Abortion - good intentions or bad, and the road to hell
DailyKos
by Susan Grigsby
Abortion - good intentions or bad, and the road to hell
They say the road to hell is paved in good intentions.
I would expect the words that disguise the destination to include life, health, babies, mothers, caring, protecting, and nurturing. And sure enough, those are the words being used by the anti-abortion, forced-birth lobby in the plethora of legislation designed to force women into the service of their religious worldview.
They claim that they believe life begins at conception, their Bible tells them so, and they must fight to protect the smallest of cells in a woman's womb—even at the cost of the woman's rights over her own body. Her rights are superseded by the rights of the fetus, they say, and they can probably show us biblical verses to support their claims.
And it may be that they actually believe what they peddle, in spite of the contradiction implicit in the desire to protect every single life before birth while they let the living starve, fall ill, and die.
But I have a much harder time buying into the myth that those who bankroll the forced birther movement, those who hate the thought of all government regulation, are being motivated by a desire to protect life. Or babies.
I think their motivation is a lot closer to the one that prompted Nicolae Ceausescu to implement Decree 770 within a year of taking over the government in Romania. Decree 770 banned the once available-on-demand abortions, as well as sex education.
At least the Romanian dictator, unlike our current oligarchs, was honest. He wanted to increase the population of workers in his state. How he did it was terrifying. There is no reason to believe that the Waltons and the Kochs of our world would not be happy with a huge workforce scrambling for whatever low-wage work they deign to offer.
Contraception, though not banned outright, was not legally available, and the only sex education that children received was in the form of lessons about the glory of motherhood. Single people and childless couples were encouraged to reproduce through a celibacy tax, ranging from 10 to 30 percent of their income depending upon their jobs. Families with large numbers of children were rewarded. According to Gail Kligman's The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania, at one point the government tried to get rural women to sign contracts agreeing to bear four children, not unlike the contracts their farmer husbands signed for the production of cattle.
"The fetus is the property of the entire society," Ceausescu proclaimed. "Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity."
Unless the fetus belonged to a Gypsy. In a segment of the documentary film, Children of the Decree:
In most cases legal abortion in a hospital was granted to Gypsy women if they asked for it officially, even if this meant breaking the law. Most of the members of the medical commission shared the general idea that an increasing number of Gypsy kids would undermine the creation of a new generation. Therefore, Decree 770, became indirectly an instrument in a hidden process of ethnic cleansing.
And it also required complete subordination of women to the will of the state, beginning in high school, and continuing throughout her years of fertility. ...
I will never forget my first imposed gynecological exam in high school in 1970. They made us girls stand in a row and go into the one-room medical office to be checked by a male ob/gyn. The purpose, they told us, was to get some kind of medical document necessary to enroll for high school graduation and university entrance examinations. How come the boys didn’t need it, we were wondering in vain?
... -snip-
The examinations would continue in factories and workplaces throughout the country as Ceausescu sent prosecutors with the doctors to make sure that every pregnancy went to term. Every miscarriage was investigated to determine its cause.
Unsurprisingly, he still could not stop women from attempting to abort their pregnancies. Deprived of access to safe medical procedures, women tried all kinds of remedies, no matter how dangerous, toxic, or ineffective they were. One television personality jumped into a pool of cold water to cause a miscarriage and related how others used lemon juice internally in an attempt to do the same. In the film, Children of the Decree, a doctor tells of how women "injected in the uterus a lot of bizarre things, from mustard, tea, antibiotics. You name it." Daniella Draghici relates that in 1974:
Like most Romanian women my age I, too, had an eventful first abortion, according to the same pattern: first I had lots of shots containing some kind of painful mixture that was supposed to induce an abortion. Nothing happened after a week, so one horrible evening I was taken to a lady who took me to a sort of medical woman, who lived in a country house far, far away. She asked me to get up on the kitchen table, where she tormented me for what seemed to me forever with all kinds of sharp metal instruments she kept boiling on an ancient stove. She took great precautions not to let me make any noise by putting a rag in my mouth and asking me to bite on it when it hurt. I left that place with the conviction that I was never going to have sex again. I was worried because I continued getting morning sickness despite the ordeal I had gone through. So, someone else took me for a secret check-up, which proved I was still pregnant. How could that be? How could one have an abortion and still be pregnant? I was lucky I was taken to a real doctor this time, who finished the job on another kitchen table.-snip-
Nicolae Ceausescu's experiment in forced motherhood resulted in at least 10,000 maternal deaths from illegal abortions, and the forced birth of two million unwanted children, many of whom resided in orphanages. The fate of the children who were born with birth defects, handicaps or mental disabilities was barbaric as they were warehoused and ignored at institutions like Cighid. The mortality rate there was over 50 percent.
Because the forced birthers do not yet control all branches of our government, they do not have the power to pass or enforce a Decree 770. However, they have already made inroads into the rights recognized in Roe v Wade.
-snip-
If you live in Maine, your governor responded to a question on abortion with: "We have more people in Maine dying than being born. If we’re going to sustain the Maine society, we need more people. We need younger people." Which sounds remarkably similar to the attitude of Nicolae Ceausescu. Granted, Le Page is currently an outlier in Republican politics, but how often have we seen the extreme outliers of the Republican Party become the mainstream of the party?
Decreteii / Children of the Decree - full movie
The hell they create for women of childbearing age is one we will all have to share, regardless of age or gender. The unwanted children will be our burden as a society. The deaths of women from illegal abortions will form our guilt. But even more, the very act of subordinating a woman's body and will to the demands of a religiously inspired state dictate will harm us all. And not just in the blurring of the line between church and state, but in the fact that a nation cannot remain viable if only half of its citizens are free.
Full article:
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1360140
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