Dr. Lee Martin, Tampa, Florida, 5.27.2018
Ireland Becomes More Free and Just
Ireland held a historical referendum yesterday to repeal their medieval Constitutional almost total ban on abortion. Sixty-four percent of eligible voters turned out, and 66.4% voted in favor of overturning the abortion ban. Opponents had repeatedly pointed out that Irish women leave in droves each year to seek abortions in the UK and elsewhere. Over 3,000 women were leaving per year coming up to the vote, and the Irish Family Planning Association reported that over 170,000 women had done so since 1980. The increasing availability of abortion pill packages within Ireland also demonstrated that regardless abortion was taking place there just like everywhere else in the world.
The law specified that all abortions were illegal in Ireland except to save the life of the mother. The law banned abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or if the fetus was malformed. Irish abortion law was highlighted in 2012 in global news when a 31 year old dentist who had been denied an abortion died while suffering a septic miscarriage. Heavily Catholic countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Chile have similar bans, and so do many Muslim countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The BBC reported this morning that Ireland’s Prime Minister said about the referendum outcome that this is “the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows and into the light….the day we came of age as a country, the day we took our place among the nations of the world.” That would be among nations with at least some semblance of progressive family planning policies, and those are the countries where religious fundamentalism does not have a stranglehold on government policies in regard to women’s rights to control their own bodies.
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America Degrading Into a Medieval World Favored by Religious Fundamentalists
But governments and cultural controls can shift over time. Witness America, so-called land of the free, where the Religious Right has for now decades become so ruthlessly committed and organized they have gotten one draconian anti-abortion law after another passed in state after state. These religious activists, who are primarily evangelical fundamentalists, seek to impose their worldview on all women in America and have as their ultimate goal to overturn Roe v Wade. They want to become what Ireland was, and some even seek to become like the violent, failed state of El Salvador and ban abortions in all cases. El Salvador is so enlightened they have 17 women serving 30-year prison sentences for the crime of having miscarriages. Even countries so atavistic and repressive to women as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan are in some ways regarding abortion not that harsh. Yet as Ireland progresses and becomes more free, here is a snapshot of regression in the United States:
- In 1973 through Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court held that Texas statutes criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a woman’s constitutional right of privacy, which it found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. State legislatures have been the major battleground where the anti-abortion religious fundamentalists have largely waged successful campaigns since Roe v Wade. State restrictions on abortion, now widespread throughout much of America. They are often referred to as “trigger laws” in anticipation of overturning the right to abortion. I call them barrier or hindrance laws; every effort is placed before a woman to prevent her from having an abortion.
- Use Texas as an example, where Roe v Wade started, still one of the most severe states. It is also a very politically conservative state. According to the Texas ACLU, Texas law requires you to make at least two trips to the abortion provider. The state requires you to undergo a sonogram and receive state-mandated paperwork about medical risks, adoption alternatives, and developmental stages of the fetus. (Some of the information in this paperwork is false.) The state also requires you to wait 24 hours after receiving the sonogram and state-mandated paperwork before having your abortion.
- Most states have enacted all kinds of hindrance laws. It is not just the “Bible Belt” South involved in rolling back women’s rights. Earlier this year the Republican controlled Iowa state legislation passed what they called “the heartbeat bill,” which will be overturned. Its goal is to block abortions once a heartbeat is detected, which would essentially ban the procedure for most by the sixth week of pregnancy.
Seven states now have only one abortion clinic. Sometimes women have to travel for hundreds of miles to get a legal, safe, medical abortion because anti-abortion activists and state legislatures acting on their behalf created conditions to close clinics. There have been at least 11 abortion doctors and clinic staff murdered for doing their job. The National Abortion Federation (an alliance of medical providers) documents a long historical list since Roe v Wade of clinic bombings and arson, physical assaults, throwing acid, and of course, constant harassment by rabid religious fundamentalists who only want their type of “freedom” in which they came ram their moral certitude down other people’s throat. What follows is a list from the Guttmacher Institue (https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/overview-abortion-laws)
- Physician and Hospital Requirements: 41 states require an abortion to be performed by a licensed physician. 19 states require an abortion to be performed in a hospital after a specified point in the pregnancy, and 19 states require the involvement of a second physician after a specified point.
- Gestational Limits: 43 states prohibit abortions, generally except when necessary to protect the woman’s life or health, after a specified point in pregnancy.
- “Partial-Birth” Abortion: 20 states have laws in effect that prohibit “partial-birth” abortion. 3 of these laws apply only to post-viability abortions.
