Revolution #86, April 29, 2007
Why the New Abortion Ruling Is a Severe Attack—and Must Be Resisted
- The Court has made it a crime for a doctor to perform a certain abortion procedure, even if the doctor thinks that it is the best health choice for the woman involved. This ruling thus puts “the life of the fetus” over that of the woman. And it puts doctors at risk of prison if they perform this procedure.
- In this ruling, the Court openly used the logic that since some women may come to regret abortion later in life, the State has the right to forbid them from getting abortions. While this logic was only applied to the relatively rare procedure being outlawed in this case, there is nothing to prevent the same logic being used to outlaw abortion altogether. Moreover, the logic of the Court implies that the state should be able to control many spheres of a woman’s personal life. This marks a huge, huge leap backward for the emancipation of women.
- In making the above argument, the Court relied on “research” provided by an anti-abortion organization funded by the Christian Fascist movement. This means that the values of Christian Fascism can now determine legal decisions affecting every woman (and man) in the United States. This marks a huge leap backward in the separation of church and state, and a giant leap “forward” in the legitimization of Christian fascism.
The fact that the procedure being outlawed is rare must not blind people to the fact that new legal reasoning and principles have been put in place to justify this criminalization. “The law of the land” has just become qualitatively more repressive.
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