personhood

Fetal Rights Versus Maternal Rights: The Slippery Slope of Personhood

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Perhaps you’ve seen the case of Erick and Marlise Munoz, who reside in Tarrant County, Texas. Marlise is comatose due to a pulmonary embolism and is on life support because she is pregnant. In previous conversations, Marlise had expressed to her husband that she wouldn’t want to be on life support should she become comatose. These wishes, and the wishes of her husband, are being disregarded by the hospital. Current laws in Texas protect fetal rights over the rights of the mother; this means that Marlise will be kept alive until her child can be delivered safely, even though neither she nor her husband desired this outcome. This baby may face many developmental challenges because Marlise has been deprived of oxygen, so Erick will be facing another hurdle.

I had thought that the missing safeguard for the Munoz couple was a living will, which many younger people assume is for senior citizens; that if Marlise had a living will expressing her wish to be removed from life support, she wouldn’t be kept alive. Wrong. Texas law has the authority to void a living will in the interests of keeping a fetus alive. However, this point differs from state to state.

This case accentuates the importance of having a living will at any stage in life, senior or not, as well as discussing your wishes about being kept on life support with your family or partner. However, even a living will may not protect your wishes if you happen to become pregnant; this depends upon which state you reside in.

When did the rights of an unborn child become more important than the rights of the mother, and what is the desired outcome of the fetal rights movement? The term “fetal rights” applies the same legal protection to fetuses as children, meaning that mothers can be imprisoned and sentenced for decisions they made while pregnant that may have endangered the life of the fetus. And, as Vince Beiser of Mother Jones writes, “such tactics may be paving the way for abortion – the ultimate violation of “fetal rights” – to legally be declared murder.”

Take, for instance, the case of Sally DeJesus, a woman residing in North Carolina, profiled in the Mother Jones article “Fetal Abuse”, who briefly relapsed into drug addiction while pregnant, but still sought treatment and delivered a healthy baby. Because she admitted her mistake of using drugs while pregnant to healthcare workers out of the desire to keep her baby healthy, she’s now facing up to three years in prison.

Women’s rights advocates are concerned because this could mean that people struggling with addiction while pregnant won’t seek help because of these legal penalties, and will further endanger their own health and the health of their unborn children. Furthermore, this law penalizes women who use illegal drugs and ignores women who may be endangering their fetuses with legal substances, such as cigarettes or alcohol. If the goal is to protect unborn children from irresponsible or uninformed mothers, it is a sloppy one. It also appears to lead more women into the prison system rather than a system of supportive rehabilitation. If the state cares about the lives of the unborn children it claims to protect, it won’t lead them to have mothers in prison with untreated addiction problems.

What we’re left with is a mass of sticky questions. If the state has the right to keep someone alive against their will and the wishes of their family, who has to foot the hospital bills? Since the Munoz family would not have chosen to deliver the child now being kept alive by the hospital, who will pay for the care of the child that will likely face developmental challenges due to oxygen deprivation? Who is responsible for the child when the state decides life or death?

The fact that the state of Texas can overlook a living will to preserve the life of a fetus also raises the question of how far that can go. What’s the point of making a living will if the state can override it? If the state’s interest is in preserving life at all costs, why honor the “do not resuscitate” clauses at all? Presumably this won’t happen, because the lives of unborn children seem to be more important than the adults responsible for them.

In states where fetal rights advocates have passed legislation, people, especially women who are or may become pregnant, find they don’t get to choose how they live or die. If they’re struggling with addiction, they may further endanger their own lives to stay out of prison for endangering the fetus, rather than seek medical help. Furthermore, certain cases in Alabama and Mississippi are toeing the line for prosecuting women who’ve miscarried due to illegal drug use. Clearly these laws are being put in place to establish personhood for fetuses so that abortion laws can be challenged. That leaves pregnant women in certain states faced with the possibility of jail time for miscarrying, depending on certain factors. Abortion may be legal, but endangering the life of an unborn child, sometimes unintentionally, may become illegal. It’s a frightening state of affairs when the life of a fetus becomes the keystone of determining what happens to the life of a woman. Think of Ireland’s draconian anti-abortion laws and how they led to the 2012 death of Sita Halappanavar, who died while under hospital care because she was refused a badly needed abortion during a life-endangering miscarriage. Sita’s life ended because it was deemed that her fetus, which had already died, was more important than Sita’s own life.

