Tag Archives: reproductive rights

Tell John Peter Smith Hospital Where to Send Their Bill

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John Peter Smith Hospital, the Fort Worth hospital that interpreted Texas law to require them to keep a pregnant woman on life support long after she was medically considered dead, and against her family’s wishes, might now be trying to bill the family for several months of unconsented and unwanted treatment.

For what it’s worth, sign this petition if you don’t think that’s right (h/t Jennifer).

You might also tell Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and your state legislators how you feel.

The law in question is a 1999 addition to the Texas Health & Safety Code, § 166.049:

PREGNANT PATIENTS. A person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.

The key there is “life-sustaining.” Part of the dispute was whether the hospital should keep a patient who, it was generally agreed, was brain dead on life support.

Not at all surprisingly, Rep. Bill Zedler, R-Arlington, doesn’t get it.


I’d say shame on you, Rep. Zedler, but we both know it wouldn’t do any good, don’t we?

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Unacknowledged Bodily Autonomy in the Reproductive Rights Debate

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(The following was my response to a comment on Facebook about how people calling themselves pro-life view abortion as murder, the same as if a woman shot and killed her husband. I disagree with that analogy on many levels. I owe some hat-tips to a few people for some of the ideas expressed here. I’ll try to update if I can find those posts.)

Except that, in your hypothetical, it’s probably safe to assume that the woman’s husband was not physically occupying space inside her abdomen (no sex jokes, please). I understand that people think abortion is murder–I think they’re wrong, and I don’t think that simply calling it murder ends the conversation. The problem with calling it murder in a way that makes it equivalent to killing a separate, autonomous human being for whatever reason is this: if you are experiencing kidney failure, and I am the only known person on earth who is a match to you, no one can legally force me to give you one of my kidneys, whatever the medical consequences for you or the social consequences for me. The same goes for a blood transfusion or any other use of any part of my body. If I am brain-dead, but my kidney is viable for organ donation, no one can take my kidney unless I consented to be an organ donor. In short, I have complete and utter legal authority and control over how to use my body, even if it means that someone else dies. The alternative is that I could be forcibly anesthetized for kidney removal, resulting in a possible lifetime of medical complications against my will. From a legal standpoint, it doesn’t matter why I refuse to consent to organ donation. Calling abortion murder as though it is merely a decision to end the life of another person (and I disagree that an embryo or fetus is a person in that sense, but that’s a slightly different topic) ignores completely the fact that said embryo or fetus is occupying space inside another person’s body. No one can be compelled to donate a kidney, and no one can be compelled to give up their body for an embryo or fetus. Otherwise, a corpse has more bodily autonomy than a living pregnant person.

Now, at this point, the conversation usually (not always) turns to the circumstances of the pregnancy–i.e. the woman (or transgender man, or genderfluid person, and so forth) had sex, knowing that pregnancy is a possible result, etc. etc. The problem there is that you don’t know, unless you investigate the circumstances of the pregnancy, whether it was the result of willful sexual conduct or not, and even if it were not the result of voluntary behavior (e.g. rape), so what? You already said that you believe a fetus is a person with the right to life and so forth, so it shouldn’t make a difference how the pregnancy occurred. It’s just that telling a rape victim that they have to endure the multitude of difficulties presented by pregnancy seems morally abhorrent to many people. That shouldn’t matter if you truly believe what you originally said–so we come back to the beginning, and still have to contend with the fact that the pregnant person has bodily autonomy that still has not been recognized.

There are other arguments too, such as a right of self-defense if a pregnancy threatens someone’s health, but it still comes down to the right to bodily autonomy. Whatever you believe about an embryo’s or fetus’ rights, a separate, living, breathing human being–who was viewed as such up until the moment their pregnancy was discovered–is sitting right there, being ignored.

