This Is My Body....

Bleat and howl all you want, but overturning Roe v. Wade comes at a high price.


What's your choice?

The Water's Deep. Row or Wade? It's All About Choice!

Row versus Wade? Geddit? No... Don't worry, you will.

Roe v Wade is a landmark US supreme court ruling which effectively afforded women the right to choose what goes on in their own bodies. The idea essentially is that a foetus has a right to life only after such time that it becomes viable - that is, when it can live outside of the mother's body: even if that means using artificial means.

Roe v Wade effectively gave US women the right to a medical termination across the entire country. This was particularly offensive and shocking in a country which puts such a religious right on life.

President Obama has already quashed Dubya's idiotic sanctions against supporting organisations outside the US but in response a group of right-wing senators have re-introduced the Life at Conception Act which will, if passed, overturn Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion by giving even a zygote equal rights as a person under the 14th amendment.

This is obviously idiotic but it's driven by religious conviction - not careful measured thought. The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, was originally written to protect former slaves and effectively empower them with the same rights and responsibilities as the "white folk".

Laws are funny things and if their authors are not extraordinarily careful they can be widely abused, as example, consider this quote from Republican Senator, David Vitter

“As science continues to advance, the evidence that life begin at conception is becoming more and more irrefutable. This bill is critical to the fight to protect the culture of life, especially as we face an administration and new Congress that seems determined to advance the agenda of a practice that a great number of Americans find abhorrent.”

Even in the first sentence, the mind-buggering veil of ignorance & simplicity that these people operate under becomes horribly clear. Life (by this definition) has always begun at conception and we've known that for a hell of a long time.

However, how are we to define life?

The turning point in Roe v Wade was when the court accepted that life (as most of us understand it) begins when the foetus becomes capable of supporting its own life (even with medical intervention): and this in itself may prove critical.

That aside, the second part of Senator Vitter's statement demonstrates that he fails to understand the right to choose! Choice (not necessarily over pregnancy) isn't specifically written in to the US Constitution, but it is implied in the right of freedom (also implied in the 9th amendment).

No. This is about the religious right's wish to lord it over everyone else.

Choice - as we have it now and as Americans have had since Roe v Wade allows each person to chose based on their circumstance and personal belief. If it were overturned, the religious right would have removed the ability of clear thinking people to decide what goes on inside their own bodies; a dangerous precedent indeed.

As an extreme example, if a child with precocious puberty becomes pregnant the Republican idea would require she carried it to term and gave birth; by any means. Yet for a child of 5 or 6 years that is neither possible or practical. While rare, it happens. Similarly, who are they to decide - for others of conscience - that a woman should sacrifice her life for the sake of a foetus that has no hope of survival?

One law does not fit everyone and here's what a supporter of this bill has to say in a comment appearing PanHandleParade.com pasted as it appears replete with all the errors - judge for yourself:

"i totally agree. if anyone becomes pregnant, there is a reason. that is a life in there. if it is there, then God thought of that being. MADE THEM UP! why would He make a person without any intent for their life? He wouldnt.Everything has a purpose in Him, and just because you arent ready to have this child, God wants it here. So deal with it. =]"

We lay it all at your door, of course!

Myself, I'm going to "Roe, roe, roe me boat, gently down the stream."

Ah! The Sweet Sound of Spin!

Dakota Voice is running this story today, basically an updated version of an older anti-abortion argument. There's a beautiful irony here considering I found this on a Republican pro-life lobby and as ever it's loaded in favour of the pro-life argument.

When you think about abortion, think of something. Imagine a child…

This child’s future is a broken home…

He will be abandoned by his father…

His single mother will struggle to raise him…

Despite the hardships, he will endure…

This child will become the first African American president.

Life: Imagine the potential.

That's the thing about choice, President Barack Obama's mother didn't choose to terminate that pregnancy and if she had, history would be different.

What pro-lifers never get is that this is about choice - one option cannot fit everyone. For some women, abortion will be the wrong choice, for others, it will be the right one. We cannot judge what any foetus will become because we don't know how life will influence them; for every black president or musical prodigy, there will be many others which life leaves by the wayside.

We can know with a reasonable degree of certainty the outcome of many genetic diseases, however. We know the pain and suffering that some children will have to endure as they lose a desperate battle for life in the hours and days after they are born - sure to die.

Many others will have deprived lives, may die of starvation or suffer from malnutrition or disease. Still more will become petty criminals, living life on the fringes of society and spending much of their lives in an out of prison.

UPDATE:

Rowan Pelling's moving account (in the generally awful Daily Mail and right-wing) is an inspiration to those faced with the dilemma of termination. Of her first pregnancy, a child suffering with Patau syndrome, Pelling writes:

"I recognise that it can seem near impossible that anyone could terminate a foetus at this late stage, when its claims to existence appear so tangible. But I am certain that if my first baby had not been diagnosed with Patau syndrome until the 20-week scan I would have still made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.

"This knowledge, which will be abhorrent to some, has brought home to me the fact that other people’s agonies, situations and choices are often impossible to imagine from any distance. Can I really understand, say, the dilemma faced by a pregnant woman who endures brutish social deprivation and domestic violence?"

This is the choice (and a future we can't predict) that pro-lifers want to take away.

Look at this picture and tell me your loving God made this I dare you.

