Question for Women: What do you think about the recent SCOTUS decision?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Just some background. Yesterday, the Supreme Court held that the partial-birth ban is indeed constitutional. The ban makes no exception for the health of the woman.
Just a few questions for the ladies:

  1. Do you think the State has a legitimate interest in the enacting laws that prohibit or restrict abortion?

  2. Do you think the State provides women, who choose not to have an abortion, with adequate care? In other words, are you satisfied with federal programs (WIC, welfare, etc) that that aim to help mothers and children? If not, how could these federal programs be improved?

  3. Does it bother you that, for the most part, men, as opposed to women, are making the decisions about the legality of abortion?

  4. How would you define “Women’s Rights”? Does your definition include the right to have an abortion?

  5. Has this decision changed your outlook about the future of women’s rights in the United States?

And, finally:

  1. Does this SCOTUS decision anger you in anyway?
  • Honesty
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I think that the State has an interest in making sure that medical procedures are safe. The PBA is as safe or safer than other options.

No. I think that people who are unable to provide and care for their children in the long run should probably have their children taken away and have their fertility restricted. This applies to men AND women. It’s one thing to need a little help for a couple of years. It’s quite another to have a dozen or more children and rely on various handouts to provide for them. I know this is not a popular stance, but I really think that in the long run, we’re going to have to restrict the fertility of ALL humans in one way or another. And I think that not enough people consider the long run.

Very much so.

That’s very complicated, but yes, part of women’s rights includes the right to access to healthcare and abortions.

I think that in the long run (again) this will be viewed as a sort of hiccup in history. People will look back at this time in the US and wonder what the hell we were all thinking.

Incredibly so.

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I’ll bite.

1 - I believe the state has a right to certify all medical procedures as safe or unsafe. As such, abortion is a medical procedure and I think the state has as much right to certify it as any others. But unless the procedure itself is unsafe, I don’t think it should prohibit or restrict it.

2 - I don’t really know a whole lot about the details of WIC and such. My only real point of reference is a friend of mine who got pregnant unexpectedly at around age 20 and decided to keep the kid. It wasn’t easy for her, but she managed to raise the child, go to college, get a degree, and get a good job, without any real help from the father. She was pretty motivated, though. So on some level, the system works.

What I would like to see is the state get better at regulating the parental financial input. All I hear about child support is that it’s a nightmare on both sides. Why does it have to be that way?

3 - Yes, I believe men can think rationally about important subjects. That said, I do think there’s a ton of men out there who simply don’t think about the abortion issue in anything but generic terms. It’s something that they don’t think will ever affect them, so they don’t analyze it like a woman would. Those are the people I worry about.

4 - I do think that women have a right to an abortion unless/until we as a society change to the point where there is no drawback to having a child you can’t personally take care of. That includes much better adoption and birth control policies, and a general open attitude about young women who find themselves pregnant. In other words, until unmarried youthful pregnancies become no big deal, we need abortion.

5 - Not so much this decision, but the general trend of things. The Godders are taking over, not only in abortion rights but everywhere. I don’t want to live a life defined by a group of fanatic’s Bible study groups, and abortion is just one aspect of that.

6 - yes, it does, in part because it seems to be more political posturing than a real decision. It doesn’t really restrict abortions, it restricts one method. And because right now it’s such an inflammatory issue that one little symbolic victory has an actual impact. It may be the first of many.

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*Just a few questions for the ladies:

  1. Do you think the State has a legitimate interest in the enacting laws that prohibit or restrict abortion?*
    Only in regard to the safety of the patient in undergoing particular procedures. IIRC, this is not why they were enacting the law.
    2. Do you think the State provides women, who choose not to have an abortion, with adequate care? In other words, are you satisfied with federal programs (WIC, welfare, etc) that that aim to help mothers and children? If not, how could these federal programs be improved?
    Even with these programs being available, a lot of women are still floundering to provide for whatever children they have, regardless of whether they wanted the child or not.*