 

Holy Shit – This Has to Stop

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Cursing in a title, how unprofessional you say. Well, yes it is, but damn it, this has to stop. By now, you are all aware of the inanity surrounding the abortion and women’s health debates. It seems we can’t turn around without another new reality defying piece of legislation coming to the fore.  From the Always Pregnant in Arizona (HB2036)  to the single-celled persons in the US Congress, one has to ask:  has everyone lost their flipping minds? Apparently, not yet; we have still to reach the nadir of bottom-feeding, reality-denying, logic-bending oblivion.

Just this week a female legislator in New Mexico proposed a bill to prevent abortion in the case of rape or incest lest critical evidence for the rape be lost. Really? Really?  Have you absolutely no understanding what DNA is? Obviously not.

House Bill 206, proposed by Republican Representative Cathrynn Brown, makes abortion in the case of rape and incest a third degree felony of tampering with evidence punishable by up to three years in prison. The thought being that one most carry to term the offspring of the rapist in order to gather critical evidence linking him to the crime. Hmmm.

Laugh as we might at the ignorance of biology pervading legislatures across the US, this absolute fealty to an ideological end game, one willing to legislate unreality, to rename its truths, is dangerous with ramifications far beyond the abortion debate.

Are there no longer adults in this world, capable of understanding human biology and policy making at the same time; capable of thoughtful and reasoned debates or legislation regarding abortion?  It seems not. Or maybe, that is not the point. Maybe reality is passe.

What a wonderful delusion to legislate away inconvenient truths. Where else could this trend lead. Gravity is certainly annoying, perhaps we should start there. Or better yet, as some jester suggested, the mathematical Pi is too complicated– let’s simplify.

I, however, like the sacred sperm act, though not technically reality-defying, it certainly takes the ‘life’ debate to its reasoned absurdity. Ye shall spill no sperm except to impregnate and should ye fail to impregnate, felony feticide awaits. Should ye spill that life giving juice, charges of child endangerment are a must. I see a science fiction movie here: caged humans, milked for their life-giving proteins. Bwahaha!

Snark and humor aside, ignorance is no longer an excuse. Silence is not acceptable. This shit has to stop. Reality exists, facts matter, laws of physics and human biology apply. These things cannot be legislated away to serve a political or religious aim – unless we let them. Malleus Maleficarum anyone?

Subtle but fundamental changes in discourse: is anyone listening?

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Discourse Matters

What happens when we change the definition of a person to include everything from a corporation to a barely fertilized female egg? What happens when the corporate person and a collection of cells have more tacit and actual rights afforded than actual sentient beings? Though the loud and often offensive debates over a woman’s manifest right to make decisions about her health have led many to declare a ‘war on women,’ these same trends will serve to erode human rights in general- even for male humans.

Perhaps more of a philosophical question at this point, but when the definitions of words within a language dissociate so radically- person no longer means a human- it is difficult not to wonder what ramifications are before us; the law of unintended consequences will most certainly be at play here.

The Subject in Discourse

Language, and by association conversation or discourse, follow some very specific rules. At the most basic level, a sentence contains a subject, verb and object and, for the most part, words describe something about reality. (We’ve long since dissembled language and reality with mega marketing, political expediency and spin- but that is another topic altogether).

Subjects are usually, he, she, it, they etc., a person or thing.  Although the definition of person has evolved over the course of history, it is generally allied with some underlying concept of sentience or thinking. Even though animals can think, we have never defined animals as persons (try as many dog lovers might) and there has always been a clear demarcation between human and everything else. Over the course of two years, however, cultural forces have rendered that definition virtually obsolete. And we have yet to settle on a new definition.

Corporate Privileges in Discourse

By law, corporations are now afforded some of the same (often more) rights than human persons. A corporation is comprised of human persons, but is essentially a contrived legal entity that allows business to transact. What does it mean when a legal contrivance becomes a person? Because corporate persons often have more power and money, there is the very real risk that their market goals will supersede basic human rights. (As a countervailing force, however, the millions of people within corporations connected socially online may overturn this overstep- see my last post).

