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NEWS & LETTERS, June -July 2007Woman as ReasonAbortion ban vs. freedomby Terry Moon The Reagan-Bush stacking of the Supreme Court finally bore fruit for the fanatical anti-abortion fringe in the U.S. when the retrogressive and misogynist court decision upheld the outlawing of the DX (dilation and extraction) abortion procedure without an exception for a woman's health. We all knew it was coming as soon as Sandra Day O'Connor retired while Bush was still in office--we knew that Roberts and Alito were lying through their teeth when they intoned that they would respect precedent. So angry that she read excerpts from the bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent reveals the raging hypocrisy of the ruling. This decision: • Overrides the clear precedent that anti-abortion laws must contain exceptions for pregnancies which endanger the woman's life or health. This makes meaningless the concept of "undue burden." • Wallows in anti-abortion ideology as it "invokes an anti-abortion shibboleth": women who have abortions "regret their choices," and suffer from "severe depression and loss of esteem." • Blurs the distinction between the viability and non-viability of a fetus. This ruling puts all abortion procedures in jeopardy. • Ginsburg railed at the justices who throughout "the opinion refer to obstetrician-gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label, 'abortion doctor.' A fetus is described as an 'unborn child,' and as a 'baby,'... and the reasoned medical judgments of highly trained doctors dismissed as 'preferences' motivated by 'mere convenience.'" Ginsburg concludes: "A decision so at odds with our jurisprudence should not have staying power." But this is the same kind of illusion that the Feminist Majority, NOW, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL Pro-Choice America are pushing. They are agitating for the passage of the "Freedom of Choice Act" which Bush has said he would veto! MOVEMENT ILLUSIONS The Left is not much better. Katha Pollitt, writing in THE NATION, rightly lashes out at those leading NARAL, whose illusions were revealed by their "policy of supporting pro-choice Republicans." Pollitt thinks "a Democratically controlled Congress would never have passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act." But 80 Democratic legislators voted for banning DX abortions. Yifat Susskind, of MADRE, sees the Court decision as a global conspiracy on the part of the "Bush Administration [which] is a product of the Christian Right." Her answers to how to counter such a movement are not only obvious, but the Women's Liberation Movement has been practicing them for decades: 1. linking abortion rights "to social and economic rights"; 2. "expand our understanding of 'women's issues,'" to include "international peace and security, indigenous cultural survival," and 3. create "a new progressive dialogue that makes more room for religious people...working to counter fundamentalist agendas." This devastating decision codifies, in the highest court in the land, that women cannot make the most basic decisions about our own bodies and lives, that a fetus' existence is more important than a woman's life; that we need the state to make personal and health decisions for us--in short, that women are less then human. It reveals that we live in a society where any freedom we have can be stripped away at the whim of the state--in this case by five Catholic men. PERMANENT REVOLUTION The depths of this imposed alienation from our own bodies, the reality that any freedoms we imagine we have can be stripped from us by so few--this actuality doesn't call for electing a few more so-called "representatives," or including more religious liberals in the women's movement. This blow to women's lives reveals the need for our demand to be for a society based on totally new human relations, the establishment of true freedom where women are comprehended as fully human and make our own decisions about our lives and bodies. This ruling exposes the lie that we live in a free society. A free society would be one where there would be no need for a private life to shelter us from the abuses of the public sphere, from, for example, a sexist Supreme Court, or from the alienations of our jobs. A free society is one where not only would work no longer be an alienation but one of "life's prime wants," so too our public lives would be so tied up with life that there would be no contradiction between our private and public selves. Marx said we can do this "only by declaring the revolution to be permanent." If this sounds utopian, consider that what's really utopian is believing that women will ever be free in our capitalist, sexist, racist, heterosexist, alienating society. |
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