American Conservatives (Still) Don't Get It

I love Dakota Voice. Rather like Christian Voice, it claims to represent family values and so on but when it comes to the crunch it's a small band of ultra-conservative buffoons led by a bloke with far too much time on his hands.

Leading from a story in the Telegraph, and letting a few facts slip by, DV's Bob Ellis almost recites scripture in gleefully informing us of how us pro-choicers are wrong to give women the chance to decide what happens to their unborn children. Of course, he doesn't say that in so many words, what he says is this:

"Better to leave life and death up to the Author of Life, and not take death into our own hands by killing innocent children.

Which is clichéd and highly emotive rhetoric: and he knows it.

The problem with Bob is he just won't accept the simple fact that there probably is no god. Even an idiot should be able to see that nature is the author of life. Pro-choicers would no more go around "killing innocent children" than he would. If you believe in a god, you might accept that a superior being kicked life off, but there's no evidence at all - none - that we're controlled on a daily basis.

Bob and his followers (and there are many like him, mostly descended from Catholic tradition) believe that life begins at conception. Technically it does but that life does not become remotely sentient until many weeks and probably months later; moreover, that life is not capable of sustaining itself even aided current medicine comparatively late in the pregnancy. Even after birth, this child has to be provided for every hour of the day. It relies on its mother for everything: from heat and shelter to food and emotional warmth.

The Bob variety of pro-lifers are a pretty trenchant lot. Abortion is never an option. Not if the mother was a child who had been raped; or if the foetus was horribly deformed and already in great suffering; not even if the mother's life was at risk. We get the same line in entrenched bullshit from Alaska Governor, Palin - which is why she was so popular with right-wing America in the 2008 election - despite being a complete ignoramus who abused her power. The more informed, pro-choice America breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Obama defeated this creationist freak show, but the war isn't over yet.

The Telegraph article Bob alludes to goes into rather more detail that the Conservatives at DV would like, so I'll summarise some of it here.

First of the headlines:

Telegraph: "Mother has healthy baby boy despite abortion warning by doctor"

Dakota Voice: "Healthy Son Despite Doctors Advice to Abort"

Wait did I miss something here? From the headlines, things look pretty clear cut - they aren't.

The Telegraph doesn't have an axe to grind like DV, and continuess with the hint all is now what it ought to be:

"A mother who was twice advised to have an abortion by doctors has gone on to have a 'perfectly' healthy son."

Note how they've cautiously placed perfectly into single quotes? Wonder why - and I wonder why Mssrs. Ellis and co. missed that? Might this have something to do with it? This from the Telegraph:

"Further tests conducted a few days later on New Year's Eve suggested the baby could also have Edwards Syndrome - the presence of an 18th chromosome - with a life expectancy of only up to four months if birth is survived."

Words like "could", "might" and "may" are the sort no prospective parent wants to hear. Rather like life, medicine isn't black and white (oh, if it only were). The worst was to come as the Telegraph reports, contradicting its own headline:

"Kai was born six weeks premature on March 5 at Scunthorpe General Hospital weighing just 2lb 6oz and immediately admitted to intensive care, but was discharged within six weeks.
One side of his heart was slightly bigger than the other which may need an operation to correct in the future, but regular tests have been showing the condition is constantly improving."

Kai Purdy pictured with his mother, Gaynor. Photo: ROSS PARRY AGENCY

So in truth, little Kai Purdy was anything but a normal healthy baby boy.

Dakota Voice effectively lied by omitting these facts and the Telegraph wasn't entirely honest either.

It appears that he does have Edwards Syndrome (aka Trisomy 18) and his heart was abnormal. The little fella is a fighter though and everyone at Abusing the News wishes him well. This is a great story of survival against the odds and one where the right choice was made.

However, consider this sobering evidence from Wikipedia (backed up from other sources):

"The survival rate of Edwards Syndrome is very low. About 95% die in utero. Of liveborn infants, only 50% live to 2 months, and only 5–10% will survive their first year of life. Major causes of death include apnea and heart abnormalities. It is impossible to predict the exact prognosis of an Edwards Syndrome child during pregnancy or the neonatal period. Because major medical interventions are routinely withheld from these children, it is difficult to determine what the survival rate or prognosis would be with aggressive medical treatment. The median life span is five to fifteen days. One percent of children born with this syndrome live to age ten, typically in cases of the less severe mosaic Edwards syndrome."

Of course, this won't rain on Pro-Life's parade. They'll just happy that Kai was born.

Had things been different, and the evidence is strongly in favour of that being the case, this child would have died before being born or very shortly afterwards.

The medical advice given to the Mr and Mrs Purdy was, statistically and rationally, entirely correct. Kai isn't a miracle (because that suggests supernatural intervention) he's just 1 in a 100. The other 99 children born with this condition will either be dead already or suffer agonising deaths during their very short lives.

They made an informed decision and it paid off.

This is the nature of choice that Conservative America, the Catholic church and all the pro-lifers around the world don't get.

Pro choice doesn't mean "abort every faulty foetus" it simply means give women the right to make a informed decision about what happens to their children. No one held a gun to Mrs Purdy's head, they just gave her the evidence and she made the decision. The right one.

Regarding the other 99 other times the Telegraph won't report will be a rather different story.