Women Under Siege!

Cause for Alarm from the new and improved Bush-stacked Supreme Court (not available for a limited time only)

By Leah Fishbein, 4/20/07

As many already know, last Wednesday The Supreme Court
contradicted its own 2000 decision to overturn a Nebraska ban on “partial birth abortion” and
upheld the federal abortion ban in the cases of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzalez v. Carhart. This hearing occurred in response to the
Federal Abortion Ban Act legislation passed by Congress and signed by Bush in
2003[i].
This decision is an appalling one, and it is furthermore an unprecedented
setback for women and those who care about them. The Supreme Court has never, in the thirty-plus years since
the right to abortion was won in Roe V. Wade, made a decision restricting
women’s reproductive rights without
providing for cases in which a woman’s health is at stake.

Why you should be
concerned

Here is what some prominent people have been saying about
this ban:

“I consider the Supreme Court Ban on one type of abortion
procedure to be an annexation of  Women’s Wombs  by the U. S
Government and as such should be viewed by all people of conscience as an act
of war against women.”

-Merle Hoffman,
founder, Choices Women’s MedicalCenter, Queens NY on
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

“This ruling shows the true colors of
the current Bush-stacked majority of the Supreme Court: it does not care about
the health, well-being, and safety of American women. This must serve as a
wake-up call to women: we are losing our fundamental rights as Bush continues
to stack the courts.”[ii]

-Eleanor Smeal,
Feminist Majority Foundation

“The time is now right to launch
aggressive legal challenges across America to abortion on demand”The
court has now said it’s OK to ban procedures. We can do more than just put
hurdles in front of women seeking abortions; we can put roadblocks in front of
them.” [iii]

-Troy Newman,
president of Operation Rescue (in the past leading proponents of violence
directed at abortion providers and clinics)

“The government has a legitimate and
substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life,”[iv]

-The Supreme Court
of the United States,
in its decision on the PBABA

For all those who have been waiting for a sign that the
Christian right minority in this country has co-opted our government and
society (because on paper it just “sounds too conspiratorial”, or because “they
haven’t really made any attempts to change things in a radical way”) that sign
appeared yesterday in the form of a ruling dropped by judges intent on forcing
old-school, biblical morality on us, and it dropped like a bomb onto women’s
bodies. That ruling spread over this country like a silent alarm, the
opposition and outrage necessary to stop this and further attacks on women
palpably missing from most of the country, at least in any massive way, at
least yet. That ruling slapped us in the face, challenging a basic assumption
that healthcare decisions should be between doctors and patients rather than
outsider religious factions and politicians, leaving the patient out of the
process entirely. That ruling poured over us like a bucket of ice cold water
hopefully waking us up to the reality that this is the ultimate sign, one that
declares that Bush and his counterparts in the Supreme Court, now holding the
majority, do not value in the least
women’s health. This consideration is especially secondary in the face of
support from their theocratic political base and in light of their personal
“moral values,” (values that don’t contradict with the possibility of free fire
zones in Iraq
or of using the death penalty as a conflict-resolution tool). If permitted-if
there is not massive uprising in the face of this ruling-the Christian Right,
c/o the Bush Regime, will move to
overturn Roe. V Wade, with the stated goal of federally outlawing abortion
as a whole. Seriously. Just take a
look at any of a number of websites for the National Right to Life Committee,
Focus on the Family, Operation Rescue/Save America and this is easily
understood.

The science of things

Blatantly missing from this whole debate, from the media
coverage and the demands of the Christian fundamentalists and the wobbly
democrats” opinions and public opinion in general, is the science that is an
invaluable tool in understanding why the procedure banned in yesterday’s
decision should never have been up for question at all. To clear things up, we
must first understand that the very language of the ban is confounded by a
familiar forgetfulness of the media and of the culture in this country.

Where are the reports of the origins of this term “partial
birth” in light of the ban? Are we so quick to forget that the very people
attempting to outlaw abortion invented this non-medical term, one not even
acknowledged by the scientific community, to scare people into railing against
this process (really called D&X, or Dilation and Extraction). Coined by the
National Right to Life Committee in 1995 with the hopes that “as the public learns what a
‘partial-birth abortion’ is, they might also learn something about other abortion
methods, and that this would foster a growing opposition to abortion,”[v]
the term was quickly introduced in the title of republican-sponsored
legislation to ban the new procedure developed by an Ohio-based physician. The
alternate process commonly utilized after the 20^th week of a
pregnancy, dilation and evacuation, performs the necessary dismemberment of the
fetus inside the womb, often causing severe blood loss and also possibly
gashing the cervix which can easily prevent any future possibility for pregnancy-in
effect, sterilization. Likewise, in the event of an attempted c-section in
place of other methods there is a high risk of infection.