- Public Funding: 17 states use their own funds to pay for all or most medically necessary abortions for Medicaid enrollees in the state. 32 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the use of state funds except in those cases when federal funds are available: where the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. In defiance of federal requirements, South Dakota limits funding to cases of life endangerment only.
- Coverage by Private Insurance: 11 states restrict coverage of abortion in private insurance plans, most often limiting coverage only to when the woman’s life would be endangered if the pregnancy were carried to term. Most states allow the purchase of additional abortion coverage at an additional cost.
- Refusal: 45 states allow individual health care providers to refuse to participate in an abortion. 42 states allow institutions to refuse to perform abortions, 16 of which limit refusal to private or religious institutions.
- State-Mandated Counseling: 18 states mandate that women be given counseling before an abortion that includes information on at least one of the following: the purported link between abortion and breast cancer (5 states), the ability of a fetus to feel pain (13 states) or long-term mental health consequences for the woman (8 states).
- Waiting Periods: 27 states require a woman seeking an abortion to wait a specified period of time, usually 24 hours, between when she receives counseling and the procedure is performed. 14 of these states have laws that effectively require the woman make two separate trips to the clinic to obtain the procedure.
- Parental Involvement: 37 states require some type of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion. 26 states require one or both parents to consent to the procedure, while 11 require that one or both parents be notified.
Until the radical religious right cannot completely ban abortion in America, they have been increasingly successful in getting state legislatures to clamp down on the availability of legal, safe medical abortions. According to the CDC more than 600,000 women each year in America seek a legal abortion, even while its incidents have been decreasing over the past decade. Nine of 10 abortions are when gestation was less than 13 weeks. Abortion is one of many methods of family planning. It is a woman’s right. If holier-than-thou radicals get their way, women will abort anyway. Many will die without openly legal medical abortion rights. Epidemiological estimates indicate that as many as 800,000 illegal abortions per year were occurring in the U.S. during just the 1960s before Roe v Wade. Several thousand women died every year before Roe v Wade, and those numbers only lowered due to wide and effective use of antibiotics and medical interventions, I want to tell you this because of what is happened in this country.
During a speech earlier this year before the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Vice President Mike Pence said “I’m a Christian, a Conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” He is a fervent anti-abortionist and fundamentalist religious fanatic. He is also one step away from the Presidency after Trump, who has clearly shown he could care less about women’s rights and wants to at least severely restrict abortion throughout the world. By my own transcription of the speech, Pence went on to say,
“I couldn’t be more proud to serve as Vice President to a President who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life.
From the first week of this Administration we reinstated the Mexico City policy preventing tax payer dollars from funding organizations that promote and perform abortions around the world.
I was honored, I was honored to cast the tie breaking vote in the Senate and have the President sign a bill that empowers all 50 states to defund Planned Parenthood.
In the days ahead we’ll continue to strive until we restore the sanctity of life in the center of American law.”
This last statement was a promise to overturn Roe v Wade. The religious nuts were going crazy with cheers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtSzbSdIiIk).
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The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1974
I would say the emphasis must be on the fact that women control their own bodies, they are not incubators for men or society, and women have freedom. That freedom comes by taking power, and you must take power as real, meaningful, long lasting power cannot be given to you. And as anyone who has wielded power or been under the boot of power knows, or best yet knows how power can be shared in a community, power means control. Yet each person bears their own innate, non-negotiable control, and for women who may be pregnant with a child, it is always her body—and her mind—not the fetus, that controls.
—Lee Man, 2018
===================================== For your Reflection:
George Carlin, 2009 – Remember, he is comedian….while being a social critic
Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place, huh? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.
Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach “military age,” then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life… pro-life… These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state.
Pro-life… You don’t see many of these white anti-abortion women volunteering to have any black fetuses transplanted into their uterus’s, do you? No, you don’t see them adopting a whole lot of crack babies, do you? No, that might be something Christ would do. And, you won’t see a lot of these pro-life people dousing themselves in kerosene and lighting themselves on fire. You know, morally committed religious people in South Vietnam knew how to stage a goddamn demonstration, didn’t they?! They knew how to put on a fucking protest. Light yourself on FIRE!! C’mon, you moral crusaders, let’s see a little smoke. To match that fire in your belly.
Here’s another question I have: how come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelet? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen, that we passed chickens in goodness? Name six ways we’re better than chickens… See, nobody can do it! You know why? ‘Cuz chickens are decent people. You don’t see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No, you don’t see a chicken strapping some guy to a chair and hooking up his nuts to a car battery, do you? When’s the last chicken you heard about came home from work and beat the shit out of his hen, huh? Doesn’t happen. ‘Cuz chickens are decent people.
