What hateful evil bastards!
It’s astounding, from reading the list on the front page of this article, just how many of these cases would have never been issues if the USA had single-payer medicare. Y’know, like civilized countries usually have.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say these women lost their civil rights simply due to pregnancy.
Most of the above cases, as per the linked article, are incarcerations due to substance abuse while pregnant. Oxycontin, paint fume inhalation, etc. Maybe there were heavy handed abuses in these cited cases, but there’s so little information that one is only meant to draw a divisive conclusion. One’s civil rights come into question when they infringe on another’s.
Like the fetus’s when it is trespassing?
A fetus is not a person yet and does not have the right to use of another person’s body if the pregnant person is unable or unwilling to give birth.
There is a concept called bodily autonomy. Its generally considered a human right. Bodily autonomy means a person has control over who or what uses their body, for what, and for how long. Its why you can’t be forced to donate blood, tissue, or organs. Even if you are dead. Even if you’d save or improve 20 lives. It’s why someone can’t touch you, have sex with you, or use your body in any way without your continuous consent.
A fetus is using someone’s body parts. Therefore under bodily autonomy, it is there by permission, not by right. It needs a persons continuous consent. If they deny and withdraw their consent, the pregnant person has the right to remove them from that moment. A fetus is equal in this regard because if I need someone else’s body parts to live, they can also legally deny me their use.
By saying a fetus has a right to someone’s body parts until it’s born, despite the pregnant person’s wishes, you are doing two things.
- Granting a fetus more rights to other people’s bodies than any born person.
- Awarding a pregnant person less rights to their body than a corpse.
I can agree to that. I can’t agree that because you’ve opted to house a fetus that you have legal protection to harm it. Abort it, then huff paint and abuse oxys.
…You do realize the states that have these laws try to make abortion as impossible as they can without getting in trouble with the federal government, right?
And that, BoingBoing listed 6 examples of these laws being used on women who hasn’t sued any drugs, but just suffered an accident, or got sick enough their bodies couldn’t support their pregnancy or miscarried out of nowhere, which does honestly just happen sometimes?
The abuse of these laws justify getting rid of them, even if the intent is good. Lots of laws are like that, we could hypothetically prevent all crime by listening to everyone all the time, including cameras and microphones in everyone’s house, but we don’t, because the benefits of that policy would be heavily outweighed by the downsides.
In a perfect world, these laws protecting fetuses would be a good idea, but as the evidence shows, we live in a world where such laws are heavily abused to further victimize women who had a miscarriage or sickness or other unfortunate event making their probably-wanted pregnancy nonviable even when there’s no evidence she’s to blame for it.
You did not read the linked article, it seems. A few of those 6 examples BoingBoing provided were directly substance abuse issues, as per the 2-link-deep original publication:
But I digress, I’m all for abortion rights in all states and a level playing field, I’m simply calling the BoingBoing article out for being one-sided and completely disingenuous. I had to dig to find supporting information.
I think around one in five pregnancies if you are healthy and young, actually.
I’m aware a lot of the cases involved substance abuse, I’m saying the ones that didn’t are egregious enough violations of people’s civil rights that it’s proof the people involved in enforcing this law, can’t be trusted to enforce the spirit of it (which honestly isn’t a very positive spirit, pregnant people with substance abuse problems would be better served by rehab than jail, but that’s not punishment enough for the kind of conservative who wrote this law into office) instead of using it to go after people who haven’t done anything wrong besides lose a pregnancy due to accidents or the fact miscarriages just happen because sometimes it takes a while for a fetus to be obviously nonviable enough for the human body to notice and decide to clear out the uterus and get a chance to start over.
I’m fully aware the substance abuse thing happens, but that doesn’t justify allowing a law that’s obviously so broadly written it can and has been abused to harass innocent people to continue to be on the books.
Foetuses don’t have civil rights, jackass.
Remember how these guys are “not a scientist” when they don’t want to take responsibility for their climate change policies?
Well, they’re not a gynecologist either. See how flexible that excuse is?
This reminds me of one of those attempts to explain fascism–
- Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Since the fetus does not have a voice of its own, and must be spoken for, what better way of resolving the problem of extending liberal rights to the fetus than to assign these rights to the state, which can advocate on behalf of the undifferentiated masses against the the narcissistic fantasies of the so called “mother”-- not that she is honorable enough to merit respect as such.
If we had a Firestonian utopia with artificial wombs, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Until then, bodily autonomy.
But if the child if survived, the GOP/TP would make sure there wouldn’t be any way for the mother to take care of it. You know, cause she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place without permission from a man
Sorry, you didn’t read that correctly. The actual statement was:
In a majority of these cases, women who had no intention of ending a pregnancy went to term and gave birth to a healthy baby. This includes the many cases where the pregnant woman was alleged to have used some amount of alcohol or a criminalized drug.
A majority had a healthy baby. Many used some amount of alcohol or criminalized drug. Both “many” and “some amount” can mean almost anything. (Especially when it is merely alleged.)
I see:
The court described the research that the state had relied on as “outdated” and found that McKnight’s trial counsel had failed to call experts who would have testified about “recent studies showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor.”
and:
When a subsequent hearing was held to determine the legality of her incarceration, a doctor testified that Lowe’s addiction posed no significant risk to the health of the fetus.
emphasis mine on the next:
She was charged with reckless endangerment, based on the claim that by inhaling paint fumes she was creating a substantial risk of serious bodily injury or death to her unborn child. After spending approximately two weeks in the Cass County Jail, Greywind was able to obtain release for a medical appointment. At that appointment Greywind obtained an abortion, despite widely publicized efforts by abortion opponents to persuade her to carry the pregnancy to term.
That’s 3/5 of the selected cases, not out of all cases. In two of those, the harm from the state seems to be as much or more than the harm from the drugs.
I have always wondered what reproductive rights would look like if we laid eggs like chickens. I imagine any woman who didn’t want a baby could/would just dispose of a newly laid egg privately. Unless there was a whole egg right set of laws.
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