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SIGNAL BOOST: “Every Reason for an Abortion Is a Good Reason”

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This article by Amanda Marcotte is from July 15, 2013, but it hasn’t gotten any less relevant or important:

While spouting a series of lies, Bill O’Reilly whined recently on Fox News that women in Texas are providing what he considers insufficient reasons for getting an abortion. The exchange between him and Fox’s official fake feminist Kirsten Powers went like this:

Powers shot back: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

“Yeah!” O’Reilly jabbed. “For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!’”

“Yeah,” Powers said. “For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

To hear O’Reilly and Powers talk, one would think that in order to get a safe, legal abortion under the standards set out by Roe v Wade, one has to go in and provide a “reason” that you “deserve” this abortion, and some kind of authority figure determines if it’s good enough before you get an abortion—their only concern is that women are supposedly not giving good enough reasons. Obviously, these two pundits know better and are just being dishonest with the viewers, but that they are engaging in this rhetoric in the first place speaks to a serious problem in how abortion is discussed in this country.

***

The confusion between how ordinary people talk about abortion in terms of deserving-ness and how the law handles abortion, as a matter of rights, is why so much polling data on abortion is bunk. Gallup is notoriously bad on this front, showing that somehow half of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but a majority still want abortion to be legal. In other words, a lot of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but disagree with the “pro-life,” i.e. anti-choice movement about abortion access. I believe that speaks to a longing a lot of people have for women to be able to access abortion, but only if they provide a good reason for it. Of course, there’s no legal way to determine the difference between a good and a bad reason, to separate the “good girls” who just “made a mistake” from those deemed unrepentant sluts.

***

Unfortunately, I fear that pro-choicers may be making this problem worse by our rhetoric. Every time anti-choicers try to restrict abortion, we trot out women who’ve had abortions to put a face on the situation. It’s a good idea, but as Jessica Grose of XX Factor writes, the women in these stories almost always feel the need to justify their abortions, to explain that they are deserving—which in turn implies that others are not.

***

Because of this, I have to sign off on Grose’s suggestion: Tell your abortion stories, but don’t try to justify yourself! We need to get the message out that, as with every other medical intervention out there, pre-viability abortions don’t need to be earned. You don’t need to be a “good girl” who is full of remorse. The woman who slept with 30 guys and accidentally got pregnant because she foolishly took her chances without a condom deserves her abortion just as much as the loving mother of two who has discovered a fetal defect incompatible with life. We believe this to be true, and we can only start convincing the public that it’s true if we start talking about this belief more straightforwardly.

READ MORE…

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Signal Boost: Anti-Choicers’ “Shocking Amount of Entitlement”

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From “The Deeply Disturbing World of Modern Anti-Abortion Activism” by Amanda Marcotte, on anti-choice efforts in Kansas:

What all this bespeaks is a shocking amount of entitlement on the behalf of anti-choicers. It makes sense; the underlying premise of being anti-choice is believing that you have the right to control the reproductive decisions of perfect strangers and that your beliefs about what sexuality is “for” should be imposed on others by government fiat. Once you get into that headspace, all other kinds of shockingly entitled attitudes follow, including the belief that you get to misuse the medical records of underage rape victims and that clinics, and not you, are to blame if your protesting is an irritant to the rest of the community. The anti-choice movement, at its heart, is imperious and cold-hearted, but the situation in Kansas shows how an insular, radically anti-choice community can take the already grossly entitled attitudes of anti-choicers and blow them up into grotesqueries.

As I have stated many times in the past, I do not believe for a second that the higher-ups in the anti-choice movement have any serious interest in reducing the number of abortions. At best, it is about removing any legally-sanctioned access to abortion so that they can claim a clear conscience and place the blame for continued abortion on “criminals” (which really is quite the feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand). At worst, of course, it is just yet another effort at imposing archaic notions of control over women.

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Kansas Abortion Opponents Try Out a “Look What You Made Me Do” Strategy

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By Anthony Appleyard (talk).Anthony Appleyard at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia CommonsWichita, Kansas had been abortion-clinic-free for several years, ever since someone shot and killed George Tiller in church. Now, however, a new clinic, the South Wind Women’s Center, has opened in the same spot, and it has anti-choice forces all up in a tizzy. They are taking a novel approach this time, however. They are asking the city to change the area’s zoning to “non business” so that South Wind cannot operate there, because they say the clinic will cause noise disruptions.

