Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin report on the frightening implications of fetal personhood.
Each year, six million women in the United States become pregnant. Approximately four million women go to term, one million have abortions, and nearly one million experience pregnancy losses, including thousands of stillbirths that occur after 28 weeks of pregnancy. All of these women are at risk when legislators attempt to establish a point in pregnancy when women may be deprived of their civil and human rights.
A stark but accurate way of putting it. If the pregnancy has civil and human rights then the woman who is pregnant loses them.
NAPW has fielded calls for help from women in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas who, late in their pregnancies, were threatened with court orders or other state action if they did not give up their rights to medical decision-making, bodily integrity, and health and submit to unnecessary cesarean surgery.
These are not idle threats. In fact, some women who have refused cesarean surgery or rejected advice to be hospitalized late in pregnancy have been taken prisoner and forced to submit to highly invasive medical and surgical procedures. The justifications for such actions have everything to do with the principles that would be established by laws banning abortions after 20 weeks. One Florida federal district court has already (wrongly) ruled that if states may outlaw abortion at some point during pregnancy and force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, then surely the state can also force a woman to undergo major medical procedures to deliver the child she “affirmatively desires to have.”
Sure. Women get pregnant, therefore women should not have full human rights. It totally makes sense.
In an article published earlier this year in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, we document more than 400 cases involving the arrests and detentions of—and forced medical interventions on—pregnant women taking place between 1973 and 2005. Since 2005, we have documented more than 300 additional cases.
Our research finds little direct legal authority for these actions. Rather, prosecutors, hospital lawyers, and arresting officers rely on laws like the one being voted on next week in Albuquerque and those already passed in 13 states. They claim that if the state may protect the unborn by depriving pregnant women of their rights in the abortion context, consistency requires that pregnant women be deprived of their rights in all contexts, including birth and pregnancy loss.
These cases press home the need for abortion opponents and supporters alike to oppose these bans and secure society’s commitment to the fundamental principle: that a woman is a person with civil and human rights throughout her pregnancy. Before and after 20 weeks. Always.
Yes let’s agree on that.
Didn’t they investigate all miscarriages as crimes back in Romania when Ceaușescu was in charge?
Republicans these days are a bunch of communists. Seriously, “Go back to Russia” is what we need to shout at all these conservatives.
I have been trying to make this point for years. (e.g. here if you’re interested.) Abortion is not about privacy. It’s about your right to make your own decisions about your own body, a right which is absolute in modern democracies. If it wasn’t, kidney patients could requisition one of your spare kidneys. If it wasn’t, there would be no right to self-defense.
The right is absolute — except when it comes to women. Interesting, that. It’s almost as if women were only half of a person. Or maybe three-fifths. Thirteenth Amendment indeed.
Francisco Bacopa has it right. In Ceaucescu’s Romania, Doctors who were guilty of abortion, and this included treating the women who showed up in emergency rooms hemmorrhaging after self-aborting, were sent to prison and lost their licence,so one desperate attempt at DIY abortion would mean one dead woman,one less doctor and several (semi-)orphaned children for Romanian society to deal with.
This of course had fuck all to do with genuine socialism, but was a result of authoritarianism, which is anti-human no matter which ideology one uses as an excuse for it.
Hello Ophelia. I clicked the link and read the article but am afraid I don’t understand or just can’t believe what this article suggests.
WHAT????? WHY??????
I know — from experience — that physicians do not necessarily consult a woman when she is in the process of giving birth or necessarily even inform her of what they are doing to her and the child, but, but, to be taken prisoner?????????
I dunno. Fetal personhood just means the fetuses are people. Nothing new.There’s all sorts of laws about people.
Persons don’t have the right to co-opt other peoples’ organs as needed.
So let them sue. Once they realize they might have to give people like me their organs, they’ll shut up.
It’s been argued in the blogosphere but not, to my knowledge, in court that fetal personhood laws give the fetus a property interest in another person’s body, and thus violate the Thirteenth Amendment.
BTW, has anyone asked a Catholic how souls get divided in monozygotic twins? If “ensoulment” occurs at fertilization, the single zygote gets one soul. But sometimes it divides once before starting to differentiate. In parts of Africa, it is assumed that one of every pair of twins is a soulless demon, so the local witch doctor is summoned to decide which child must be killed. I suspect that the Vatican has an answer ready: that the reason for monozygotic twinning is that sometimes God inserts two souls into one zygote. That leaves the large fraction of twin conceptions that result in just one fetus, because one embryo gets absorbed early. Maybe that soul gets a free pass to Heaven. Remember that Limbo has been abolished. It’s more likely that they will just roll out the all-purpose Mysterious Ways copout.
I did once back when I was in high school. I was told to stop asking silly questions. I’ve yet to ask it again though; I get the impression that it was likely the most coherent response I could expect.
stever @20
The Catholic response to monozygotic twins ensoulment is that when the blastula splits into two complete blastulae the soul also splits into two complete souls. Just as the blastula essentially clones itself, the soul clones itself.
I didn’t spend 16 years of Catholic education for nothing. Would you like to know how the Catholic dogma of the Assumption (Mary being taken bodily to Heaven) came about? It because in 451 a bishop couldn’t give a Byzantine emperor what he wanted but the bishop wanted to keep his head.
Hmm, so if a pregnant woman can be forced into medical procedures for the “benefit” of the fetus, does that mean we could force parents to get their children vaccinated? Or force medicine-nonbeliving, faith-healing-beliving parents to take their damn sick kids to the damn emergency room? Somehow not.
It’s almost as if the fetus is more important than the child.
This is the bottom line. It is quite simply a bid to make all women prisoners.
(gratuitous pedantry)
The word pregnancy refers to the condition of being pregnant, or to the time period during which that condition persists. Pregnancy is not an object. So it makes no more sense to speak of giving rights to “the pregnancy” than it does to speak of giving rights to “intoxication” or “January”.
(/gratuitous pedantry)
Agreed!
While this should be true in any sane world, it’s not what’s currently happening. See the arrest and forced interventions of pregnant women for the crime of refusing procedures.
Jack,
It’s almost like the point of laws like this have nothing to do with the well being of children. It’s almost as if the point to is to punish and control women.
Silentbob – well that’s exactly what’s at issue. I didn’t use the word “pregnancy” because I’m too dim to realize that it’s not the usual way to refer to the fetus. I used it to make the point that the fetus isn’t [yet] a baby and that it IS still part of someone else’s body. It’s not so much pedantry to point out that pregnancy refers to a condition as it is missing the point. The fetus is part of a condition, or more precisely a process. The absurdity of claiming a pregnancy has rights was part of the point I was making.