Throwing Away the Humanity of Women

Here's yet more proof that popey frankie is just the same vicious, despicable woman-hater in nice-guy clothing.

Pope Francis has criticized abortion as evidence of a "throwaway culture" that wastes people as well as food.

Cause fetuses and food have rights, but women are just incubators.

Ilyse Hogue at the Nation on how this attitude is, today, stripping humanity from anyone with a vagina.

At this moment in a Fort Worth hospital, Marlise Munoz’s body is hooked up to machines that are keeping her body alive. Her brain function, her ability to communicate, or hold her child, or kiss her husband—all of those are tragically and irreversibly lost as the result of a pulmonary embolism she suffered the week after Thanksgiving. Marlise had expressed to her husband Erick—both of them were paramedics—that she never wanted to be kept alive this way. So why, despite her own clear wishes and those of her husband and her parents, is she still on life support?

Because Marlise was fourteen weeks pregnant when she passed.

According to The New York Times, more than thirty states place restrictions on when a hospital can remove life support from a pregnant woman, and a dozen, including Texas, have laws on the books that require hospitals to keep a woman’s body alive if she’s pregnant. The hospital must override the doctor’s judgment that she will not recover, the family’s wishes and even the expressed will of the individual herself. In the most tragic way possible, Marlise’s case is forcing us to confront the reality that in far too many places, women are literally seen in the eyes of the law as vessels whose primary function is to produce more offspring. Sound dehumanizing? That’s exactly what it is.

SNIP

Lynn Paltrow at National Advocates for Pregnant Women has been tracking these laws for years and advocating for women to be full citizens in the eyes of the law. In 2010, she wrote a piece for The Huffington Post exposing the move towards “personhood” as part of this sinister agenda. She points out that recognizing the humanity of others has never before come at a cost to an entire class of people. When women were recognized as equal citizens under the Constitution, this did not come at a cost to men. She states that “efforts to legally disconnect fetuses and to grant them entirely independent constitutional status would not merely add a new group to the constitutional population: it would effectively denaturalize pregnant women, removing from them their status as constitutional persons.”

Marlise Munoz knew exactly what she wanted to happen to her if a tragedy like the one she suffered befell her, and she had the wisdom to share that information with those closest to her. All her family wants is to honor her wishes. We are fortunate enough to live in a country that values freedom and privacy—it is part of who we are as Americans. But a law that forces complete strangers to desecrate the dying wish of our loved ones shows us how far we have strayed from those very cherished values.