Women’s Issues – Page 3 – Population Matters-USA

*Ann Telnaes Editorial Cartoon* used with permission of Ann Telnaes and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The United States of America is becoming a theocracy. The Dobbs decision has bypassed the Congress by having the Supreme Court establishing a de facto religion which forces unwilling women to become mothers.

So far this religion has evidenced itself with the Court’s failure to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision. The Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gave power to individual states to regulate the legal status of abortion. Remember, the majority of Americans are prochoice, according to several recent polls. There are fears that more is to come, perhaps even resuscitating the Comstock laws which forbad use of contraception.

Abortion has not always been frowned upon. Back when the Constitution was written, women’s healthcare was in the hands of women, including herbal abortifacients, and it is likely that men had no idea what was going on. It is silly to think that the Constitution would include anything about women’s healthcare, let alone abortion, yet part of the argument in the Dobbs decision is that there is no mention of abortion in the Constitution. Remember, the people at the Constitutional Convention were all white males! Abortion was acceptable in colonial America and didn’t become illegal until the mid-1800s.

This new religion was sired by the coupling of rightwing politics and conservative religions, including Roman Catholicism and the evangelicals who have overtaken the South. The primary tenets of the new religion pretend to be in favor of narrowly defined “life”, claiming that human life begins when human sperm and egg meet. It appears that most followers of this new religion don’t care much what happens to the “life” except when it is in the woman’s reproductive tract—with little attention to the person who supports that uterus. After birth, they tend to not support healthcare, social services or education—especially sex ed. Teen pregnancy rates are highest where the evangelicals are strongest.

In reality, the “prolife” people may be courting death. They are encouraging continued human overpopulation with consequent destruction of Creation. Humans are causing the massive extinction of species, many of which are essential to our own existence. Our clever synthesis and use of chemicals is toxifying the air and water with poisons, some of which last forever. And don’t forget the climate chaos that even Trump cannot ignore.

The high priest of this new religion is Samuel Alito, the principal author of the Dobbs decision. His bishops are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett; all supported the Dobbs decision. These 6 justices were all appointed by Republican presidents; the three dissenting justices were appointed by Democratic presidents. It is unlikely that this happened by chance. The unescapable conclusion is that this judgement was politically based.

What can be done about this apparent incursion of a state religion into the USA? A group of religious leaders have sued the State of Florida, which has one of the most prohibitive abortion laws in the country. These leaders claim that that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new abortion law. One of them, Reverend Laurie Hafner of the United Church of Christ, stated “I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith.”

Similarly, a patient at Planned Parenthood asked me, after her abortion, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes”, I responded. “I am a Quaker. I feel obliged to perform abortions because it is one way I can help people and also help this overpopulated world.”

Rather than preserving the sanctity of human life, as believers in this new religion profess, it worships the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus and damns the imagined evil of abortion. This religion ignores the fact that one in five human pregnancies ends in a spontaneous abortion, also called “miscarriage”. If human fetuses are so holy, why does God allow miscarriages to happen?

I am worried that minority religious beliefs are being imposed on the majority by a powerful minority. We must push back in the upcoming elections and send a signal to the Supremes that we won’t tolerate a state religion.

Signe Wilkinson Editorial Cartoon used with permission of Signe Wilkinson
and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.

Jennifer and Jake are newly-weds. The couple met in graduate school at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. She is working toward a degree in engineering and he is studying to be a nurse practitioner.

They were doubly cautious about contraception. Although they want at least one child in the future, first they want to meet their educational goals. In addition to using condoms, they avoided sex when she thought she might be most fertile. Then they had a condom break. Jennifer kept an online menstrual diary “mymonthlycycles.com” and the next morning was horrified to find that she might have been fertile at that time. When her period was late and breasts started to be tender, she was sure she was pregnant.

Since online calendars can be monitored by the “Texas abortion police”, one of the first things she did after she stopped crying was to delete that information. Next, she asked a friend who had had an abortion where she could go. She contacted all the New Mexico clinics, but they were either too busy or the availability of appointments conflicted with their student responsibilities. Finally, she made an appointment at the Durango Planned Parenthood clinic. Jake had an afternoon class on Monday, but if they slept a bit and left Lubbock before midnight, they could reach Durango in time for the 10:30 appointment.

The couple was greeted by people yelling and waving signs outside Planned Parenthood’s parking lot. The armed guard just inside the door was much more friendly, but said that Jake needed to wait outside in the car, and Jennifer would join him in 2 or 3 hours.

An hour later she woke exhausted Jake to tell him good news. “I fell asleep while filling out the forms, but the first thing they did” she said, “was a pregnancy test. It was negative—I’m not pregnant!” Jennifer was so frightened by the new Texas laws that she was afraid to buy a pregnancy test. Instead, she took the evidence of pregnancy that her body gave her, not realizing that women can have anovulatory cycles which mimic pregnancy.

This narrative recounts the stories of real patients, but the names and situation are fictional.

Only 2 of 40 countries that have changed their abortion laws since 2000 are more restrictive; Nicaragua and the USA. The other 38 have increased access to safe abortions services. Ethiopia reformed its abortion laws in 2004 in response to the high death rate of women having illegal abortions. Its maternal mortality rate now is less than half of what it was before the legal reform. Already too many women are dying in the USA from pregnancy complications, but that figure will skyrocket as desperate women seek care where abortions are illegal.

It took the high-profile death of a woman for the law to be changed in Ireland. This very Catholic country had banned all abortions with an amendment to its constitution. In 2012 Dr. Savita Halappanavar was sick with an infected miscarriage. She requested a D&C, but was told that she couldn’t have it as long as the fetal heart was beating. It was too late when the fetus did die; the mother perished from sepsis shortly after.

For me, the overthrow of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court wasn’t a surprise. Politicians, in league with churches using abortion as their rallying cry, had been pushing to make abortion illegal for decades. All the articles I’ve read have decried the tragedy to human rights, but none has mentioned that the subsequent increasing human population will have global repercussions. What can we do? Support people coming for abortion care from antiabortion states. Donate to Planned Parenthood, the National Network of Abortion Funds, Cobalt ProChoice Colorado. Most important, vote for prochoice politicians; we need laws and constitutional amendments to guarantee access to safe abortion care. Please remember, the majority of Americans are prochoice.