But let’s get back to this abortion shit. Now, is a fetus a human being? This seems to be the central question. Well, if a fetus is a human being, how come the census doesn’t count them? If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage they don’t have a funeral? If a fetus is a human being, how come people say “we have two children and one on the way” instead of saying “we have three children?” People say life begins at conception, I say life began about a billion years ago and it’s a continuous process. Continuous, just keeps rolling along. Rolling, rolling, rolling along.
And say you know something? Listen, you can go back further than that. What about the carbon atoms? Hah? Human life could not exist without carbon. So is it just possible that maybe we shouldn’t be burning all this coal? Just looking for a little consistency here in these anti-abortion arguments. See the really hardcore people will tell you life begins at fertilization. Fertilization, when the sperm fertilizes the egg. Which is usually a few moments after the man says “Gee, honey, I was going to pull out but the phone rang and it startled me.” Fertilization.
But even after the egg is fertilized, it’s still six or seven days before it reaches the uterus and pregnancy begins, and not every egg makes it that far. Eighty percent of a woman’s fertilized eggs are rinsed and flushed out of her body once a month during those delightful few days she has. They wind up on sanitary napkins, and yet they are fertilized eggs. So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who’s had more than more than one period is a serial killer! Consistency. Consistency. Hey, hey, if they really want to get serious, what about all the sperm that are wasted when the state executes a condemned man, one of these pro-life guys who’s watching cums in his pants, huh? Here’s a guy standing over there with his jockey shorts full of little Vinnies and Debbies, and nobody’s saying a word to the guy. Not every ejaculation deserves a name.
Now, speaking of consistency, Catholics, which I was until I reached the age of reason, Catholics and other Christians are against abortions, and they’re against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals?! Leave these fucking people alone, for Christ sakes! Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion! And the Catholics and Christians are just tossing them aside! You’d think they’d make natural allies. Go look for consistency in religion. And speaking of my friends the Catholics, when John Cardinal O’Connor of New York and some of these other Cardinals and Bishops have experienced their first pregnancies and their first labor pains and they’ve raised a couple of children on minimum wage, then I’ll be glad to hear what they have to say about abortion. I’m sure it’ll be interesting. Enlightening, too. But, in the meantime what they ought to be doing is telling these priests who took a vow of chastity to keep their hands off the altar boys! Keep your hands to yourself, Father! You know? When Jesus said “Suffer the little children come unto me”, that’s not what he was talking about!
So you know what I tell these anti-abortion people? I say “Hey. Hey. If you think a fetus is more important that a woman, try getting a fetus to wash the shit stains out of your underwear. For no pay and no pension.” I tell them “Think of an abortion as term limits. That’s all it is. Biological term limits.
But you know, the longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear this phrase “sanctity of life”. You’ve heard that. Sanctity of life. You believe in it? Personally, I think it’s a bunch of shit. Well, I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians all taking turns killing each other ‘cuz God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the land, vengeance is mine. Millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question. “You believe in God?” “No.” *Pdoom*. Dead. “You believe in God?” “Yes.”
“You believe in my God? “No.” *Poom*. Dead. “My God has a bigger dick than your God!” Thousands of years. Thousands of years, and all the best wars, too. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me. Hey, any time a bunch of holy people want to kill each other I’m a happy guy.
But don’t be giving me all this shit about the sanctity of life. I mean, even if there were such a thing, I don’t think it’s something you can blame on God. No, you know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? ‘Cuz we’re alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We’re not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What’s the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. ‘Cuz JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They’re fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It’s a self serving, man-made bullshit story.
It’s one of these things we tell ourselves so we’ll feel noble. Life is sacred. Makes you feel noble. Well let me ask you this: if everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die, where does the sacred part come in? I’m having trouble with that. ‘Cuz, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. We don’t practice it. Look at what we’d kill: Mosquitoes and flies. ‘Cuz they’re pests. Lions and tigers. ‘Cuz it’s fun! Chickens and pigs. ‘Cuz we’re hungry. Pheasants and quails. ‘Cuz it’s fun. And we’re hungry. And people. We kill people… ‘Cuz they’re pests. And it’s fun!
And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn’t seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says “Save the tumors.”. Or “I brake for advanced melanoma.”. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up! Made it up! The same way… Thank you.
===================== Thank you for not having an abortion if you don’t want one, and thank you for leaving the rest of us alone.
Florida Leeman 