At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.
South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy.
(Pilkington)
While abortion access advocates were skeptical from the outset, believing these fetal homicide laws were a back-door to LACP, it is lawyers who are proving the point.
The problem with certain market-based solutions is that they take time, and during that time there will be many sacrificial lambs. I tried to make this point earlier in the thread:
Nor would one want me in charge if personhood was the rule; Equal Protection is a vital foundation of our society, and I would sacrifice as many lambs, send as many people to prison, wreck as many lives, as I must in order to make the point. Meanwhile, I would be remiss in my duty, as such, if I did not. Did a woman experience menstrual irregularity? We must investigate, in order to make sure a "person" has not died, and if we have evidence suggesting such a death, we must ensure that the defenseless "person" did not die by homicide.
That isn't a matter of spite. Rather, it's how important Equal Protection is to our society. And here's the thing about the appearance of spite:
This is why I think the concept of "personhood" at conception doesn't work. Can it be made to work? Perhaps, but at the same time, I'm not inclined to find out. The better ways, in my opinion, to reduce the number of abortions in society, are education and access to prevention tools. Yet, as we see in our political culture, these approaches, too, are objectionable.
In truth, I have a hard time separating abortion from issues of sexual conduct.
Have you ever seen a burn line in fighting wildfires? It's a risky maneuver; in the middle of a tinder-dry region, the theory is that by burning out enough area in the path of the wildfire that the blaze cannot cross. And while we can certainly declare our faith in fire crews, even
they know that a controlled burn can erupt into something much worse in a heartbeat.
I raise this issue because it seems that leaping past sex education and contraceptive access to LACP, which is a politically viable set of assertions in our society, is metaphorically akin to putting out a fire by setting other things on fire, and the statistical result of ignorance and lack of access is like throwing gasoline on the fire to put it out.
Additionally, abortion is not the only aspect of self-governance that a woman loses under LACP. Sure, it's easy enough to point to smoking, drinking, or piles of cocaine, but it also pertains to work, traveling in a car, or even walking on a sidewalk. It pertains to a woman's exposure to
anything that might endanger the organism growing inside her. In the name of Equal Protection, the organism inside the woman becomes superior, and while that might seem an emotional rhetorical appeal, the functional implications are tremendous.
I would also note that while our society sees much argument about the life of the mother, there is little talk of what actually drives the most part of late-term abortions. Yesterday,
I excerpted a legal brief from Supreme Court hearings focused on late-term D&X (a.k.a. "partial birth abortion"). And as I noted, it's a soul-scarring read.
Nobody with a shred of human decency is going to drag an anti-abortion advocate into a hospital to watch a baby slowly and painfully dying of a disorder identified
in utero, and say, "This child's suffering is all on you." But I also don't think enough people are considering the fact that their policy preference, LACP, would create such a situation.
The question of implications gauges the intent of LACP, and so far it really does seem to be about the War of the Sexes more than it is the children.
End hunger. Get the hundred-thousand-plus children in the United States who need stable homes into stable, loving homes. Our society spends so much argument on the rights of the unborn, even if that means the right of the unborn to be born into suffering. This doesn't make sense.
It's true, I reject LACP because its implications are unacceptable to my outlook. But if it ever becomes the law of the land, I would certainly hope we have some idea what we're getting ourselves into. And, yes, in truth, I think that, as a society, we will be blindsided by the implications of LACP if we
don't give it some serious thought beforehand.
Remember that under the Fourteenth Amendment, women were not considered people insofar as fifty-two years passed before the Nineteenth. And even as the marketplace tried to give women the vote in the states, those laws, even when passed in the states, were repeatedly quashed.
Some would suggest that slavery was on its way out, anyway, suggesting that the Civil War and Thirteenth Amendment were unnecessary. Some would suggest that civil rights for people with dark skin was on its way, and thus Supreme Court decisions in
Brown and
Loving were unnecessary. The unspoken price, though, is the number of people who would suffer during the interim.
If we leave the implications of LACP to the learning curve of generations, how many times will we screw up? How many people will suffer?
That's why it's important to have this discussion on the front side.
Of course, I don't foresee LACP becoming the law of the land anytime soon, so perhaps the only real purpose of asking people to think about the implications is to make sure they understand what they're advocating.
And I find it interesting that when the personhood issue pushed to the fore in 2010, the response on the liberal and Democratic Party side of the aisle was to focus on hormonal birth control,
in vitro fertilization, and other such medical aspects at risk. Perhaps the leading voices, be it members of Congress or the media commentariat, &c., thought it would be too complicated a discussion to undertake consideration of the broader implications. Judging by the discussion so far in this thread, they would have been right. To the other, it's also possible it just didn't occur to them; when one deals in superficiality, deeper implications often remain unnoticed.
But if people are going to advocate LACP, it would probably be a good thing to consider the wider implications; indeed, I cannot see why they wouldn't want to, unless this really is about political aesthetics instead of genuine concern for humanity.
____________________
Notes:
Pilkington, Ed. "Outcry in America as pregnant women who lose babies face murder charges". The Guardian. June 24, 2011. Guardian.co.uk. November 5, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges
