Forced-birth crusade is not a hypothetical
Anyone who still doesn’t understand that the newly empowered forced-birth movement is inherently oppressive, cruel and at times literally life-threatening to women should look carefully at what elected officials are trying to do today in Missouri and in Texas.
In Missouri, state lawmakers have filed legislation that would give full legal rights of personhood to fertilized eggs — meaning women who end their pregnancies at any point, for almost any reason, could face murder charges and, potentially, the death penalty.
And a Texas woman’s quest to end a pregnancy that is medically nonviable and has become ensnared in the court system there because (and please read this part carefully) continuing the doomed pregnancy endangers merely her reproductive system rather than her very life.
These aren’t hysterical hypothetical situations but actual developments affecting actual women, unfolding in real time right now. They raise the stakes immeasurably for efforts like the current push in Missouri to codify abortion rights via statewide referendum.
When the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, eviscerating almost half a century of constitutional protection for abortion rights during early pregnancy, the court’s majority waxed on about taking judges out of the abortion debate and returning the matter to the people’s elected representatives in the states.
A year and a half later, both those lofty goals are dust. The courts are, if anything, more deeply enmeshed in the abortion debate than ever, as judges are increasingly tasked with interpreting extreme and often vaguely worded state abortion bans and related policies.
As for the supposed infallibility of the people’s elected representatives: Voters in seven states so far have found it necessary to go around their extremist legislators to protect abortion rights via referendum. Not a single state that has put the issue to a statewide vote (not even deep-red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Montana) has come down on the anti-choice side.
That explains why conservative politicians in Missouri have spent months now trying to sabotage efforts to get an abortion rights measure on next year’s Missouri ballot.
The courts have repeatedly had to step in and smack down various schemes by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Attorney General Andrew Bailey and others that were designed to deny Missouri voters the right to weigh in on an issue that intimately affects half the population.
The urgency of that referendum effort has been ratcheted up this month with the filing of several bills in Jefferson City that would give a newly fertilized egg the same legal rights as a fully formed person from the moment of conception.
Missouri already prohibits abortion from conception in all cases — even rape and incest — with a sole, vaguely defined exception for medical emergencies. Doctors who violate the ban can face up to 15 years in prison and revocation of their medical licenses. But the law, enacted literally minutes after Roe’s overturn last year, specifically prohibits prosecution of the mother.
That could soon change. As The Kansas City Star reported last week, two almost identical bills filed this month by state Sen. Mike Moon, R-Ash Grove, and Rep. Bob Titus, R-Billings, would bestow all legal rights of individuals to zygotes and fetuses at all stages of development.
A third bill, by state Rep. Brian Seitz, R-Branson, would simply change the legal definition of “person” to include “unborn child at every stage of development from the moment of fertilization until birth.”
Which means a pregnant woman who takes action to end the pregnancy could be prosecuted for murder. The legislation from Moon and Titus confirms this by specifying that when “the victim is an unborn child and the defendant is the child’s mother,” she is allowed to argue a legal defense of “duress.”
As if the criminalization of a woman’s control over what happens inside her body isn’t duress by definition.
The proposed legislation recognizes no legal difference between aborting a zygote and killing a fully formed individual, and it specifies no separate penalties. Because Missouri employs capital punishment against convicted murderers, the execution of women who facilitate their own abortions would presumably be on the table for prosecutors.
Even those who believe fertilized eggs should have full legal rights should pause to consider how complicated pregnancy can be in the real world — and how willing anti-choice politicians have been to blithely victimize women entangled in those complications.
The potential depths of that victimization is being demonstrated right now in Texas.
Kate Cox wanted to carry out her pregnancy, but at 20 weeks, she has learned that the fetus has a fatal genetic condition. It will mean either stillbirth or a short, tormented life for the fetus and potential damage to Cox’s reproductive system, possibly preventing her from ever getting pregnant again.
A lower court ruled that Cox’s condition falls under the exceptions to Texas’ draconian abortion ban. But, in an act so deliberately cruel it borders on psychotic, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to intervene.
The high court last week prohibited the abortion while it reviewed the case — extending Cox’s risk and torment for no remotely rational reason. (Cox finally ended up leaving the state to seek an abortion, according to media reports Monday.)
Cox tells her story in an op-ed originally published in the Dallas Morning News, which appears elsewhere in today’s Post-Dispatch opinion section. Regardless of one’s views on abortion rights, it should stand as evidence that the issue is seldom as simple as anti-choice ideologues try to make it.
As for the pending Missouri legislation: Anyone who dismisses the possibility of a woman someday being marched to the execution chamber for refusing to carry out a pregnancy hasn’t been paying attention to the escalating fanaticism of the anti-choice movement in the post-Roe era. This misogynistic dystopia must be averted — and the ballot box is the only way it will be.