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Edited on Mon Jul-11-11 01:14 PM by Rozlee
The big day is here. Television cameras and the D.C. police vie with dueling crowds of demonstrators in front of the Supreme Court. On one side of the division, a TV news reporter interviews a woman that's holding a baby and is saying: "Life begins at conception. That's where we all started. Each fertilized egg is a baby boy or a baby girl." On the other side, another woman tells another reporter that she and her husband have 3 children and are barely making it; they can't afford to be a family of 6 or 7 not making it. Inside the building, the Supremes are deliberating. They're arguing and asking that vital question:
WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN?
This will be the be all and end all of the entire debate. Right now, in many states, the right to choose is being lashed at by anti-choice extremists. A woman in Idaho, attempting to procure drugs online to have an abortion, was arrested due to the state's ban on women not getting abortions after 20 weeks. In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down some stairs was hospitalized and then arrested for attempted murder when she confided to a nurse that she'd thought of aborting her baby earlier in her pregnancy. THOUGHT of it! The nurse reported that the fall may have been a suicide attempt to abort the pregnancy. Texas now requires ultrasound for pregnant women having abortions. Virginia has signed a law mandating hospital standards for abortion clinics, a move that may force over 2/3 of the clinics they have now to close. Mississippi is considering a bill that would define the meaning of a "person" and might result in outlawing contraception and even result in bringing criminal investigations on women who have miscarriages outside of a clinical or hospital setting.
WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN?
When fertilization occurs say the anti-choicers. But, it's a rocky road from there if that's so. After conception, only half of all fertilized eggs implant. From that point, 15-20 percent of all KNOWN pregnancies end in miscarriage. The anti-choicers say that abortion is murder. Well, God must be the Great Cosmic Abortionist, if that's so.
Back to the Supreme Court now. In this futuristic setting, a conservative majority has the votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. They smell blood in the water. They have the power to take it all the way. Not to mention the ideology. Artificial birth control wasn't always legal after it's inception. In 1965, in Griswold vs. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that the "right to marital privacy" held that individuals could practice birth control. Justice John Roberts wrote a scathing draft in 1981 disparaging the ruling. In his confirmation hearing, he squirmed when asked about the draft and said his views had changed. The "right to privacy" clause served as the precedent to Roe v. Wade. It's been in the cross hairs of conservatives since. There's no mention of the right to privacy in the Constitution, they argue. They battered Judge Sotomayor during her own confirmation hearings repeatedly on that question and asked her opinion on the right to purchase and use contraceptive products. The extremists in the anti-choice movement--and nowadays, they all seem like extremists--believe women should use nothing but the rhythm calender method of contraception. If they use contraception at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute and the American Journal of Public Health, 11 million women are currently using birth control pills. 2 million use IUDs. Nine out of ten have used some form of artificial birth control in their lives. Among all women, past and present, only 2% have admitted to using the rigidly imposed Church-dictated rhythm method.
The Justices are sweating bricks, looking out the windows. The anti-choice extremists, for all their screeching, mouth-frothing and saber-rattling, are, after all, a considerable minority. The women that depend on contraceptives, their partners, the guys out there worrying about being baby daddies, parents looking askance at their college age kids and wondering how many of them will be moving in with them hauling six kids of their own....now that demographic is quite a bit larger. And they've been galvanized. It was one thing to sneak in "Citizen's United" while the entire country was sitting zoned out in front of "Dancing With the Stars." Sexuality is always a game changer. Fuckin' always. And the TV cameras are out there covering the whole sorry mess around the clock and those extremists are making everything worse with their wild-eyed, spittle-spraying preachers holding up their jars of pickled fetuses. Not that the pro-choicers are any better, but they are scoring points running ads of parents living under bridges with 22 kids. To say nothing of the fact that a new women's movement seems to be brewing from the prior ashes of apathy. You'll take our BC pills from our cold, dead hands. A women's movement that may sweep out generations of Republicans from power for generations to come, like it did in the decades after the Depression. Not only that, but if they elect enough liberal leaning politicians, they may over rule any Supreme Court decision by using the Nuclear Option. Going on the road and getting the votes needed to enshrine the right to choose in the Constitution.
Is that even possible? So very few Supreme Court rulings have ever been over turned that way. And I've been burned. Americans have been beaten down to pulp by the Republican party and gone crawling, bleeding and whimpering to them, to get beaten down some more. I'd like to believe that my fellow women wouldn't take something like this sitting down. Because you know the bastards are going to overreach if Roe v. Wade ever makes it to them. They're going to go for broke. They're going to go into a feeding frenzy and want it all. Get rid of birth control; outlaw all abortions; consider even ectopic pregnancies murder; make miscarriages that occur at home crime scenes, the works. Or at least, that's what their base is going to want and they won't take anything less. The Supremes' backs are going to be against a wall. Awesome. This might actually be entertaining. Sucks to be them.
Personally, I think they'll blink. The very first journal I ever wrote was about interviews Justice Scalia gave on 60 Minutes and the Baltimore School of Law during the summer of '08, when McCain was ahead in the polls. If McCain had won, he'd have appointed conservative justices that would have ruled again on Roe v. Wade. In his interviews, Scalia said that denying people abortions denies them of having the right to decides such issues for themselves. "Why should the Court have the power to remove this from the democratic process?" And, "I would not only be in favor of Roe v. Wade, I would be in favor of the opposite view." Chickenshit of him, wasn't it? Giving himself some elbow room to weasel their way out of making a federal decision and paving the way to possibly punting the whole sorry mess back to the states. In such a case, we'd be back in the situation we are now. The right to choose will still be chipped away bit by bit, a death of a thousand cuts, until little, if anything, remains. Polls say most Americans support a woman's right to choose. But, if so, we're too apathetic to take to the streets and fight for that right. Like we've been too apathetic about "Citizens United." About the rich getting richer while the rest of us get poorer. About the never-ending wars. About...
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