Because abortion-criminalizers are rigid, absolute, dogmatic, uncompromising, and extreme in their ideological discourse, pro-choice individuals and organizations have articulated and developed official positions that offer the same political intransigeance, as counter-weight.
Frances Kissling - you may remember her from this - raises some challenging and complex questions in the first part of an essay posted at Salon.
We are pro-life to the extent that we do not want to abuse or harm living things if we can avoid it. That at least is our ideal -- which we then regularly violate with war, torture, the death penalty, and the callous way in which we deny those in need healthcare, food, shelter and education. Still, I realize that expressing pro-life values, when you're pro-choice, is much more complicated. The fact that the fetus resides in the body of a woman requires special consideration of her rights.
Protecting the fetus in any way comes with a cost that only women can bear. But I have come to believe that women's autonomy does not require that all efforts be made to protect women from pain or from hearing the word "no." The Supreme Court attempted to balance women's autonomy and respect for life in Roe [vs Wade] by allowing states to "proscribe abortion [after viability] except when it is necessary to protect the life or health of the mother."
These are valid considerations in the US where the laws are different. In Canada, the termination of a pregnancy has been for over 20 years a strictly medical intervention regulated by the health care system. Yet we know for a fact that access to first-trimester abortion is not quickly nor easily available in all jurisdictions and that has consequences for women's reproductive health as well as their choices.
It's safe to predict that Blob Blogging Wingnut and other fetus fetishists will prevaricate and spin snippets of Kissling's reflection while ignoring its resolutely pro-choice foundation. SHE has sneered and twisted HER own meaning from such iconoclastic musings before - it may be the fact that Kissling is a former president of Catholics for Choice that gets HER knickers in knots.
In parting, we at DAMMIT JANET! support Emma the Embryo and her perspective, as drawn below by Alison at her own blogsite Creekside.
2 comments:
The egg marketing board?
You do realize that those eggs aren't fertilized, right?
LOL.
And the logic "if the fetus is a person, the woman isn't." Makes perfect sense. Not.
Funny, I just had a discussion about how YOU and YOUR cohort of zygote zealots are literal-minded. Thank you for the timely illustration of that fact.
Emma makes as much sense to pro-choice as Umbert does to pro-lies abortion criminalizers.
A fetus sets off a fire inside the uterus that has been gestating him for what, several years now? Yep, yep, that's YOUR kind of logic. YOU betcha.
So how is that ongoing Hate is a Family Value campaign working out for YOU?
Post a Comment