According to the Wichita Eagle, abortion opponents are citing several reasons that the clinic shouldn’t be allowed to operate in the community: several gun incidents that occurred when Tiller practiced there, the lack of communication between the clinic’s security staff and the anti-abortion activists to “defuse violence” before it occurs, the level of “antagonism” between the the clinic’s escorts and the anti-choice protesters, and the fact that it may be “inappropriate” for school children to see graphic signs and protests affiliated with the clinic.

So basically, the very same people who would be causing the noise are complaining about the possibility of noise. Don’t get me started on the “defuse violence” argument. This strikes me as a classic diversion tactic used by abusers: “Look what you made me do.” They regard loud, disruptive protests—complete with “graphic signs”—as some sort of natural result of a clinic opening in their town. Some (not all) even seem to regard violence as a likely outcome, with little to no thought of the moral agency of the people committing the violence:

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: What about showing some personal responsibility, anti-choicers? What about accepting that a clinic’s mere existence is not actually provoking you to do anything, whether it’s shoot someone or merely yell invective at them as they go about their business? But personal responsibility is so 2012 (unless you are black). We’re in a new era now, where the mere existence of free birth control means you have to take it and abortion providers are making you harass them just by existing. Willpower is dead.

Photo credit: By Anthony Appleyard (talk).Anthony Appleyard at en.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

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Oh No You Don’t, Republicans!

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file6461281015948A few Texas Republican representatives apparently don’t feel that HB2 was enough embarrassment and grief for our state, so they’ve decided to expend more taxpayer money to pursue even more egregiously unconstitutional restrictions on abortion rights (h/t Evin).

The text of HB59, introduced today in the Texas House of Representatives, is not yet available online. The bill’s caption is “Relating to a prohibition on abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat; providing penalties.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, the heart may begin beating as early as six weeks. It is not clear if HB59 would prohibit abortion after a specific number of weeks, or if it would prohibit doctors from performing an abortion if they can detect a heartbeat. Regardless, the law is just a bad idea.

North Dakota’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law in March, is based on the idea of a fetal heartbeat. That law did not give a specific time frame either, but it has been interpreted to ban abortion at around the six-week mark. That law has also been ruled unconstitutional, which of course is the goal for proponents of these bills, who know they’ll be struck down but keep hoping they can get a case before the Supreme Court in order to reverse Roe v. Wade. A Kansas anti-choice advocate admitted as much earlier this year, according to Huffington Post: Continue reading →

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Signal Boost: Kurt Eichenwald on “the Murderous Cruelty of Conservatives”

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Vanity Fair published a column yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald entitled “My Family, Our Cancer, and the Murderous Cruelty of Conservatives,” in which he recounts his wife Theresa’s struggle with breast cancer, the top-shelf medical care she received, and the fact that many Americans have no chance at all of receiving remotely similar care. He lays this right where it belongs, at the feet of Republicans (and their occasional blue-dog Democratic allies), who refuse to support health care measures that nearly every nation in the industrialized world now takes for granted, and who refuse to acknowledge the impact their policies have. The whole article is excellent, but here are a few quotes that stuck out for me:

Many Republicans, either out of self-delusion or deceit, deny they are causing any such thing. But there is no question that, in their obsession with zygotes, embryos, and non-viable fetuses as part of their supposed pro-life stance, they are effectively murdering real, walking, talking women—mothers and daughters, grandmothers and sisters, all sacrificed on an altar of Pecksniffian hypocrisy and contemptible disregard by people who have the insurance, connections, and available health care to feel certain their politics won’t kill their loved ones. Perhaps Theresa and I are re-directing our anger from the cancer, but so be it; our rage has focused on the financially comfortable, morally blind, and arrogantly self-righteous who tyrannically conspire to rob poor women of years of life they might otherwise have. It is for this reason that Theresa is willing to disclose her condition, in hopes that, in doing so, we will help highlight how politicians are blithely choosing to kill women who are not as fortunate as she is.

