http://socialistaction.org/defend-reproductive-justice-for-women/
Defend reproductive justice for women!
Published March 8, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
March 2016 Abortion
By CHRISTINE MARIE
“The most significant abortion rights case in a generation.” “The
greatest threat to reproductive justice in 25 years.” These are just a
few of the headlines to the many articles providing background to the
news that on March 2, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments
in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Such claims are absolutely valid
and accurately describe at the threat to women’s lives that is currently
posed by attempts to restrict access to abortion in dozens of states.
In the next few months, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not a
2013 Texas law called HB 2, which would leave only about 10 of the
state’s 44 clinics open if upheld, is constitutional. HB2 requires
clinic doctors to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and
requires the clinics themselves to meet the same standards as ambulatory
surgical centers.
While the legislators who crafted this bill claim to have women’s
well-being in mind, the American Medical Association and the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree with abortion rights
advocates that the restrictions would endanger women’s health by denying
women the benefit of “well-researched, safe, and proven protocols.”
The absurdity of the right-wing claim that abortion is a dangerous
procedure is highlighted in a report crafted by the Texas Policy
Evaluation Project (TexPEP). Project researcher Dr. Daniel Grossman
explained to MSNBC that while there has not been an abortion-related
death in Texas since 2008, each year about 100 state women die due to
complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. According to an
authoritative study published by the University of California, San
Francisco in 2014, the rate of major complications from abortion is less
than ¼ of one percent, or about the same rate as one would expect from
complications from a colonscopy.
Despite the lack of any scientific basis for the Texas legislation, if
the Supreme Court rules in favor of Hellerstedt, or ties 4-4 on the
case, a lower court ruling upholding the Texas regulations would
prevail, nearly identical rules in 10 states would be validated, and the
door opened wide for the quick implementation of these onerous attacks
nationwide.
On March 4, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked implementation of an
“admitting-privileges” law that would close all but one clinic in
Louisiana, a state of 4.7 million people. That temporary block has
buoyed hopes that the Supreme Court will rule in defense of a woman’s
right to abortion in the Texas case, discouraging further advances in
the legislative onslaught against reproductive justice. While a ruling
against the state of Texas would be a huge victory, it would not end the
war on women and the growing threats to reproductive justice. The oral
arguments come as women’s rights advocates are reflecting on the already
dramatic decline in the availability of abortion in the United States.
According to Esmé Deprez, author of “The Vanishing U.S. Abortion
Clinic,” a quarter of clinics on American soil have closed in the last
five years, in great measure due to reactionary legislation. In
Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, there is
only one clinic left per state. The court is not considering the many
other restrictions, including waiting periods, parental notification,
and the failure of insurance policies and Medicaid to cover costs that
have continued to make unplanned pregnancy a nightmare for the young,
the low-waged, and those residing in the South or rural areas. And if
the “well-being of the woman” legal avenue is closed, those determined
to control women’s fertility will come up with a new legislative angle.
In Texas, according to TexPEP, the implementation of the requirement for
physicians to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital resulted in
a reduction of abortions in the first six months of 13% and an increase
in wait times to schedule appointments to 20-23 days in some cities. The
increased wait times mean that more women will be forced to seek
late-term abortions, a much more complicated and even less widely
available medical procedure.
In addition, there is already evidence that Texas women are increasingly
turning to self-induced procedures without medical assistance. The days
of death by hidden efforts to terminate pregnancy are once again upon
us. Women in Texas are reporting being forced by lack of travel funds,
the inability to take days off work for such travel, necessary due to
the closure of local clinics, to attempt to self-induce with herbs,
teas, and medicines obtained in Mexico without a prescription. Many
report failure to induce a complete abortion and having to seek
emergency medical help despite their fears of prosecution.
Prosecution for self-induced abortion has also reappeared, most notably
in Indiana in the case of Parvi Patel. Patel, 35 years of age, is
currently serving 20 years of a 46-year sentence after being convicted
of two incompatible crimes, “feticide” and child neglect. After Patel
showed up in an emergency room after an incomplete miscarriage or
self-induced abortion, the prosecution used ideologically tainted
“medical” testimony against her, suggesting that somehow this fetus
could have been saved by medical intervention.
