Editorial 9.5, May 2007, by Deirdre Helfferich

Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head About It, Girlie
May 12, 2007

The bumpersticker reads: “The Republican Party. Your Bridge to the 11th Century.” But I don’t blame the Republicans, particularly. The reactionary, misogynist, small-minded mentality that has hijacked much of the Middle East, recent American politics, and can be seen flaring its snot-filled nostrils in many European democracies and dictatorships alike is certainly not exclusive to the Republican Party of the United States. These bozos have been with us ever since we first discovered fire and some Neanderthal said to the guy with the flaming torch, “Hey! You’re going hell for that!” and clubbed him over the noggin.

People often compare this fundamentalist, reactionary trend to the Dark Ages of Europe, and look to the Renaissance and modernity as a time of enlightenment, scientific and artistic discovery—but the Renaissance was also the period of the Burning Times, the witch craze of the mid-1400s to the early 1700s, during which approximately 40,000, and perhaps as many as several hundred thousand people, mostly women, were executed for the crime of witchcraft (not to mention torture and other forms of persecution). Contrast this with the recent breakthough in thinking that finally allowed the First Amendment to prevail in the use of “accepted” religious symbols in military graveyards: the Wiccan pentacle can now be placed on headstones of fallen Wiccan soldiers.

I majored in foreign languages in college, and during one of my history classes read a book written before the Burning, in 1405, La Cité des Dames (City of Women), by Christine de Pizane. This, interestingly enough, is a feminist work. Six hundred years later, the idea she espoused, that women are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and choosing their own best course, is still one that the judges of our nation have trouble wrapping their minds around.

Now, anyone who knows me, and probably anyone who knows of me, knows that I am a feminist. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple: I vote. I own property. I can drive. I have a career. I can read and write. I can attend university, visit the library, run for office. These things are legal, and right, and good. These things were all fought for, long and hard, by feminists. Voting, owning, driving, reading, etc., are feminist acts. They assert that yes, I am a person, yes, I am fully a human being.

And until very recently in this country, I could have control over my body. I could make my own medical decisions, and was legally assumed to have the mental and emotional faculties of an adult. Having control over one’s person is the most basic of rights.

But this has changed, dramatically, with the recent decision by the Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Carhart. As Priscilla Smith, the lead trial lawyer for Dr. Leroy Carhart on behalf of the Center for Reproductive Rights, points out,

If this were a so-called “informed consent” statute, we could argue about whether or not the information would contribute to a more informed decision or was false or misleading. But this is not an informed consent statute at all. It is a ban, whether or not the woman’s decision is mature and informed, whether or not she will suffer serious medical complications, uterine perforation, scarring, hysterectomy, hemorrhage, whether or not she has a bleeding placenta previa, chorioamnionitis, uterine or placental cancer, etc.

And the basis for supporting this ban? Well, according to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, (PDF) “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”

So, based on no reliable data, the Court has decided for all women that because some women might regret having had an abortion using this procedure, none of us should have the option when the medical circumstances call for it, because, apparently, women just can’t handle regret. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in her dissent, (PDF)

Today’s decision is alarming…. It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line…between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.

I dissent from the Court’s disposition. Retreating from prior rulings that abortion restrictions cannot be imposed absent an exception safeguarding a woman’s health, the Court upholds an Act that surely would not survive under the close scrutiny that previously attended state-decreed limitations on a woman’s reproductive choices.

Because of the basis the majority used in this court case, this is a profoundly anti-woman decision that may be used as a precedent to prevent women from being treated as full human beings under the law: Our health doesn’t matter, even with a fetus that isn’t viable. I see it as yet another sign of a disturbing, condescending trend toward making “feminism” a dirty word, and toward overturning the hard-won battles leading toward American women’s legal independence.

No, we’re not in the eleventh century, we’re in the twenty-first. And what a sorry time it is.

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