The Risks of Anti-Abortion Discourse

Similarly, local anti-abortion supporters aligned with local government entities have pushed legislation across multiple regions of the US that grant a fertilized egg, person status; often affording the cell person more rights than the human person. Along with these trends, legislation that either forces women to undergo unneeded medical procedures and/or prevent physicians from providing medical information to women supersede the rights of the human-sentient person in favor of cells. No matter what you believe about abortion, this is a fundamental shift in discourse with significant policy ramifications.

Aside from the potentially life-threatening position a woman can now be placed in legally, aside from ethical quandaries these laws place a physician in and the very real medical malpractice suits that these laws open the physician up to, this shift in language, motivated by narrow political goals, removes the notion of human rights, human persons, from policy discussions. And although, these policies currently target women specifically, they will ultimately erode rights for all humans. Who is to say other cells or other legal or object entities don’t indeed deserve to be protected over the rights of humans.

Sperm cells for example, are core constituents of human life and until we master asexual reproduction, why shouldn’t all sperm cells be considered sacred and merit the same protective caveats as the female egg?  Or to its absurdity, the male penis, testicles and the like, containers of this life-giving force, why shouldn’t they be enshrined and protected until the moment of copulation- a chastity belt perhaps?

Laugh as we might, redefining personhood to include everything from non-human, legal entities to a collection of cells that may or may not evolve into a human being, dismisses the role and rights of actual humans. This change in discourse is a dangerous slope.

Are Women Equal Ender the Law?

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The Raucous Birth Control Debate

When I was in my 20s, I was adamantly non-feminist. I considered myself equal to any man. I had control of my reproductive health. I could vote, hold office, play sports and saw no point in fighting those old battles. Boy was that naïve. I still consider myself equal to any man. I realize now, however, that much of the world does not agree. And rather than progressing towards more equality, as a country we seem to be moving towards less.

Here we are over a decade into the 21st century and we are once again arguing about a woman’s right to manage her own health. We’re arguing about birth control. Partly because of the political and economic dynamics of our time, the issue is more heated than ever. Wedge issues like this re-surface with every election cycle. From a dollars and cents perspective, who wants to pay for medications that 98% of the female population utilizes for years at a time?  Birth control is an expensive proposition for any institution.

Economics aside, I would contend that the birth control debate is not about birth control, or even one’s religious beliefs. No, this debate is about whether women are full citizens with all of the rights and privileges as men – including the right to make their own health care choices.

Are women equal to men under the law? Do we have the right to pursue health, happiness and liberty as we see fit?  Do we have the right to religious freedom?  Or per the current brouhaha, are we a special class of citizen with only some of the rights conferred to the male citizenry?

If the current discussions are any indication, there are many among us that believe that women’s rights are alienable and superseded by the rights of religious institutions or political expediency. How else does one explain the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings  on women’s health that included no women, but highlighted the male hierarchy of congressional and religious power?  How else does one explain the conservative punditry’s fealty to the male view of women’s health (adroitly portrayed by John Stewart’s Vagina Ideologues ). How else does one explain the utter lack of women, even conservative women, present in these discussions about women’s health?

Maybe these events can be chalked up to the election year machinations of feckless politicians; maybe it is just a power play, positioning one party over the other; we can hope…

I worry, however, that as these conversations continue and the voices of women are denied, the prevailing discourse that women’s health and self-determination are matters of religious conscience and governmental intrusion, will become more and more entrenched. The line between election year politicking and reality is blurring quickly. These debates are defining not only who can speak about women’s health, but which topics are acceptable; only men and only reproduction.

As a woman and a fierce advocate for women’s health research, I find the current trends dangerously recursive.  No, these discussions are not about birth control or even religious freedoms. These issues aren’t even about liberal versus conservative or left versus right, though often framed as such. These discussions are about whether women are equal citizens with all the rights and privileges accorded. Do we have the right to make and manage our own health care decisions?  If the current discourse continues, the answer is trending towards no, women are not equal.

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