Women and Politics

Recent antics and debates from Rush Limbaugh and Congress have centered much of the recent nationwide political discussion on the issues of contraception, reproductive freedom, and women's rights. Their discussion has focused on the absurd and patently insulting comments by Rush Limbaugh about a single woman, Sandra Fluke, who testified that the government should force her Catholic law school to pay for her contraception. Putting aside the merits of Fluke's advocacy and the constitutionalism of a government mandate on educational, religious, or commercial entities having to pay for health care of any form, let alone enacting policies that violate their beliefs, this debate is sickening.

The debate is sickening because it has only served to focus the nation's attentions on a childish incident of name-calling. It is sickening because one side insists that government should force others to invest, pay for, or otherwise provide goods and services of any kind. It is sickening because it distracts from the very real and very terrifying escalating assault on women in this country.

A recent Facebook debate amongst my friends discussed a YouTube video that decried the "disposability" of males in our society and especially among feminist thinkers and activists. I read the whole debate and while some very interesting and worthwhile points were brought up, the whole debate began to piss me off. Basically the argument said that because men are asked to give up their seats on the lifeboat, to put women's lives above their own due to evolutionary patterns of behavior, because mothers value their sons' emotions less than their daughters' (all points that can be heavily called into question in today's world), that somehow men are shortchanged. The video whined (in pretentious academese) that men are somehow disposable.

And yet, there are those in American society that truly do believe that women are disposable.

(I'm not laying claim to any moral superiority of the following claims, but I do believe that there is a very real human rights issue emerging here. It is completely focused on women biologically and socially, and it has me furious and terrified at the same time.)

You want examples?

How about HB 954, which seeks to redefine abortion after 20 weeks as feticide and make any woman who seeks to terminate her pregnancy after that point as a murderer? It goes further as to make it a criminal act to remove an already deceased fetus from the woman by artificial means. That means a woman who miscarried but whose body did not expel the dead tissue would be forced to carry that with her until her body naturally discarded it or until she and her doctor could prove that it represented an imminent threat to her life or substantial health.

This bill has already passed the Georgia State House by a vote of 102-65 and is currently be heard by the State Senate. That fact alone is infuriating, but it is compounded by the testimony that actually helped convince my representative and many others to vote on it.

Terry England is a representative from Auburn, GA and is one of the sponsors of this bill and he testified in favor of the changes to the law. In his testimony (and I am actually shaking with anger to write this), he compared the experience that women would go through due to this bill--the experience they would have as they miscarried and were forced to hold on to the remains in their own bodies, the experience of being denied access to their own bodies, the experience of being denied the chance to make painful but necessary decisions regarding their own health and well being-- as sad, natural, and equivalent to his own experiences delivering stillborn calves on his farm.

I am not joking.

He didn't stop with that comparison. He goes on to tell of a "salt of the earth" man who says he will gladly give up cockfighting "when those folks down there quit killing babies." As a way to put it in perspective. To frame the debate. Because a "salt of the earth people" will give up killing chickens if the state government will take control of women's bodies.

I am. NOT. Joking.

I'm also not done.

There is an amendment being proposed, also here in Georgia, that will declare that from the moment of conception, from the exact moment of fertilization, an egg is a full human being. This so-called Personhood Amendment would affect the Georgia State Constitution and is being championed by Reps Rick Crawford and Barry Loudermilk. This bill will prohibit any form of abortion, any type of contraception that can interfere with "proper implantation" of a fertilized egg (which includes almost all forms of oral contraceptive, spermicide, and more), and would eliminate in vitro fertilization.

This amendment has been polled across Georgia and has incredibly widespread support.

So far, the proponents insist that women will not be prosecuted for miscarriages, but the very fact that has to be CLARIFIED is a HUGE HUGE HUGE warning sign. They have to explain that "doctors won't be prosecuted for ectopic pregnancies." SERIOUSLY?! As a woman who very much wants to have children in the next year or so, who has known women very close to me who have suffered the unexplainable pain of miscarriage, who have struggled to conceive their own children and had to question the guilt that came with being unable to carry to term, we have a government that is about to tell us that "Yes, it really is your fault when not every fertilized egg in existence comes full term to bring life into the world."

You think I'm kidding?

Consider this case:

In Indiana, a woman is currently being held for attempted feticide and murder. What really happened? Bei Bei Shuai tried to kill herself when her fiance and the baby's father, who also happened to be her business partner in the restaurant they owned and ran together, explained to her that he was married to someone else and was leaving her. He told her this just before Christmas and eight months into her pregnancy. She was devastated and attempted to kill herself by swallowing rat poison bought at her local hardware store.

She survived and gave birth a little more than a week later. Her daughter, however, suffered seizures as a either a result of the rat poison or the treatment her mother received. The child died within a few days. Bei Bei suffered another breakdown and spent a month in a psychiatric ward.

One month later, she was arrested for murder of her child.

The implications for this are staggering, especially when you consider similar cases have moved forward in five other states in this country. As Bei Bei's attorney says, “These laws say there’s one law for pregnant women and another for everyone else,” says Linda Pence, the energetic Indiana lawyer representing Shuai. “For everyone else suicide is a mental health issue. For a pregnant woman, it’s a crime."

If you want to talk about the disposability of individuals, then this is where you start. When there is a separate law for women, when we are compared to farm animals, when our lives stop being our own and our rights cease the moment an egg in our bodies is fertilized, when our right to control our own health and bodies is abrogated by those who have never miscarried or carried a child to term nor will ever understand what that means, when our lives are valued as less, then that is the moment we become disposable.