Widgetized Section
Go to Admin » Appearance » Widgets » and move Gabfire Widget: Social into that MastheadOverlay zone
Senator Sanders
The blame for this invasion of our privacy rests with members of congress who continue to vote for the Patriot Act
The Most Effective Dismantling of Reproductive Rights Comes From Stigma
loading...
As the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade passed by this week, it was disheartening to review the state of reproductive rights and realize that since this court decision was rendered, these rights have never been in worse shape. It’s not that the majority of Americans oppose abortion rights, because actually according to the ongoing Gallup Poll on the issue, most (52%) still believe that women have a right to get an abortion “under at least some circumstances.” The percentage of people who believe it should be legal in all cases (25%) is still higher than the percentage of people who believe it should be illegal in all cases (20%). However, the number of people identifying themselves as pro-choice (41%) has hit record lows as of polling results released in May 2012. Conversely, the same poll found that 50% of Americans now label themselves as pro-life and 51% say that abortion is morally wrong. Our current Supreme Court is stacked in favor of chipping away at abortion rights, especially if the right cases come before it, and it is difficult to predict how future courts will behave (we are just fortunate to have elected a president that will stave off any attempts to appoint even more justices who oppose women’s rights at this time). The unprecedented passage of anti-abortion lawsat the state level since 2010 is a major part of the “Republican War on Women.” And of course, radical conservatives have even begun attacking many forms of birth control despite the fact that these would reduce the need for abortions. How did the state of reproductive rights deteriorate to this point? Have these rights been taken too much for granted? Has the anti-abortion movement forced such stigma and shame to surround the procedure that potential advocates are driven away?
The Pew Research Center released the results of its poll last week on the Roe vs. Wade decision. First, the good news: the majority of Americans still believe in the finding of the court and a woman’s right to choose in at least the first three months of pregnancy (63%). It is interesting to note that the age group most supportive of legal abortion was 50-64 (69%), because these are people who first experienced the transition from illegal to legal abortion in their youth, a time when they could observe those such as teenagers start to make use of the procedure to end an obviously negative situation. The other group most supportive of abortion rights was 18-29 year olds (68%). However, this group was starkly unaware of just what kept their rights in place, as the majority of them could not properly identify what Roe vs. Wade was about (only 44% could). The curious thing about this poll is that much like the Gallup Poll, it also found that a high percentage of respondents identified abortion as morally wrong (47%), so people are capable of both disagreeing with it on a personal level and believing that it should still be a legal option for others.
To summarize the complicated views of Americans, it appears that the majority support legal access to abortion, at least for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy while at the same time, a majority do not consider themselves to be pro-choice or personally favorable toward abortion. These personal views are shown by statistics to fall away as a barrier to actually getting an abortion when faced with the reality of an unwanted pregnancy: fully 20% of women who get an abortion describe themselves as evangelical or fundamentalist Christians and 28% are Catholic. Given that dynamic, abortion rights are settled into a particularly tenuous position. People shun them until they need them, so public support for abortion rights becomes scarce even as private need remains substantial (almost half of pregnancies are unintended, and 3 in 10 women have an abortion before age 45: fact sheet). In 2008, the last year reported, there were 1.21 million abortions, and there have been almost 50 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade was decided. Since the majority of women report that their partners were supportive of the decision to get the procedure, there are many millions of men and women who theoretically could be vocal advocates for reproductive rights. But most aren’t. The torch is carried by a relatively small group of determined feminists (both male and female).
Nobody thinks abortion is an optimal outcome. Every pro-choice advocate wants to see contraception made so widely available, and people so well educated on how to use it properly, that abortion becomes less and less necessary. However, in the rush to ensure that everyone knows abortion is not ideal, pro-choice advocates have been placed in a no-win situation. They cannot celebrate abortion. Who would? But, they struggle to counterbalance the overwhelming forces of stigmatization and silencing that cause millions of women who have had the procedure to remain closeted. There have been campaigns by the National Abortion Federation, 45 Million Voices, Trust Women, the 1 in 3 campaign, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL Pro Choice America to have women tell their story about the circumstances that led to their need for an abortion. It’s a chance to break through the socially-imposed muting of women’s voices. But across the country, it isn’t working. The social shaming of women who have had abortions is intense.
Mississippi will be completely without abortion services imminently. Only a few lonely local voices within the state have spoken out against the state-imposed laws that violate the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision that ruled states must not place an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions; a disingenuous judge has ruled they do not. Eliminating the lone remaining abortion clinic entirely via unnecessary regulations has been remarkably easy, and this precedent will no doubt empower other states to make the same move. Robin Marty at RH Reality Check quotes one abortion rights activist who requested to remain anonymous, “This big fear out here isn’t violence, it’s social stigma. There isn’t anyone out here who can support the clinic publicly without facing some sort of personal repercussions.”