And this:

Like a boy trying to justify what he wants to believe, rather than forming belief around demonstrable facts, the Texas legislators and their mostly G.O.P. counterparts around the country aren’t making arguments. They’re just saying things based on a woeful ignorance of the issues involved.

And this:

Since you don’t understand the issue beyond your desire to limit abortions, Rep. Laubenberg, let me put the meaning of what you have done in clear terms: through your ignorance or incompetence or general lack of interest in the well-being of people who don’t look like you or have your size bank account, you will be responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of Texas women. You, Rep. Laubenberg, will be a murderer, no different than some street punk who shoots up a liquor store. His weapon is a gun; yours, a smug satisfaction with your limited understanding of health policy. If Theresa and I were among the rural poor, she would now almost certainly be one the many people you would kill as a result of her inability to gain access to breast screenings. And for that, you deserve not only our contempt, but the contempt of every decent human being with the humility and intelligence to recognize the impact of the legislation you have “written,” yet aren’t bright enough to understand.

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“She has more rights over her own body dead than alive.”

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The following is from a July 10, 2013 post at Positive Guidance Parenting. It presents a perspective that self-proclaimed pro-lifers refuse to acknowledge. The whole post needs to be read by everyone on earth, but here is the part that hit home for me:

I read a perspective that I want to share with you. Let’s say you go into renal failure. For whatever reason, your kidneys are shot. Hey, we’re the same blood type, and I could give you a kidney to save your life. But I don’t have to. It’s my kidney, and I get to decide whether you can have it or not. If I choose to keep my kidney, you die. Corpses have the same rights – no matter how life saving their organs are, no living person has a right to those organs unless consent was given by the individual prior to his or her death. A fetus requires the mother to act as a host – putting her body and all of her organs on loan while he strives for viability. Without it, the fetus dies. Saying that a mother cannot choose whether to offer up her body as a life support system is saying that both that fetus and any corpse have more rights than a living, breathing woman. Let that settle in – Texas is pushing laws that strip living women of rights that we respectfully give to her corpse. She has more rights over her own body dead than alive.

Regardless of where you fall on the issue, currently in the United States of America, women have a constitutional right to an abortion prior to viability of a fetus. Viability is defined as between 24 – 28 weeks of gestation. Texas is passing a ban on abortions at 20 weeks, following the footsteps of a handful of other States. These laws are a direct challenge to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and are systematically being overturned by higher courts because they are blatant violations of women’s reproductive rights. Way to be an aggressive abuser of women, Texas. And I don’t say that lightly. This is an abusive relationship. There is no being respectful of each side’s opinions. Women will fight for their human rights, and this bill will be overturned, despite Texas legislature’s misguided dominance.

(Emphasis added.)

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The Texas House Makes HB2 Seem More Popular Than It Is by Changing the Page Layout

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Via Stand With Texas Women/Facebook

Via Stand With Texas Women/Facebook

The Texas House of Representatives’ House Research Organization (HRO) releases a “Daily Floor Report” summarizing the bills and testimony presented before the House or its committees. The House has been in recess since the second special session started, although the State Affairs Committee held a hearing on the resurrected anti-abortion bill, HB2, last Tuesday, July 2. The Daily Floor Report for July 9, 2013 (PDF file) has a summary of that hearing, and it demonstrates a sneaky way of making it appear, at least superficially, that your bill has more support than it actually does (h/t Arthur).

Beginning on page 1 (the first page after the cover sheet), the report lists witnesses testifying “for” the bill, “against” the bill, and “on” the bill. It lists three pages of witnesses supporting the bill and one page of witnesses opposing it. The report also identifies one person who testified “on” the bill, Ellen Cooper of the Department of State Health Services.

Based on that, you might think that far more people testified in support of HB2 than in opposition to it, right? You might be excused, at first glance, for thinking that three times as many people testified for it as against it.

