Abortion Post

In a report which swoons very little, and is far more serious than its usual fashion liberal fare:

"...This is a big jump, and it says that anti-abortion legislators want to be very active on this issue and they have some momentum,' Elizabeth Nash, a public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, told HuffPost. 'They used to chip away at Roe v. Wade, and now they're hacking away at it with a cleaver.'

More than 120 bills limiting abortion rights have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature so far, and the 15 bills that enacted into law include a bill in Utah that limits abortion coverage in all private health plans and laws in Utah and Virginia that require their health departments to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics.

Some states are making it exponentially more difficult, both financially and psychologically, for a woman to have an abortion. In South Dakota, a woman now has to wait at least 72 hours after seeking an abortion to have the actual procedure and is legally required to obtain counseling from a 'crisis pregnancy center' -- which are unregulated by the state and have the explicit goal of talking women out of abortions -- before having the procedure.

South Dakota has also mandated that the physician performing the abortion counsel the patient in person about the health risk factors relating to abortion prior to her 72-hour waiting period. This limitation, in a rural state like South Dakota with very few abortion providers, can put an unnecessary burden on low-income women trying to balance work and childcare.

'In South Dakota, there's one provider and he flies in once a week, so in practice what would happen is that a woman would go on a Saturday or a Friday, get the counseling, and then have to wait at least a week for the provider to come back,' said Nash. 'They're saying the three day waiting period is no big deal, but it is, particularly for women who aren't well off and can't take off work and have to deal with childcare. A lot of burdens are placed on a woman when she has to make these two trips.'

In addition to imposing pre-abortion waiting periods, legislators in 13 states have introduced laws forcing women to obtain an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion. Bills in seven of those states -- Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas -- would require the woman view the fetus and hear a detailed verbal description of it before undergoing the mandatory waiting period.

'This bill just allows them to see the child inside of them, so it's not just out of sight, out of mind,' said Alabama State Sen. Clay Scofield (R-Albertville). 'It's critical in their decision-making process.'

Conservatives are also trying to impose gestational limits on abortions at an unprecedented rate, according to the Guttmacher report. Legislators in 17 states have introduced 35 measures patterned on a 2010 Nebraska law that bans abortion at 20 weeks, based on the presumption that a fetus feels pain at that point. Two of those measures would ban abortions beginning at 18 weeks..."

As this process accelerates, and as more and more legislatures are captured by zealots masquerading as small or responsible government activists, it will be just, moral and right to provide cheap, reliable, safe and secret abortions to any woman who wants one, for whatever reason, and for no other reason than she wants one. Especially if it breaks a law to do so.

These laws can only be enforced on women. Granted, some men who help them might be charged and prosecuted as conspirators or abettors, but the law is written deliberately to create a legal category of punishment and constraint for only one kind of person. For women.

As I wrote a year or so ago:

No woman exists with exact identity to any other woman. Not one. Not every woman possesses a uterus. No woman occupies the exact space, time or personhood of any other. The category "woman," like any other fiction, serves a communicative need, but does not express a [perfectly applicable]* universal condition. But, enough women have a uterus, that the possession of one (if we can really treat any organ as a "possession") approaches the norm.

Not every man exists with exact identity...yadda yadda yadda. Most men get by without a uterus. Enough that any given man not having a uterus approaches the norm.

Women have wombs, men don't. Against some allegedly universal standard (person, human, citizen) women and men fail to measure up as functionally equal (or, identical, level). Women and men have different [generally physical]* genders.

(Caveat: I don't hold any position which follows from gender difference to subservience of one gender to another.)

A person enforcing a law defining how a woman "uses" her uterus cannot apply that force equally to both a man and a woman, cannot treat the law as a universal, because nearly one half of any group of subjects or citizens lacks the organ in question.

Because [this sort of law] applies only to women, [and] can only apply to women.

In applying the law, enforcement erases the presuppositions (any chance, really) of  "equality before the law." Or, in other words, any law requiring women to use their wombs in any manner at all necessarily treats with women as unequal to men, before the law. It isolates women as possessing generative organs in need of regulation, in relation to men who have generative organs which don't require regulation.

Let's repeat: it creates an enforceable inequity. Not the functional non-equality** of variation, such that men and women have physiological differences, discussed above.  A very different sort of inequality. One which sets up women as subjects of enforcement never applied to men.

* - as loosely defined by generative organs. This does not address, and is not intended to address, the feeling, experience of or identification with a gender, as a position on a range of possibilities of sexual and emotional self, nor the social construction of "gender norms."

** - or, less clumsily, non-identity...