Cell Tissue More Human Than Women

"The only reason they keep Qumari women alive is to make more Qumari men."
--- C.J. Cregg, West Wing episode "The Women of Qumar."

It hasn't changed. Not in 5,000 years. Women are not really human. They are just mechanisms for creating more men. Which is why the current "anti-contraception" hysteria among the repugs is not about contraception, abortion or even non-marital sex. It's about enshrining in law and society that a clump of cells is more human than any woman.

And it's working.

Digby on "Murderous Birthing Vessels":

War on women? Why do you say that?

March 14, 2012 marks the one-year anniversary of Bei Bei Shuai’s unprecedented and inhumane incarceration for having experienced such a profound sense of depression while pregnant that she attempted to kill herself.

Ms. Shuai was arrested, charged, and has been held without bail based on the claim that Indiana’s murder statute (death penalty or 45-years-to-life) and attempted feticide statute (up to 20-years) may be used to punish pregnant women who cannot guarantee a healthy birth outcome.

We hope that you will sign the grassroots Change.org petition to the Marion County Prosecutor telling him to drop the charges. The petition, in short, says: Unless it is your intention to make clear that in Indiana the “Pro-Life” position is “Pro-Life-Sentences-For Pregnant-Women” position, we urge to you drop all charges and Free Bei Bei Shuai now.

When I use the unpleasant term "birthing vessels" this is what I'm talking about --- this woman is only valued for the fact of her pregnancy. It's directly out of Handmaid's Tale.

Katha Pollitt wrote about this case in The Nation:

In December 2010 Shuai was running a Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis with her boyfriend, Zhiliang Guan, by whom she was eight months pregnant. Just before Christmas, he informed her that he was married and had another family, to which he was returning. When Shuai begged him to stay, he threw money at her and left her weeping on her knees in a parking lot. Despairing, she took rat poison and wrote a letter in Mandarin saying she was killing herself and would “take this baby with me to Hades”; friends got her to the hospital just in time to save her life. Eight days later her baby, Angel, was delivered by Caesarean section and died of a cerebral hemorrhage within four days. Three months later, the newly elected prosecutor, Terry Curry—a Democrat—brought charges, claiming that the rat poison that almost killed Shuai had killed her baby. If convicted, she faces forty-five to sixty-five years in prison.

Pollit goes on to point out that suicide attempts are unfortunately fairly common among pregnant women. I don't know if this prosecutor has heard, but pregnancy affects women's hormones, which can often result in personality and mood changes. It's completely horrifying to criminalize this sort of behavior and as Pollit points out, the medical profession worries greatly that this will result in women failing to seek help or be honest with their doctors. It's a recipe for disaster.

But it seems to be a very popular recipe:

Unfortunately, punishing women for their behavior during pregnancy is becoming more and more common, fueled by the passage of “unborn victims of violence” laws in at least thirty-eight states declaring the fetus (or, in twenty of those states, even the embryo or fertilized egg) a separate victim in cases of homicide. In most instances these laws were intended to protect pregnant women from violence, especially from abusive partners, not to apply to the women themselves. But that is not what has happened, as the antiabortion forces have gained power. “The prosecution’s legal arguments are exactly based on legal arguments behind the personhood measures now moving through the states,” Lynn Paltrow, executive director of NAPW, told me by phone. “They treat the fetus as completely separate within the pregnant woman. How can you be separate and within?”

That's the ultimate question, isn't it? And yet, we are rapidly becoming a society that not only values the potential person within, but values it more than the full realized person who contains it.

Pro-choicers have focused on the dangers fetal personhood measures present to abortion rights. That danger is real: they’re part of the antiabortion strategy to build up the legal status of the fetus as a person in so many parts of the law that when the Supreme Court finally revisits Roe v. Wade, a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy will look like a bizarre exception. But these laws pose broader dangers to women, because they hold pregnant women liable for any conduct during pregnancy that a local prosecutor suspects caused a bad outcome—and bear in mind that every year 15-20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, 1 percent end in stillbirth and another 19,000 end in neonatal death. Under these laws, hundreds of pregnant women have been arrested, often on only tenuous evidence that their actions, including drug use, harmed their fetuses. In Alabama sixty women have faced such charges.

I've always felt that, at least for some, the intention of these fetal personhood laws was to make women responsible for "being bad" during the only time their lives matter --- pregnancy. And I never thought it was just about abortion. I've heard too many people making judgments and casting aspersions on even mundane aspects of pregnant women's behavior (like eating sweets or refusing to stop working) not to know that the impulse runs deep. For some people, a woman is never less human than when she's pregnant, which is bizarre indeed.

Read Pollitt's entire piece. And then go sign this petition. I don't know that it will do much good, but the war on women is getting some attention, so perhaps the time is ripe.

It's everywhere.

The Colorado House just passed a "first degree homicide of the unborn child" bill, which punishes pregnant women, not their abusers.

In Tennessee, if women won't behave themselves, the state will make sure everybody knows who they are so the bitches can be shot down in the street like they deserve.

Here's a reminder from - where else? - Arizona that you don't have to have a penis to be a misogynist.

In light of which, this Alaska bill merely requiring the sluts to get a permission slip from their rapist seems mild.