In between the two extremes of “No abortions, ever!” and “Abortion on demand without apology” are the great masses of people who find the idea of abortion icky but aren’t quite comfortable with an outright ban. These people usually find a rung of the “exceptions for rape and/or incest and/or fetal deformities and/or the life and/or health of the mother” ladder to hang out on, where whenever the uncomfortable topic comes up, they can list all of their generous exceptions and feel progressive.
There are many reasons why this isn’t really good enough. The major historical reason, however, is that when you grant a group of uninterested people power over if a woman “deserves” an abortion, they are most assuredly going to abuse this power. You can not have a right to something contingent on whether or not your doctor is going to be an asshole that day.
For those who may think that I am being needlessly strident or shrill, may I direct your gaze towards Poland, where, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard that the European Court of Human Rights recently heard the case of Alicja Tysiac. Tysiac won a purely symbolic amount of non-money ($33,000) in damages against Poland, where she was denied an abortion by several doctors even though they all agreed that if she came to term, she’d likely go blind. So she came to term, and it wasn’t as bad as she feared. She can see things that are almost 5ft away, and may not go blind until later!
So Poland has one more precious baby, whose two siblings will probably never let it forget that it is the reason Mommy is blind. It’s not really the baby’s fault – eggs don’t check with the rest of the body before they get fertilized to make sure everything is up to the stress of gestating and delivery. But try telling that to a child who used to have a healthy mom and now has a newly disabled mom.
It’d be a different story if Tysiac had chosen the risk of blindess on her own. But she very clearly felt that the conseqences of being blind would be too great for her and her family, and she was specifically denied the right to make that decision.
So what do we have here? A great hypothetical abortion candidate. A woman who is by all reasonable measure “worthy” of an abortion: A mother in grave, clearly defined danger stemming directly from the pregnancy. Who gets denied by all the doctors who know better than she or want to cover their ass or just don’t like her, and now she’s basically blind.
And is this good enough? NoooooOOOO! Because she was theoretically entitled to an abortion and denied, she was able to make a big screaming deal of it on an international stage. Clearly, something must be done about that!
The 3,000 people joining the rally said it should not even be offered when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.
[...]
The protest was organised by the extreme-right wing League of Polish Families in the wake of the decision to award Alicja Tysiac 25,000 euros ($33,000; £16,000).The League and Catholic groups in the predominantly Roman Catholic country are calling for the government to fight the court’s decision.
That’s right: one of the most conservative, Catholic countries in the world has an “extreme-right wing” family values organization which came out swinging when they heard that someone, somewhere, had not taken their punishment from God quietly enough.
About 200 legal abortions are perfomed every year in Poland. An older story about a Dutch abortion boat that hangs out in Poland estimates that illegal abortions clock in at 200,000 each year.
There are two lessons to be learned from these stories:
1. The anti-abortion crowed will never be satisfied. Never, never, never. Don’t give them a fucking inch, because if you do, it might be you or your wife, sister, or daughter that pays for it. Look at Tysiac’s glasses. She may have won in court, but it hardly matters; the real damage is already done.
2. No amount of making abortion illegal makes abortion go away. People who are really interested in saving women and zygotes alike have to start with that assumption if they’re going to achieve anything other than punishing women for being women.
Wow. Really. Just holy sh*t.
[...] Appeasing anti-abortion activists won’t reduce abortion; it won’t even shut them up: Poland edition: In between the two extremes of “No abortions, ever!” and “Abortion on demand without apology” are the great masses of people who find the idea of abortion icky but aren’t quite comfortable with an outright ban. These people usually find a rung of the “exceptions for rape and/or incest and/or fetal deformities and/or the life and/or health of the mother” ladder to hang out on, where whenever the uncomfortable topic comes up, they can list all of their generous exceptions and feel progressive. There are many reasons why this isn’t really good enough. The major historical reason, however, is that when you grant a group of uninterested people power over if a woman “deserves” an abortion, they are most assuredly going to abuse this power. You can not have a right to something contingent on whether or not your doctor is going to be an asshole that day. [...]
I’m always just shocked when the forced pregnancy crowd comes right out and says that zeh babees trump even the life of the mother. I mean, I know that they believe it – there’s a 50/50 chance that the embryo will grow into a Real Person™, while the mother is necessarily a woman and thus not actually human – but why do they think that this plays well to anyone who cares about an actual woman in their life and might not want her to die?
[...] But Kyso Kisaen at PunkAssBlog points out that these exceptions do not necessarily protect those women that fall under them. Case in point, Alicja Tysiac, a 35 year-old Polish mother who was denied an abortion even though doctors warned that she would go blind if she gave birth. [...]
[...] But Kyso Kisaen at PunkAssBlog points out that these exceptions do not necessarily protect those women that fall under them. Case in point, Alicja Tysiac, a 35 year-old Polish mother who was denied an abortion even though doctors warned that she would go blind if she gave birth. [...]