More than anything, this has been the success of the anti-reproductive freedom movement, who grandiosely call themselves ‘pro-life’ (yes, of course — right up until the moment of birth): the ability to drive supporters underground using stigma and shame. They have managed to frame women’s choices as selfish instead of thoughtful, reasonable, and necessary. This, despite the fact that 69% of the women who get abortion are economically disadvantaged (42% below the poverty line, another 27% just above it) showing women’s recognition that they cannot provide for a child weighs heavily into their decisions. The anti-choice movement has made those who do speak out in favor of abortion rights seem like they are advocates for criminal-level behavior. The violence, intimidation, and scare tactics that accompany the anti-choice movement only bolster the power of their more powerful stigmatization strategy. It is difficult to know how to fight back against these tactics, but doing so is critical to the survival of reproductive rights for women in this country.
Related Posts :
The Christian Defense Coalition has announced a new campaign to "educate" American voters about what the gro ...
Republicans believe in keeping government out of our lives, well, except when it regulates wha ...
There's good news for liberty on this 40th anniversary of Roe V Wade, a 1973 court decision that confirm ...
Post Ryan soul mate Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment that exposed the Republican Party's true age ...
President Obama, through a White House policy statement, has threatened to veto the House's bill that wo ...
Enhanced Comments
PoliticusUSA
G+
Facebook11 Responses to The Most Effective Dismantling of Reproductive Rights Comes From Stigma
Public Service Advertisements
Dog Gone at Penigma
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 10:27 am
Boehner has declared his intention to end the right to abortions in the United States as the goal for Congress in 2013.
I say it is time to end Boehner’s position in government, anywhere, ever, beginning in 2013, and it is time to push back against the anti-women defunding of planned parenthood, and the legislation that REQUIRES medically unnecessary procedures and the provision of medically inaccurate information be forced on women.
These same righties are trying to undo equal pay for equal work laws, and to lower or eliminate the minimum wage laws that give protection to women.
These are the same assholes who refuse to pass the Violence Against Women Act. It’s not just that they are pro-life, they are anti-women.
loading...
Reynardine
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 10:46 am
I have known a handful of people who were genuinely “pro-life”: anti-war, anti-capital punishment, sometimes even vegetarian. My hat goes off to them. I am not so saintly; I admire those who are. Even so, there are cases where a nation must defend itself against an invader and allowing a pregnancy to continue risks the destruction of a life.
Most “pro-lifers” are of a different kidney. They stock up on assault weapons, raven for war, want capital punishment even for crimes that are not murder, and begrudge those they see as beneath themselves “stuff” (like food, schooling, housing, medical care, a minimum wage). They are pro-punishment, and they see a fetus as just punishment for a woman who exercises her sexuality like a man, or sometimes even just possessing the potential for it. It is not farfetched to say they see it (as Dr. Rober Lindner described this concept six decades back) as a “gnawing rat placed upside down in the womb as punishment for transgression”. The guilty woman (or even little girl) must not be allowed to rid herself of her gnawing rat, or even prevent its advent in the first place, and so escape her punishment. Once it is born, however, unless some man claims it as his property, it is a worthless little human being, also deserving of punishment.
It is perilous to point out the true punitiveness of the attitude behind much of the “pro-life” movement. Its contradictions are self-evident. When people write in and say that the strafing of twenty first-graders with automatic weapon fire is “nothing” compared to the “slaughter of innocents” involved in “millions” of abortions, their thinking is clear. Mowing down children is good, because it inflicts pain on both the dying and the bereaved. Allowing the abortion of embryos is bad, because it allows women to escape punishment. We need to start calling it what it is: the pro-punishment movement.
loading...
Anne
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 11:22 am
These zealots are simply pro-birth only, as opposed to being pro-life. If they were truly pro-life, they would be about supporting at least adequate schooling, health care, employment, unemployment benefits for people jobless beyond their control, and social security/medicare for the old and disabled, as well as avoiding needless wars. They want to return to a world in which women’s choices were severely limited by their inability to plan their families so women had to adhere to rigid, inflexible sexual mores as a result. This stems from their warped views about human sexuality, particularly female sexuality. They are a sick, twisted group of folks who are so unmoored from reality that they can’t see, or don’t care about, the inevitable consequences of their poorly thought-out and ill-advised policies.
loading...
Sharin Khosa
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
I will keep posting this until everyone everywhere has read this and why Roe VS Wade is upheld. For those Republicans, Christian Churchers, bible bashing hypocrites, I would like to share with everyone More of your evil doings:
Please read the following, it should shock humanity, part of article and web link from Slate:
www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/…
“In a country as awash in bad faith and empty political posturing as ours….. That’s why the story of the St. Thomas More Hospital lawsuit is ripping through the Internet. It’s a sad one, really: Lori Stodghill, seven months pregnant, was admitted to the hospital with a blocked artery that killed her and the two fetuses inside her. The plaintiff, her husband, Jeremy Stodghill, is claiming that because her doctor didn’t answer his pages, the twins died unnecessarily and could have been rescued through an emergency C-section, even if Lori’s life couldn’t be saved. The hospital’s defense, so far successful, is to claim that because the twins were fetuses and not people, this can’t legally be viewed as a wrongful-death situation.”
