not much balm in gilead these days
an interview with jack hitt, who has an article in the NY Times Magazine this sunday about the state of womens' health in el salvador, where abortion under any circumstance, including to save the life of the woman, has been criminalised since 1998. this is the abortion == murder argument played out to its logical consequences. the way it has played out, from my viewpoint, is anything but 'pro-life'. even in circumstances where the fetus cannot possibly live and where, without surgical intervention, the woman could die (like ectopic pregnancies, which are not terribly rare, which cannot result in a viable fetus and which can kill the woman or render her sterile without surgical intervention), no medical intervention may be made.
other countries do have similar laws. el salvador, though, has the strictest enforcement. el salvador has 'forensic vagina specialists' who are charged with determining whether a lost pregnancy was a natural miscarriage or an abortion. in el salvador, a woman's uterus can be considered material evidence. a judge can issue a search warrant for a woman's vagina.
make no mistake: there are those in this country who would dearly love to see this happen in the united states. el salvador is held up by some as an example. an 'inspiration'. listen to the interview and tell me if you feel 'inspired'.
posted by anne @ 9:35 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for posting this -- I'll listen when I get home. Just read the article and was fascinated by the ambivalence towards prosecuting women who have abortions. It seemed like many of the people who support the law would rather think that these women are "victims." I can't figure out if that's a softening of their viewpoint or a logical corollary to it.
It seemed like many of the people who support the law would rather think that these women are "victims." I can't figure out if that's a softening of their viewpoint or a logical corollary to it.
In the Texas abortion law that Roe v. Wade overturned, the woman was considered the victim. Notable because this was used to argue against the claim that the state had a compelling interest in preserving the life of the unborn child: if the legislators had considered this a reason to ban abortion, they would have said that the child was the victim. Because of all this, I'd guess that, as charming as they might find the idea in theory, in practice anti-abortion activists in the U.S. wouldn't support a law that defined the woman as the (or even a) victim in an abortion.
(Compare, by the way, laws allowing two murder charges against people who murder pregnant women. The absence of these was another of the arguments in Roe. Learning this made it much easier to understand why they're so controversial.)
If you haven't listened to the oral arguments from Roe v. Wade, it's well worth doing so.
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