"I thought I had rights. But my baby had more constitutional rights that I did."

[Novara]

Abortion Rights at Risk: The GOP Opens a New Front in the War on Women

<snip>

Walker and Cruz have also favored the idea of granting separate legal status, or "personhood," to the unborn, which in pro-life rhetoric equates abortion with murder. But abortion is actually just the beginning. What granting personhood to fetuses really does, say many reproductive-rights advocates, is pit the rights of the unborn against the rights of the mother. "Pregnancy in our society tends to be idealized and women counted on to provide a perfect uterine environment," Northwestern University law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer recently wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times. "Fetal rights can be employed to justify any deviation from this standard." And this isn't simply a hypothetical, she and others point out. Pregnant women have been prosecuted or subject to forced interventions for substance abuse, for refusing to have a Caesarean section, for attempting suicide, even for falling down the stairs. In a future that seems straight out of The Handmaid's Tale, the interests of "fetal protection," Tuerkheimer noted, might lead to pregnancy itself becoming a matter of state regulation.

<snip>

"It is not only that laws like this deprive women of their liberty and almost every other civil right associated with being a person protected by the U.S. Constitution," says Sara Ainsworth, director of legal advocacy at the nonprofit National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which is representing both Beltran and Loertscher in cooperation with the Carr Center for Reproductive Justice at NYU School of Law. "These laws actually put women's health and the health of their pregnancies at risk — which is totally contradictory to the claimed intent of this law. Basically, the law's true purpose appears to be to control and stigmatize pregnant women who have used any amount of a drug or alcohol."

<snip>

"What this is really about is creating a separate legal status for pregnant women," says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who co-authored a 2013 study that documented more than 400 cases between 1973 and 2005 of pregnant women who were subject to arrest, detention or forced intervention by state authorities. "There is no way to grant separate rights to eggs and fetuses without removing rights from women."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/abortion-rights-at-risk-the-gop-opens-a-new-front-in-the-war-on-women-20150422

These are women who aren't necessarily addicts, and who quit using anything once they got pregnant. Yet they are punished anyway. The fetus has more rights than women do.

[marym625]

1. K&R!

Thank you for this. I hope it makes the main page. It certainly should

[n2doc]

2. But once it was born, say goodbye to those rights

They have an expiration date attached.

[BlueJazz]

3. The thing that's always been a puzzle to many people is: Why oh Why would a large...

..percentage of the population actually support these GOP tactics to control Women? To me, it's like being a traitor to your own clan and the human race.

[Novara]

5. The population does NOT support these tactics - that's the thing

In survey after survey, the public supports the right to an abortion and they don't support these punitive measures. The public knows none of this will actually protect women. Lawmakers are totally out of touch with what the public wants.

They're fetus fetishists, then to hell with 'em once they're born.

[BlueJazz]

7. That's good to know. At least, I don't feel like I'm stranded on an island with kind, caring....

...people, cut off from the sociopaths on the mainland.

[AuntPatsy]

4. Perhaps they need to begin checking Men's sperm as well, after all, what's the difference?

[erronis]

6. Hey, careful there!

Think how much work that would be! A good 17yo can probably produce 100's of thousands several times a day.

Reminds me of a crude joke from my adolescence that I won't repeat but contained something like this:
... an engineer, a lawyer, a schoolteacher ... No doctor. Better start over.

[Cryptoad]

8. At the core for the reason the conservative SCOTUS has not....

over turn Roe vs Wade is the fact that the Law now considers a fetus not to have personhood until it can live on it own, other wise a toenail could have personhood. If the GOP is able to change the definition of personhood by the law, abortion will be abolished.