D&X is a
dilation of the cervix in order to pull the fetus out of the woman’s body, with
the doctor then puncturing the fetuses” head, often sucking the fluid out so
that the cranial area might compress enough to pull the fetus out of the
woman’s body. The American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists indicates
that in certain circumstances, the D&X procedure is the best one for a
women’s health. The procedure is not encouraged in other cases. This
process is clearly not used lightly, in fun or by scheming doctors out of spite
for “babies”. The American Medical Association bylaws actually explicitly
prevent physicians from performing this procedure unless the patient’s health
is at risk. This is the medical community self-regulating to prevent a serious
and, yes, controversial operation from taking place unless completely necessary
by medical standards. But this regulation is not enough for people who are not
concerned with science, medicine or women’s rights, people who would see
women’s lives chained to the unpredictability of childbearing whenever their
God deems it necessary, people who would rather jeopardize a woman’s health and
have her fetus born, free to live its 5 minutes of life-often the case in
situations where this procedure is necessary.

Let’s provide some
statistical basis for an understanding of the utility of this process. The Alan
Guttmacher Institute research group found that in 2000, around 15,000 abortions
were performed on women 20 weeks or more along in their pregnancies-those
abortions overwhelmingly occurring between the 20th and 24th week. Of those
15,000, only about 2,200 D&X procedures were performed–0.2 percent of the
1.3 million abortions believed to be performed that year. These procedures are
almost never performed after fetal viability, this being so rare that the
“pro-life” movement actually panicked when Congress originally attempted to ban
D&Xs only in cases of fetal viability-according to the “pro-life” movement,
this ban wouldn’t even be effective with that stipulation because those cases
hardly exist. This is why this ruling is much more political propaganda rather
than a genuine move for “life.”

Many D&X
abortions occur because of a fetal condition called hydrocephalus–which 1 in
2000 fetuses develop–in which the cranium is abnormally enlarged up to 20″
(compared to a normal adult diameter of 7-8″), making delivery dangerous,
extremely painful and even fatal for both the fetus (especially in a caesarean
section) and the mother. Hydrocephalus is hard to detect before or even early
in the second trimester-hence a major part of the justification for the
legality of this procedure. Aside from all of this, it is necessary to
understand that setting the precedent for this exclusion of the patient-the
woman-from the patient-physician relationship is a major violation of human
rights and women’s rights. We should have this information, and be confident in
a scientific justification for this procedure, but we must also push forward
with an understanding of the plans of the Christian Right for women and society
and a firm belief in the autonomous power women must hold over their own bodies
and futures in order to have justice, real
human dignity and a future in which all are really equal. Any encroachments
on this autonomy equal a negation of the basic principles it rests on-the
equality of women (we”re still working on that one, huh?), the right of women
to any kind of future they might choose, and the inherent human value of half
the world’s population.

Painting the bigger picture

In light of the fact that this ban will disproportionately
affect working class people and people of color who already have limited access
to family planning services and are less likely to be able to abort early or
prevent pregnancy with contraceptives”In light of the fact that for these
groups, this means unsafe, back-alley abortions that often result in severe
injury and death”In light of the Federal Deficit Reduction Act and the
consequent price hike on birth control pills on college campuses (at the
college that the author attends, the price rose 133%, from $15 to $35 dollars
without the subsidy)”In light of the continuing attacks on Roe“In light of the fundamentalist Christians refusing to sell
women their prescriptions for birth control or Plan B”In light of the Florida
woman who was raped, then jailed and refused her second emergency contraception
pill by a fundamentalist jail worker”In light of the Keroack appointment to HHS (and subsequent removal!) and the
hundreds of identical appointments that we don’t even hear about, and in light
of the FDA appointments, the reactionary extremist legislation being proposed
and even passed all over on a state level (death certificates for aborted
fetuses; public record of abortion patients–women’s names and information;
parental notification, etc…), the pregnancy crisis centers being funded by
our tax money, abstinence only education being funded, the churches being funded to wage war on women’s rights”In light of all
this”

This entire set of distasteful and moreover scary events is
only the beginning of what has been going on. The attacks on women’s rights
under the Bush Regime could fill pages and pages, but that research is up to
each one of us. What space we have left here is for us to understand that these
attacks are not something the Christian Right is going to let fizzle as we wait
for Bush to be replaced with Bush-lite in 2008. They will push this through as
long as they have disproportionate institutional power, and they will have that
power as long as Bush stays in office.

In light of all this, we must move forward, understanding
and acting on this Supreme Court decision as the flashpoint that it is and
encouraging massive, unprecedented resistance to the whole Bush program because
of this. Not one of us wants to see the end to Roe V. Wade; and this event really and truly is their second major
victory (the first being getting someone so firmly on their side in office).
This is a major decision through which the Christian right and the Bush Regime
are signaling to us. They are significantly and clearly stepping up this
cultural battle, and this “surge” is now clear to the U.S. and the
world. In the war on women, this is their Sand Creek Massacre, and if we don’t
revolt because of this, they will be
able to push the rest of this whole program forward whether we change our minds
or not. So I suppose the question must be: What are you going to do about this?