“Of course, the problem is that the hospital is run by Catholic Health Initiatives—Catholic, as in that religion whose leadership routinely claims that not only are fetuses people, but so are embryos, zygotes, and fertilized eggs. That claim is used to turn women into sacrificial lambs for the faith……..as a way to oppress women (and the second it starts possibly costing the Catholic hospital money).”
:
loading...
Anne
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
It sounds like they are contradicting themselves in their efforts to defend the indefensible. An “abortion” in this case would have made it possible to save both these babies and maybe even their mother. This kind of thing is a predictable end result of such rigid, inflexible thinking.
loading...
Elizabeth 44
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 9:15 pm
The teaching of the Catholic church has long been, when having to choose between the mother and the fetus, the fetus must be saved because it hasn’t had a chance at life yet. No matter that there is a husband, and perhaps, several children at home who will suffer the loss of the woman. Women are dispensable and can be replaced.
loading...
Shiva(Moderator)
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 9:22 pm
I think you are right. The catholic cult is about domination over lives
loading...
Churchlady
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 1:29 pm
The MSM do a massive disservice to women by not reporting that virtually ALL mainline Protestants are pro-choice. They trust women’s moral agency and see abortion as ESSENTIAL for women who, in the bright light of their own understanding of their own lives, see abortion as the right thing for them to do.
The stigma is huge indeed. It’s not just about the proceedure; it’s about the sad things that happen to get to that point. Wrong man, wrong time, contraceptive failure, violence – one doesn’t have an abortion for no reason. After walking countless numbers of girls and women into clinics, it is clear that however powerful they are,however mature, this is a small or large death of HOPE.
We teach girls and therefore the women they become that they have control over their lives, so when that does not come true, they feel they have failed and that abortion is a manifestation of that failure.
That said, it is absolutely NOT true that women regret the choice. They may regret the need for it, but not the doing of it. Life is filled with regrets – no one gets through life without them. Far, far better to be sad about a bad time in one’s life and to go on from there than to regret for a lifetime a living child who is not wanted.
Women KNOW what their lives are about. No one else can possibly do that for them by imposing rules that are based in fantasy and mythology. Those who come to regret abortion have usually been carefully coached by religious zealots who slaver after their ‘repentance’ and denunciation of their own choice. It is NOT inevitable.
That is why the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice exists – to make clear that faith does NOT forbid abortion but respects the choice, the action, the women who do it. See www.rcrc.org for participant denominational members and the theological reflections on women’s right to choose. It is very powerful and gets NO attention from the media at all. Spread the word!
loading...
C.
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
I have to agree that the stigma of shame that is put on women who choose the right to an abortion is awful. Choosing to have an abortion is a very difficult decision for any woman. We know what being pregnant means. We also know what the responsibilities are that go with bringing a child into this world.
Women deserve to have this choice. Women know the seriousness of this choice. They deserve to have all choices available to control this process. This is their body and it should be their choice.
Children deserve to be wanted, loved, and brought up in families that can afford to care for them and at a time that is right for that family. Children are expensive. Where are the prolife advocates when children are born into families that don’t give a dam about them, can’t afford them, mistreat and mentally harm them for life? They don’t seem to care about those children.
The least these people could do is get behind easy access to birth control.
loading...
Churchlady
Jan. 27th, 2013 at 10:49 pm
C – this is beautifully said.
When your view of other human beings is grounded in respect and equality, you will support women’s choices. When it is grounded in a fearful belief that you have to prove your superiority to God or miss getting into heaven, women become objects to convert, shame, manipulate and then convert – even if you ARE a woman engaged in that dreadful behavior.
The view of religion that rests in fear of God and fear of eternal damnation cannot produce people who see others in positive light. But given that, they most profoundly CANNOT be making policy over our personal lives. It is exactly in keeping with the Tea Party who hate government making rules about how it operates.
You cannot be given control over the people and the institutions you disrespect. You just CANNOT.
loading...
Ingrid Buxton
Jan. 28th, 2013 at 11:23 am
Pro-choice women need to take a page out of the LGBT movement and come out of the closet to friends and family, out of the shadows and start telling their stories of how they came to have an abortion. Nearly all will involve ignorance of sexuality due to poor education by parents and schools, lack of access to contraceptives, shame over sexuality and denial, contraceptive failure, bad judgement, medical emergency. Lets face it, how much research is being done/funded to find something better than “the pill” for women? For men? Why isnt the morning after pill available at every drug store for pennies? Because that is what it costs, more for packaging than ingredients.
Abortion rates plummet with free birth control http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/24334.aspx
This really isnt about “pro-life” it is about “we want to control women’s lives”.
loading...