They also argued that Patel, an immigrant disconnected from the U.S.
health-care system, had attempted to terminate her own pregnancy with
abortificants (pills legal with a prescription in other states) ordered
online. She has one more possible attempt at appeal.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) point out “the expansion of
Indiana law to prosecute women in relation to their own pregnancies
endangers public health and the civil rights of all people who are or
may become pregnant.” Patel’s conviction, it almost goes without saying,
stands in ironic counter-position to the treatment of thousands of
immigrant children currently being held in private and abusive detention
centers around the country.
The prosecution of pregnant women is continuing apace with the attempts
to restrict the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. In Wisconsin,
Tamara Loertscher, an unemployed woman who had lost her health insurance
and was self-medicating for depression and pain, discovered she had
became pregnant by her long-term boyfriend. She immediately ceased using
drugs but admitted to past drug use when seeking prenatal care. She was
convicted and spent time in jail based on a law that has resulted,
according to NAPW, in the surveillance and investigation of more than
3000 women in the state. Federal courts have refused all efforts to have
the law reviewed.
In Arkansas, thankfully, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of
Melissa McCann Arms for “introducing a controlled substance into the
body of another person,” but the state attorney general is requesting
that the legislature strengthen the law to specifically include pregnant
women in a way that circumvents the Supreme Court ruling. In Tennessee,
activists are fighting a 2014 law that permits the punishment of
pregnant women whose babies were “harmed” by the mother’s use of
narcotics. In Alabama, NAPW have documented the arrest of over 100 women.
The states that have begun punishing poor women in this manner are, in
general, the states least likely to provide drug treatment for poor and
pregnant women. These arrests have made it increasingly likely that a
woman may be afraid to go to a hospital to deliver. Increasingly,
low-wage women and women of color, especially in the South, are trapped
in a Catch-22, in which both pregnancy and termination can entrap one in
the intertwined tentacles of the racist social justice/criminal justice
system.
One of the campaigns for the restriction of abortion rights that is most
revealing about the class and racial agenda of the anti’s has to be the
increasing use of the slogan “Babies Lives Matter” by clinic protesters.
This slogan is designed to purge the public mind of sympathy with the
real horror faced by African American mothers who begin each day praying
that their children will not suffer the fate of Cleveland’s 12-year-old
Tamir Rice at the hands of the police, and redirect that sympathy to
reactionary aims. It echoes the 2010 billboard campaign that plastered
“Black Children are an Endangered Species” across the South, claiming
“the most dangerous place for a Black child is in the womb,” and
charging women of color with genocide for exercising their right to
control their own body.
In response, groups like Sistersong, the Black Women’s Health
Imperative, and other organizations found the Trust Black Women
Partnership to educate and insist that from enslavement forward, the
cutting edge of the civil rights movement has included the right of
African American women to resist attempts to violate their bodily
integrity. The slogan, and its appearance at the exact moment when the
nation is reminded that due to deliberate governmental neglect up to a
fifth of the nation’s urban children may still be exposed to
debilitating lead exposures and other toxins, must set the parameters of
the type of movement necessary to defend reproductive justice today.
The demonstration of a few thousand demonstrators for women’s choice
held at the Supreme Court on March 2, although relatively modest in
size, helped signal that a lot is at stake. But what is needed in terms
of protest is of an entirely different order and magnitude.
Since the legalization of abortion in 1972, both Republican and
Democratic Party legislators have been whittling away at this victory.
In the last five years, the tool they have begun wielding is more like
an ax than a penknife. While there are differences among different
strata of the ruling elite about just how far to go in terms of gutting
abortion availability, the overall impulse is in the wrong direction.
The attempt to roll back many of the gains won by the women’s movement
of the 1970s in the U.S. is echoed in Europe, where the economic crisis
and the corresponding popularity of rightist solutions, is contributing
to similar legislative initiatives. The roots of this offensive lie deep
in the current crisis of capitalism and efforts to manage economic
unrest and to maintain elite rule. Thus, it cannot be adequately taken
on through bourgeois elections, lobbying, or crafting arguments to
appeal to the judicial theories of this or that judge. Instead, we must
return to struggle in the streets, to protests that unite the right to a
safe abortion with the right to raise a healthy child of color, to
marches that demonstrate that millions of women and their allies are
truly ready to fight for reproductive justice.
Marches and protests and all the meetings and conferences that it will
take to mount them are the key to consolidating majority opinion and
public support on our side. The Supreme Court that legalized abortion in
1972 was as unlikely as any to hand down such a ruling; the decision was
a reaction to women’s power in the streets. We must begin showing that
political power again.
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Related
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Posted in Women's Liberation. | Tagged abortion, clinics, SCOTUS,
Supreme Court, Texas.
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