A Woman Saved, A Hero Dies and the Fetus-Fetishists Keep Fighting

El Salavadoran sub-human incubator Beatriz will get an operation that may save her life, but only because she managed to survive past the 26-week deadline of the theocracy's give-birth-or-die law.

The freakazoids will learn nothing from this, other than the need to prevent the world press from discovering just how many incubators are dying from authoritarian misogyny.

Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress:

Fortunately, even in spite of her country’s draconian abortion laws, Beatriz’s life will hopefully be spared. But many women aren’t so lucky. Earlier this year, a woman died after being denied an abortion in an Irish Catholic hospital. Last year, a woman in the Dominican Republic died after she couldn’t get the abortion she needed to receive chemotherapy treatment. And around the world, an estimated 47,000 women die each year because they don’t have the access to safe reproductive health care.

Katha Pollitt at The Nation:

Since 1998, El Salvador has had a complete no-exceptions ban on abortion, promoted by the country’s powerful Catholic Church and passed with the votes of legislators from the former left-wing movement FMLN—because if there’s one thing right and left agree on, it’s that women’s lives are less important than achieving political power. (Daniel Ortega made the same move in Nicaragua in a successful bid for church support.)

Since the ban, the Central American Women’s network reports that over 600 Salvadoran women have been imprisoned for having abortions, including miscarriages and stillbirths suspected of being the result of abortion. A word to the wise: when US abortion opponents insist they would never put women on trial for terminating a pregnancy, be skeptical.

Digby again:

Does being pro-life really mean that a dead fetus comes before a living woman? That's what we're talking about here.

Of course it does. The goal of the fetus-fetishists is not to save lives; they don't care about the fetus after it's delivered - their social policies make that crystal clear.  Sacrificing adult women to even dead fetuses establishes and furthers the principle that female humans are not real people, but just semi-sentient incubators. That's their real goal.

 Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money: on the man who changed Canadian abortion law

I believe, however, that the flaw in the present legislative scheme goes much deeper than that. In essence, what it does is assert that the woman’s capacity to reproduce is not to be subject to her own control. It is to be subject to the control of the state. She may not choose whether to exercise her existing capacity or not to exercise it. This is not, in my view, just a matter of interfering with her right to liberty in the sense (already discussed) of her right to personal autonomy in decision-making, it is a direct interference with her physical “person” as well. She is truly being treated as a means — a means to an end which she does not desire but over which she has no control. She is the passive recipient of a decision made by others as to whether her body is to be used to nurture a new life. Can there be anything that comports less with human dignity and self-respect? How can a woman in this position have any sense of security with respect to her person? I believe that s. 251 of the Criminal Code deprives the pregnant woman of her right to security of the person as well as her right to liberty.
–R. v. Morgentaler (Wilson, J., concurring)

Henry Morgentaler passed away earlier this week.

SNIP

The impact of his work on the freedom of Canadian women, however, was both massive and clearly positive.   His clinics were civil disobedience in the best sense — he believed that women without connections should have the same access to safe abortions that affluent women did, and he trusted juries to do the right thing:

Dr. Henry Morgentaler not only changed abortion law in Canada, but his experience in the courts led to the establishment of an important legal protection that applies to all Canadians: Never again will a judge be able to simply toss out a jury acquittal and replace it with a conviction.

Morgentaler, who died yesterday at age 90, always said that no jury of reasonable people would ever find him guilty of a crime just because he provided women with safe abortions, and he was right.

The fight he took to the Supreme Court would ultimately ensure that safe providers did not have to risk prosecution. I will have more on this when I’m done conferencing, but the opinion is worth reading as well — not only Bertha Wilson’s famous explicitly concurrence, but the plurality opinions that do a very careful job explaining the fundamental irrationality and inequity of “moderate” regulations of abortion.

A great man. R.I.P.

Assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller trusted women to make their own decisions, and the foundation established in his honor continues his work today. Contribute here.