Today marks the first anniversary of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, a lifetime Supreme Court Justice approved with less than a true majority vote in the U.S. Senate, and whose judicial record shows a clear animus toward women. The Kavanaugh era Supreme Court soon will hear the Louisiana abortion ban case of Gee v. June Medical Services. The Louisiana law in question requires doctors performing an out-patient procedure in a clinic to have hospital admitting privileges, something that in no way affects whether a woman who might need to be admitted to the hospital will be admitted. Because hospitals desperately wish to be excluded from the toxic political debate around women’s reproductive health, they rarely grant such privileges, effectively banning abortion in states around the country.
In this decision, we will learn whether pregnant women are free and equal, or vessels of the state being forced to carry pregnancies to term. One has to ask: where are all the Libertarians and small government conservatives in this blatant state encroachment into basic bodily autonomy?
The seminal case of Roe v. Wade was rightly decided, but not squarely grounded on a woman’s liberty interest. Accordingly, reproductive rights advocates have for years bought into the false premise that a woman’s right to her bodily autonomy is contingent upon what legislators believe is a compelling state interest in her reproductive status. We have conflated the Roe court’s use of the term “viability” of the pregnancy with the legal term of “personhood.” As a nation, we have bought into this conflation and have allowed it to fester for decades.
You see, biological life – or cell division - does begin at conception. Yet, no legally independent person can live within and be dependent upon the body of another person. The pregnancy is part of the woman’s body, and, accordingly, the woman is the sole determinant of any pregnancy she carries inside her body. We need to admit to ourselves that forced-pregnancy statutes relegate women’s bodies to being vessels of the state – whether by virtue of an abortion ban law that requires a pregnancy to continue to term after six-weeks of gestation, or whether forced pregnancy is achieved through a functional abortion prohibition making it impossible for doctors to provide services, as is done with the Louisiana law in Gee.
We have allowed this largely because of the “irresponsible woman” fallacy. The proverbial “harlot” who gets what she deserves for not squeezing an aspirin between her knees, as the Rick Santorum mega-donor Foster Friess suggested. Or, the woman who would dare to end a non-viable pregnancy, when another person who is not carrying that pregnancy believes it may be viable in some way, for some short time or in some horrific, painful fashion. Or, the fictional, monstrous woman who hates babies and seeks to end a perfectly healthy nine-month pregnancy for reasons the radical ideologues can never fully flesh out.
We need to stop this demonization of women now. Each woman’s reproductive health is so unique and intimate that state legislators are as fundamentally incapable of regulating it as they are regulating an out-patient heart procedure.
For those of you who approach this subject from a faith-based, as opposed to a legislative, perspective, I point out that the Establishment Clause should stop you in your tracks. If it does not, then know that my faith tradition requires me to acknowledge that women are divinely made to carry a pregnancy inside their being, and because no person can live within the walls of the flesh of another--or off the life blood of another--then the woman is the sole fiduciary of that pregnancy and in no biblical text is that divine fiduciary responsibility delegated to a secular legislative state.
Here is some much needed clarity: the debate over abortion is about equality and control over decisions that will impact a woman’s entire life. Carrying a pregnancy to term is a decision the woman must be allowed to make, after consulting with whomever she wants, whether that be family or friend or doctor or spiritual advisor. And, if she is not allowed to make the decision she believes is in her best interest, she is not free. She is not equal to a man who has no such state intrusion into his health and life decisions. That is the real issue here, and we all do a disservice to the point of women’s equality before the law by arguing whether a state can restrict or eliminate a woman’s medical decisions by legal ploys such as requiring that a doctor at a clinic have privileges at a hospital, which privileges are notoriously subject to political and personal whims.
Is a woman truly free and truly equal if the state can force her to do something which affects her health and her future? The answer is NO. And so, that question and answer must guide this conversation, and nothing else.
Teresa Tomlinson was the first female, twice-elected mayor of Columbus, now running for U.S. Senate in Georgia. During her time as mayor of Columbus Teresa grew the economy and lowered unemployment, she turned around struggling neighborhoods and lowered crime by more than 40%, and she reduced homelessness and improved the quality of life for all our residents - all while saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. By the completion of her second term, Columbus was named one of the “25 Best Run Cities in America.
You can follow her on twitter (@teresatomlinson) here: twitter.com/...