Because Incubators Have No Rights

Abortion is as old as conception.  What was new about Roe v. Wade was codifying in constitutional law a woman's control over her own body, including a non-viable fetus.

So reversing that autonomous control means reversing the primacy of the adult woman over the non-viable fetus.

Thus the lie not only that a fetus - a zygote, a blastocyst, a single fertilized cell - has an independent life, but that the "life" of an undifferentiated clump of cells takes precedence over the life of the adult woman who gestates it.

From that lie, forced pregnancy is the logical next step. And not just forced pregnancy, but shackling and imprisonment for any woman who dares to put her own health and life ahead of a fetus'.

Karen McVeigh at The Guardian: 

Hundreds of women have been arrested, convicted, jailed, detained in mental institutions or forced to endure medical procedures as a result of the "criminalisation of pregnancy" over the last four decades, a new report has found.

In the first study of its kind, to be published on Tuesday, researchers from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) identified 413 criminal and civil cases across 44 states involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women's liberty between 1973 and 2005. NAWP said that it is aware of a further 250 cases since 2005. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, it said.

The report, which will appear in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, found that women were denied a wide range of basic human rights, including the right to life, liberty, equal protection and due process of law "based solely on their pregnancy status".

It found a wide range of cases in which pregnant women were arrested and detained not only if they ended a pregnancy or expressed an intention to end a pregnancy, but also after suffering unintentional pregnancy loss.

The cases of detention and forced medical intervention varied widely and included one in which a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her having an abortion.

Another involved a woman in Oregon who refused a doctor's recommendation for additional testing for gestational diabetes. She was held in a locked psychiatric ward. Another case involved a court in Washington DC, which ordered a critically ill woman to undergo caesarian section over her objections. Neither she nor the baby survived.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of NAPW and lead author of the study said: "Our analysis of the legal claims used to justify the arrests found they relied on post-Roe measures such a foeticide laws and the same arguments made in support of so-called 'personhood measures' – namely that state actors would be empowered to treat fertilised eggs, embryos and foetuses as completely legally separate from the pregnant women."

McVeigh gets this wrong: it's not the criminalization of pregnancy, it's the criminalization of female autonomy. Because the anti-abortionists don't give a flying fuck about the fetus "pre-birth" much less post-birth; they care only about controlling women.