Recent developments
So, it's been a while since I've posted anything. Busy at work, and the flu hit the TJ household. But of course, it's not as if anything's changed over the past few weeks. We've continued our slide into becoming a fundamentalist state. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the Attorney General of Kansas wants the personal medical histories of women and girls who have had late-term abortions in that state. He claims he's looking for evidence of child sexual abuse, but it is crystal clear that his real motive is to find out if any women had late-term abortions in violation of law. (As critics have pointed out, “If Kline's motive was to find young girls who were raped and became pregnant, he could have looked at state birth certificates instead of abortion records.”) Kansas law prohibits abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy unless the continuation of pregnancy could severely injure the woman. Shawnee Country District Court Judge Richard D. Anderson said, sure, you can have those records, you can spend your nights reading the sexual histories and birth control practices of these 90 women and girls (who won't even be informed that you are given this information). Two clinics involved have appealed this decision, but I'm not holding my breath that they will succeed.

Ladies, you need to wake up. Your freedom to live how you choose, to have sex with whomever you choose, to marry (or not) whomever you choose, to use whatever form of birth control you choose, are all at stake here. Shortly after Bush's reelection, Deirdre Fulton wrote an excellent article summarizing the dangers posed to women's rights by the conservative agenda. I urge you all to read it, because it is happening NOW. At the recent CPAC conference in DC, Salon reported the following statement by Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum:

"I'm talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people," he said. "The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives."

Now, let's analyze that comment for a moment, because frankly, it blew me away. Not that he said it, but that he was bold enough to say it in a publicly reported forum.

The less virtue we have in our society...
Virtue to whom? Whose virtue? Well, obviously, virtue as defined by Senator Rick Santorum, who is an anti-choice Catholic bigot.

...the more the need for government to control our lives...
What he is really saying here is more need for government to control the lives of people whose virtue is sub-par. In other words, women and girls who have sex and want abortions.

I posted this at Eschaton recently, but all you people who think that the so-called "pro-life" movement really cares about life should think again. Occasionally, in unguarded moments, they let their real colors show. Recently, on the Corner at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO's editor and a truly sexually repressed woman who needs to get laid, posted her musings regarding safe haven laws:

LIFE SIGNS [K. J. Lopez ]
Just thinking aloud a little: I’ve never liked “safe haven” laws--legal abandonment of babies.

Here’s my conundrum: I want us saving kids. But do safe-haven laws send a cultural message that there’s no responsibility that comes with being a mother if you don’t ask a mother to at least hang out, talk to authorities? I think you might save some babies lives but you send a larger cultural message—that infants can be dropped in emergency-room deposit boxes, etc. Nevermind the odd potential legal and other problems that could arise. In other words, does it do more damage than not?

Anyway, I am reminded of that in today’s story about the baby in Florida who was thrown from a car with a plastic bag over her head. The parents are criminals and better be prosecuted.

But doing the TV this morning the sheriff (I think it was, of Broward Co.) almost overemphasized that mothers can get rid of their children via safe-haven laws (which, admittedly, is a brilliant alternative to throwing a newborn out of a car). On The Today Show, though, Matt Lauer had to remind the guy to point out that what was done here was a crime.

Legal abortion, Peter Singer...legal abandonment...these things are very different mind you--the first two vs. the last--but there's an association...get my drift about the overall culture messages? I guess what I am saying is that I rather communities/states be expending energy on adoption-education campaigns. This is how you responsibly and easily give your child to another.
Posted at 02:50 PM [Friday, February 11, 2005]

What she is saying here is that the larger cultural message is more important than the potential that babies' lives might be saved by these laws. She doesn't care about life. What she is concerned with is "responsibility" (as reader dave noted, this is really about blame). In other words, making women pay for their “sinful” sexual practices. Because, ultimately, to the fundamentalists, sex outside of marriage is wrong and the woman should be punished for any violation of this credo. It is both sad and depressing that so many people still harbor the same beliefs that were prevalent when Hester Prynne wore the scarlet letter.

And let us not even get started on the “responsibility” crowd’s disdain for the welfare of children after they are born. This was amply demonstrated on the comments board at Eschaton this morning, by a troll calling him or herself “Jade,” who responded to a commenter’s postings about the expense of caring for a disabled child thusly:

"Where's universal health coverage? Easily available and affordable day care and preschool for a disabled child? Where's the assistance my brother may need if his son is not eventually capable of living on his own?"

It's in Utopia! Or, perhaps in the old Soviet Union. Or, I think China has universal health care.

What's sad is how much our citizens now look to the goverment for assistance.

Live free, and die.

Simple.

Setting aside Jade’s ignorance of the health care available in Western Europe, this response perfectly encapsulates the Puritanical view of most anti-choicers, who violently mocked Hillary Clinton’s infamous view that “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.” Of course, middle-class mothers, struggling to raise children and hold on to their jobs (because, really, who can afford to stay home in the Bush Boom years?) are beginning to recognize the wisdom of that philosophy. Judith Warner has written a book called Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which was excerpted in Newsweek recently:

Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.

It is time for us to take a stand and say, No More. We will not allow fundamentalists to take away the right to do what we wish with our own bodies. We will not allow access to birth control to be jeopardized by a few powerful groups with a warped interpretation of ancient religious texts. We will not continue to allow Bush and his cronies to ignore our pressing need for affordable, high-quality child care, universal health care, fully-funded public education for all, flexible working hours, and time to spend with our families in favor of a warmongering agenda that is bankrupting our nation and killing our youth (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost). Because, you see, it is all of one piece, one package. A nation that denies women the right to choose what they do with their own bodies will eventually deny other rights to those it successfully demonizes—homosexuals, the poor, the mentally ill, immigrants, people of color. And, likewise, a nation that denies the rights of gays to get married will deny the rights of women to choose. These issues cannot be separated. We are all part of a joint struggle and we must stand together and fight back against the people who want to turn our nation into Gilead.

(And yes, one of these days, I will post something about the name of this blog. It is of course taken from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.)
- posted by TJ @ 1:23 PM