  2. Does it bother you that, for the most part, men, as opposed to women, are making the decisions about the legality of abortion?*
    In some ways, I feel that it really isn’t their place to say what a woman can do with the state of their fertility, as, well, they are not affected as directly by their decisions. However, I think a lot of the men who are putting forth the idea that abortion is bad (no matter what the circumstances) have no real perspective on the reality of not letting women make their own decisions about whether or not to keep an unexpected pregnancy.
    4. How would you define “Women’s Rights”? Does your definition include the right to have an abortion?
    Women’s rights all fall under the right to equal treatment [i.e. they get treated the same as men] under the law. A subset would be “reproductive rights,” which would grant each person full rights over their own reproductive systems. A woman does not want to be pregnant and wishes to terminate the pregnancy? That’s fine, as it’s her decision. A man wishes to not impregnate a woman because he is not interested in having children at that time with that woman? That’s fine, as it’s his decision. (I’m trying desperately to avoid a tangent about women who “oops” their partners into having kids.)
    5. Has this decision changed your outlook about the future of women’s rights in the United States?
    It makes me wonder how many more restrictions on abortion are going to come up in the future, and whether Roe v. Wade will end up being repealed due to these restrictions. Makes me cautious for the future and a little sad at the idea that my reproductive rights are being restricted.
    *And, finally:

  3. Does this SCOTUS decision anger you in anyway?*
    It doesn’t make me angry, but it annoys me and enforces my mistrust of a lot of political entities. It’s not that the current SCOTUS and local/state governments are repealing every civil rights issue that has been covered in the past century, but it makes me wonder how far is too far in granting states the right to restrict personal freedoms that directly affect one group of people over another in a negative way. In some areas, it seems like women’s rights are slowly being stripped away under the guise of “family values.” Not all of us equipped with a uterus are after the “barefoot and pregnant” ideal and would prefer not to be restricted to the roles of Victorian society. We do not want to be children in the eyes of the law and property in the eyes of our SOs; part of what keeps us from reverting to those roles and modes of thought are the rights that are granted to us by the government.

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Yes, as a general principle I definitely think the state has a right to get involved in matters of human rights (which includes the abortion issue, to me)

I definitely don’t think there is enough support out there yet for single mothers and poor women. Given what I know of federal programs’ bureaucracy and inefficiency, however, I am not sure that more federal programs are the answer. Time Magazine did an article recently about the ‘grassroots’ abortion war, where pro-lifers are trying to provide support to women to help them decide against abortion. You can criticize those kinds of centers for sometimes going about their mission in the wrong way, but I think it is a wonderful idea to try to provide grass-roots support to moms who need it.

No. I don’t think a person’s gender says anything about their ability to reason about an issue. If you’re implying that men don’t know firsthand what abortion or childbearing is like, one could make the argument that puts men in a better position to look at the evidence objectively and make an open-minded decision than someone who has already been biased by their own personal experiences. Of course, that’s not to say that I feel that way myself. I just don’t like it when people assume that men have no right to have an opinion about this issue.

Women’s Rights are simply being held to the same standards as men, and given the same rights that men are given, so I guess that I would view it as being the same as Human Rights basically. No, I do not think that abortion should be included. Just as society expects men who don’t want to pay child support to avoid getting anyone pregnant in the first place, I think it is reasonable to expect women who don’t want to be pregnant to take measures to avoid becoming pregnant. I think eventually society will evolve to the point that they will look back on abortion in the same way that we now look back at the ancient practice of leaving born infants out to die of exposure: an archaic practice that is simply not relevant to a modern, humane society.

Not really. As I mentioned above, I don’t think of abortion as part of women’s rights, and expect that abortion is on its way to becoming irrelevant, given that we are moving in the direction of more reliable birth control, more family-friendly schools/workplaces, and that even today (in spite of how far we still have to go on such issues) the abortion rate has been on the decline over recent years.

No, I was glad to hear about it. Intact D&X or partial birth abortion (whichever term you want to use, it’s still the same thing) is a very gruesome procedure and I think it is absurd to argue that crushing the skull of a mostly-born fetus is fundamentally different than infanticide.

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I had some nice answers worked up after reading the op, but Lynn and Athena summed it up pretty well. To that I will just add a “me too.”

How can making a decision about your own body and whether or not you’re forced to carry a pregnancy to term not be part of women’s rights?

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Can you expound on this a bit further? Currently, how are women’s rights not being held to the same standards as men? Do you believe there is such a thing as “women’s rights” or “men’s rights” or do you think the words are proxies for something else?

  • Honesty