I think it would be ideal if we could reduce the unwanted pregnancy to rate to 0.00%.
However, for as long as we can only get it down to numbers that are still numbers, no matter how small, those women need resources, not punishment. If we can develop a way to remove the fetus or embryo and keep it around until we can grow it later, that would be awesome. As long as we can't do that, that's not the mother's fault.
The notion that someone with an unwanted pregnancy should "just" stick it out for nine months and give it up for adoption is unrealistic in the extreme. Do some people get abortions and regret it? Yes, any decision a human being can make comes with the possibility that they will wish they'd made a different one at a later date. It's a consequence of having a mind. Pregnancy, birth, and post-partum adjustments take a much more extreme toll on people physically, though, and have at least as much likelihood to affect them emotionally. I may have a little bit of a personal bias here, since I don't have any friends or relatives have that spent time in mental institutes for post-abortion breakdowns, but I've seen what happens when a woman gets railroaded into letting other people decide what to do with her body for a year. I don't want to see what being legally obligated to do so would do to people.
The Church teaches that a one-celled egg becomes a full, living human being at a point before the medical community would even class a woman as being pregnant, and the Church can continue to teach that. However, it's fundamentally unconstitutional to use that as a basis for public policy. And there aren't really any non-religious reasons to decide that the dividing line between "person" and "not-person" comes at the earliest possible moment that we can make ourselves see as a distinct and quantifiable "moment". Because, while people really like to divide things into binaries, and tend to get really wiggy about things that fall into the anomalous spaces that don't clearly sit in one of the binaries (the general coping methods are making them sacred, making them profane, or rationalizing them into a binary anyway), it's still unfair public policy to institutionally punish people for making our brains hurt by being associated with things that are not clearly one thing or the other. There is no dividing "line" between personhood and nonpersonhood. Pregnancy is the process by which a cell develops, gradually, over the course of nine months, into a person. Even science is a process of deciding where the lines are more than finding them. It's mythmaking. And humans need some sort of mythmaking in order to function, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is nonproblematic, and the mere fact that we make myths certainly doesn't tell us which myths should be made law.
The Church didn't always think life began at conception. Some theologians believed it began when one could first detect movement, some believed life began with the first breath, some believed that a male fetus gained its soul after some number of days and a female fetus gained its soul after some number of weeks (I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but girls got their souls later). I'm still pretty certain that they finally decided on the earliest possible moment they could think of because it's the moment between when creating a baby is the work of both parties and when it becomes the work of the woman, and male-dominated institutions tend to devalue women's work, but I don't think they explicitly admitted that anywhere.
But that's a question for Catholic theologians. Not insurance companies, not House Representatives trying to regulate the insurance companies, not the jurors and judges at the trials of people who vandalize abortion clinics and shoot at doctors, nobody shaping governmental or economic policy. It's the government's job to fix public health problems by adding as many lines of defense as they can--or at least allow its citizens access to as many lines of defense as they can--not to sit around and wring their hands about how if certain lines of defense fail, it's really unconscionable for women to want a contingency plan instead of being endlessly self-sacrificing.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-11-11 06:35 pm (UTC)However, for as long as we can only get it down to numbers that are still numbers, no matter how small, those women need resources, not punishment. If we can develop a way to remove the fetus or embryo and keep it around until we can grow it later, that would be awesome. As long as we can't do that, that's not the mother's fault.
The notion that someone with an unwanted pregnancy should "just" stick it out for nine months and give it up for adoption is unrealistic in the extreme. Do some people get abortions and regret it? Yes, any decision a human being can make comes with the possibility that they will wish they'd made a different one at a later date. It's a consequence of having a mind. Pregnancy, birth, and post-partum adjustments take a much more extreme toll on people physically, though, and have at least as much likelihood to affect them emotionally. I may have a little bit of a personal bias here, since I don't have any friends or relatives have that spent time in mental institutes for post-abortion breakdowns, but I've seen what happens when a woman gets railroaded into letting other people decide what to do with her body for a year. I don't want to see what being legally obligated to do so would do to people.
The Church teaches that a one-celled egg becomes a full, living human being at a point before the medical community would even class a woman as being pregnant, and the Church can continue to teach that. However, it's fundamentally unconstitutional to use that as a basis for public policy. And there aren't really any non-religious reasons to decide that the dividing line between "person" and "not-person" comes at the earliest possible moment that we can make ourselves see as a distinct and quantifiable "moment". Because, while people really like to divide things into binaries, and tend to get really wiggy about things that fall into the anomalous spaces that don't clearly sit in one of the binaries (the general coping methods are making them sacred, making them profane, or rationalizing them into a binary anyway), it's still unfair public policy to institutionally punish people for making our brains hurt by being associated with things that are not clearly one thing or the other. There is no dividing "line" between personhood and nonpersonhood. Pregnancy is the process by which a cell develops, gradually, over the course of nine months, into a person. Even science is a process of deciding where the lines are more than finding them. It's mythmaking. And humans need some sort of mythmaking in order to function, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is nonproblematic, and the mere fact that we make myths certainly doesn't tell us which myths should be made law.
The Church didn't always think life began at conception. Some theologians believed it began when one could first detect movement, some believed life began with the first breath, some believed that a male fetus gained its soul after some number of days and a female fetus gained its soul after some number of weeks (I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but girls got their souls later). I'm still pretty certain that they finally decided on the earliest possible moment they could think of because it's the moment between when creating a baby is the work of both parties and when it becomes the work of the woman, and male-dominated institutions tend to devalue women's work, but I don't think they explicitly admitted that anywhere.
But that's a question for Catholic theologians. Not insurance companies, not House Representatives trying to regulate the insurance companies, not the jurors and judges at the trials of people who vandalize abortion clinics and shoot at doctors, nobody shaping governmental or economic policy. It's the government's job to fix public health problems by adding as many lines of defense as they can--or at least allow its citizens access to as many lines of defense as they can--not to sit around and wring their hands about how if certain lines of defense fail, it's really unconscionable for women to want a contingency plan instead of being endlessly self-sacrificing.