And it’s not clear to me if the wife or the medical facility that performed the abortion could face litigation from an angry husband who found out. Can of worms, people?

The provision represents another rightie tendency, which is that righties essentially distrust human beings to make their own decisions. We saw that during the Terri Schiavo flap, when all manner of legislation was proposed that would have allowed government to intrude in a family’s end-of-life decisions. To a rightie, human beings are mindless beasts who need to be controlled by Big Brother so they don’t make “bad” decisions; i.e., decisions with which the rightie disagrees. And righties always assume that people who make these “bad” decisions have done so because they don’t think. Notice all the legislation imposed by states intended to make women reflect on a decision to abort, as if women can’t think for themselves. It’s beyond their comprehension that most women who decide to abort do understand exactly what a pregnancy is and realize that abortion is a serious matter.

Their whole attitude is insulting to women and reeks of the vilest kind of paternalism. Which, frankly, pushes a lot of buttons. So some of us do find righties and their twisted idea that they should have the power to control the rest of us more than infuriating. This is not “hysteria.” This is anger. Righteous anger.

I suspect that most married couples discuss a decision to abort without having the law tell them to do so. I also believe that any woman who fears her husband needs to either get over her fear or get a divorce; that’s not the way any human being should go through her life. But these are matters people need to work out for themselves. Big Gubmint need not be involved.

Update: Emily Bazelon has an excellent explanation of the Casey decision at Slate.

…the [Supreme] court rejected Alito’s narrow reading of what sort of regulation constitutes an undue burden. O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter wrote: “A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” The definition of an undue burden on the right to abortion as a “substantial obstacle” wasn’t exactly what the pro-choice crowd wanted to hear. But it was a lot better than the “severe limitation” prohibition, or veto, that Alito had propose–definitions that would have allowed much more extreme restrictions.

The triumvirate also parted company with Alito entirely over his vision of the rights of husbands. The Constitution did not permit states to require wives to tell their husbands before getting an abortion, the Supreme Court majority found. The O’Connor-Souter-Kennedy opinion cited a lot of trial testimony about the prevalence and danger of domestic violence. Pennsylvania’s law exempted wives who’d been raped by their husbands, but not those who’d been coerced into “sexual behavior other than penetration,” the three justices noted. They continued:

In well-functioning marriages, spouses discuss important intimate decisions such as whether to bear a child. But there are millions of women in this country who are the victims of regular physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their husbands. Should these women become pregnant, they may have very good reasons for not wishing to inform their husbands of their decision to obtain an abortion. Many may have justifiable fears of physical abuse, but may be no less fearful of the consequences of reporting prior abuse to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Many may have a reasonable fear that notifying their husbands will provoke further instances of child abuse; these women are not exempt from [Pennsylvania’s] notification requirement. Many may fear devastating forms of psychological abuse from their husbands, including verbal harassment, threats of future violence, the destruction of possessions, physical confinement to the home, the withdrawal of financial support, or the disclosure of the abortion to family and friends.The dissenters, by contrast, adopted Alito’s sunnier, husband-centered version of marriage. Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist (joined by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Byron White), emphasized “a husband’s interests in procreation within marriage and in the potential life of his unborn child.” Rehnquist paid Alito the high compliment of directly quoting his words about the good that could come from requiring women to talk to their husbands. “This participation might in some cases result in a decision to proceed with the pregnancy,” Rehnquist concluded.

Righties keep claiming that we who oppose the notification requirement are hopelessly ignorant when we say it might cause women to suffer harm. I guess three members of the Supreme Court are hopelessly ignorant. The justices, of course, assumed that women who fear their husbands would have complied with the law.

Better Middle Than Late

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I’ve been reading and listening to comments on nominee Sam Alito, including mention of the Planned Parenthood v. Farmer decision mentioned below. And I’ve noticed that rightie commenters and most “journalists” persistently make a mistake when they talk about this decision. That mistake is to say that the case in question was about a ban on late-term abortion. It was not. It most definitely was not.

The law in question banned “partial-birth” abortion. Anti-privacy forces confuse the issue by insisting that “partial birth” and “late term” mean the same thing. To me “late-term” implies that the pregnancy is almost full term. But the procedure that righties call “partial birth”–intact dilation and extraction (D&X) and dilation and evacuation (D&E)–are procedures performed mostly (if not entirely) in the second trimester, which reasonably would be considered MID term.

According to the written decision, 80 to 90 percent of abortions performed after the first trimester are D&E abortions. These are commonly done between 13 and 20 weeks’ gestation. The D&X is a less common variation of the D&E that involves collapsing the skull and removing the fetal body intact, as opposed to retrieving it in several pieces via a D&E. The D&X variation reduces the risk of cervical laceration and also provides an intact body, which might be required for diagnostic purposes.

These are not the only procedures available for second-trimester abortion. After 16 weeks’ gestation, the most common procedure used is induction, which involves injecting a lethal substance into the uturus and then inducing labor. The fetus might also be removed by hysterotomy, which is like a C-section, and sometimes by hysterectomy–removal of the uturus.

For reference: The second trimester is from weeks 13 to 26. The third trimester is weeks 27 to 42. A fetus is potentially viable only after the 23rd week, and that’s iffy. Babies born after at least 27 weeks’ gestation usually survive. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, only 1.4 percent of abortions in the U.S. are performed after 21 weeks’ gestation. I haven’t been able to find reliable data on third trimester abortions.

Anyway, now that we’ve got the “late-term abortion” nonsense out of the way– like other such laws, the act nullified in Planned Parenthood v. Farmer did not use medical terms, but instead used the term “partial birth abortion,” and defined that term in such a way that physicians testified they couldn’t tell exactly what was being banned. Further, the act appeared to ban abortion procedures on a “living” fetus, meaning a fetus with a discernible heartbeat, which could be as early as seven weeks’ gestation. Not exactly “late-term.”

And, if in fact the law banned only D&E and D&X procedures, it didn’t ban abortions at all, because other procedures are available. The righties never seem to notice that. It’s also beyond belief that righties can’t manage to write a law banning D&E or D&X procedures that might get approved by a court. I believe all they’d have to do is use actual medical terms and definitions and provide a “life or health of the mother” exception. But state legislatures keep passing essentially the same muddled, sloppily worded mess, and courts keep slapping it down. Makes me wonder if they actually don’t want it to become law; they just like putting on a show for the voters.

Regarding Judge Alito’s decision, provided in the last post, he was being clear that he felt it was his duty as a LOWER court judge to find according to existing case law. However, the law in question was a bare-assed attempt to sneak a total abortion ban on the books by means of bad phraseology. Any judge going along with the gag and approving legislation-by-deceit would seem pretty “activist” to me.

Also: From The Mahablog archives–why a “right to privacy” IS in the Constitution.

Update: Hunter gently explains why he disagrees with a particular conservative talking point. Billmon discusses Alita’s Casey dissent. Digby looks at the “strategy” behind abandoning Roe v. Wade. Fafblog does Hallowe’en. And the Rude One is, well, rude.