Regardless of how you feel about abortion – all of the fundamental concerns for the life of the embryo or fetus – you need to understand that the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade takes away a woman's right to choose.
A woman's right to choose regarding birth control and abortion is sociologically important because women have fought long and hard to be equal to men. In fact, authoritative interpretations of international human rights law establish that denying women access to abortion is a form of discrimination and jeopardizes a range of human rights. The United Nations human rights treaty bodies regularly call for governments to decriminalize abortion in all cases and to ensure access to safe, legal abortion in certain circumstances at a minimum.
American poet, essayist and critic Katha Pollitt writes …
“Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) – Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators – but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf."
Pollitt explains that qualifying abortion as "the most difficult decision a woman will ever make" may help abortion rights advocates to "forestall the 'women are lazy sluts who have abortions for convenience'" line from opponents, Pollitt said, but the somber tone of such defenses withholds the fact that abortion is often a positive choice for women's lives.
(Amanda Duberman. “Katha Pollitt On What The Pro-Abortion Rights Movement Gets Wrong About Choice.” HuffPost. October 15, 2014.)
Ultimately, treating abortion as a moral issue means ignoring many of the realities that factor into a woman's choice to end a pregnancy – and the positive impact this decision can have on her life.
"The way we need to reframe abortion is to talk about it in the context of people's lives. Women want to have children when they are able to have a good situation, when they're ready and able to take care of a baby," Pollitt said. "Doesn't it everybody benefit, including children, when families are planned by the people who are supposed to be responsible for them?"
Kristin Luker, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, posits …
"Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their own views on abortion are the more correct, the more moral, and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should 'the other side' win, one group of women will see the very real devaluation of their lives and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat and so little light."
(Kristin Luker. From Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. August 4, 1985.)
On June 14 2022, the American Medical Association announced that the organization would be adopting a new policy that recognizes abortion restrictions as a "violation of human rights."
The AMA, one of the largest health care associations in the country, promised legal actions to protect access to abortion should restrictions be imposed on the state level. AMA went on to state that the group views abortion as a private matter between patient and physician.
"Responding to the growing threat of over-policing and surveillance of reproductive health services, the nation’s physicians and medical students at the AMA Annual Meeting adopted policy recognizing that it is a violation of human rights when government intrudes into medicine and impedes access to safe, evidence-based reproductive health services, including abortion and contraception," the press release reads.
The AMA, along with dozens of other leading medical organizations, filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, stating that abortion is a safe medical procedure and a decision to be made between the patient and the physician.
(Asher Notheis. “Abortion bans a ‘violation of human rights’: American Medical Association.” Washington Examiner. June 21, 2022.)
From “Poem about My Rights”
By June Jordan
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Used by permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com. Source: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005)
No comments:
Post a Comment