You would be wrong about that.

At the end of the three-page-long list of HB2 supporters, the report states that “about 1,090 others” signed up to testify in support of the bill. Most of them did not get to deliver their testimony to the committee in person, of course, since the hearing might still be going on a week later if they had. Still, three pages of names plus 1,090 more is quite a lot of people.

How many more signed up to testify in addition to the one page of names testifying against HB2? At the end of that much-shorter list, the report states that “about 2,060 others” signed up to testify against HB2.

According to the Texas Tribune, a roughly equal number of people testified for and against the bill. I suspect the HRO is not accustomed to writing such lengthy lists of witnesses, but that still does not explain the different page lengths. The scale of the testimony on Sunday, June 23 does not even come close to last Tuesday, and the Daily Floor Report (PDF file) for that day clearly indicates that more people signed up to testify against that bill than for it.

Wherever you stand on the issue of abortion, this sort of game-playing should not be acceptable.

Maybe Daily Floor Reports are subject to a page number limit. That is about the only honest reason I can think of at the moment for why the report is set up this way, but even that would not explain why the HRO cut off the list of opponents when it could have shortened the list of supporters.

The chair of the steering committee for the House Research Organization is Rep. Bill Callegari (R-Houston). I sent Rep. Callegari the following request for information through his Facebook page:

Dear Rep. Callegari,

I am a resident of Austin, Texas, and I have been researching and writing about the events surrounding HB2, SB9, and the related bills pending in the Legislature. I am not affiliated with any news or media organization. I have a question regarding the Daily Floor Report released today, July 9.

The report summarizes the State Affairs Committee hearing on HB2 that took place last week, and includes lists of people who registered to testify for and against the bill. According to news reports, only about 100 people were able to give live testimony to the committee, with about an equal number of people testifying in support of and in opposition to the bill. Today’s Daily Floor Report lists three pages’ worth of supporters’ names, then adds that about 1,090 more people signed up to testify in support of HB2. It then lists one page of opponents’ names, and adds that about 2,060 more people signed up to testify against the bill.

My question is as follows: why did the report list so many more names of supporters than opponents, when more people signed up to testify against the bill than for it, and roughly equal numbers of people actually testified to the committee on either side of the issue? Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

I’ll update if I hear anything back.

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Dear Rep. Laubenberg

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Via Dallas County Democratic Party on Facebook

Via Dallas County Democratic Party on Facebook

The following is reposted with permission from a Facebook post by my friend Andreas, in relation to the HB2 hearings on Tuesday, July 2, 2013 in Austin, Texas:

Dear Rep. Laubenberg,

The truth shouldn’t ever have to fear inquiry. If this was a bill that would actually help increase women’s health and safety you would not have to avoid answering tough questions about its effect on women. You would not have to endure scathing rebuttals from actual health organizations and medical professionals. You would not have to ram this legislature through with a special session. If this was a bill that would help Texas women, you would have garnered broad support for it.

But as we have seen in the last couple of weeks, this is not about women’s health. This is about your personal religious view on women, sex and when life starts. This is about limiting access to abortions and making them so dangerous, expensive or logistically difficult, that you are basically outlawing them.

I might by cynical when it comes to the motivations and loyalties of politicians, and I might be disenchanted by the mockery of the democratic process – but I am not stupid. Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that you have the health and safety of women on your mind.

You know what would convince me that you actually care about women’s health and safety and that you want to lower the number of abortions?

If you would fund the abortion providers so they can meet the medical requirements that you say are so important.
If you would champion age-appropriate and comprehensive sex education.
If you would fight to make contraceptives easily available and affordable.
If you would listen to what medical professionals have to say about this topic.

But as it stands all you do is using questionable tactics to get around a law that you don’t agree with. Since you can’t attack Roe vs. Wade directly you try to cancel it out by these shamefully disingenuous tactics. The truth shouldn’t ever have to fear inquiry, but there isn’t much truth here, is there?

With the same respect that you show towards women,
AF

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