Too Immature To have An Abortion…
Posted by Michelle Moquin on October 26th, 2013
…but mature enough to have a baby.
Good morning!
I found this write on a blog I discovered. If not for the shutdown taking over the news media during those two weeks, this story would’ve gotten the front headlines that it deserved. I’m giving it blog time today.
State-Sanctioned Child Birth
Pain, Poverty, and Suffering for Women as GOP Strategy for…?
Recent headlines out of Nebraska show the tragedy of the logical conclusion of focusing on the affects of birth and abortion on children, rather than on women.
Note: skip this if you’re weak of stomach or terrible court rulings drive you to depression rather than frenzy.
In 2011, Nebraska changed its abortion laws to require minors to undergo extensive counseling against abortions, receive a parental signature consenting to the procedure, and wait 24 hours for the hassle and discouragement to sink in before underage women can choose not to give birth. This law did no less than imply that young women were not mature enough to vote, serve in the military, drive cars, marry, or have abortions, but they were mature enough to give birth provided their parents refuse to sign the permission slip. Parents could literally force their daughters to give birth by not granting their signature.
In gray-area cases, such as a recent case involving a minor legally separated from her parents, parental guardianship is often unclear. This 16-year-old anonymous girl was physically abused by her parents, legally separated from them by a court, and has lived as a ward of the state with foster parents since 2011. Back in May, when she was ten weeks pregnant and only just legally separated from her parents, she requested an abortion. But who would sign that permission slip? Up through the system her case went until earlier this week, when the decision from the Nebraska Supreme Court delivered its opinion.
They ruled that she was not “sufficiently mature and well informed to decide on her own whether to have an abortion.” The now four-months pregnant teen was declared too immature to have an abortion, yet mature enough to have the baby. Let that sink in: according to the Nebraska Supreme Court, a 16-year-old is too young to decide she doesn’t want to have a baby, yet she’s A-OK to have that baby. She now, as a result, is forced to give birth to a baby she can’t support, and against her will.
In this context, Republican hoopla over fetus’ rights, the capacity to feel pain, and heartbeats seems like a clever diversion from the real-life hardship resulting from forcing women to give birth to babies they state openly they won’t be able to properly care for or support. Forcing her to have that baby in the same political climate in which programs helping such women, like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), are facing serious threatsto their existence, raises a serious question about Republican policy aims.
What is the end goal here? To me what comes to mind is a United States with record number of impoverished children whose mothers were forced to have them, yet denied the supplemental support required to raise their children by those same lawmakers; streets full of barefoot children groomed for a future of underemployment and malnutrition.
I think the left needs to take the offensive in light of cases like these. The issue is not about fetus’ rights, the sanctity of life (how sacrosanct is a life of almost certain poverty?), or fetal personhood. It’s about forcing women to have babies. What will Republican lawmakers do when called out in instances like this, where they force a young woman against her will to undergo childbirth because of a set of paper thin principles? Does the likelihood of her birth being publicly paid for and the lifetime of hardship her and her child will face stack up to the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility they espouse? And what about the considerable pain they’re mandating women to undergo? Forcing women to give birth against their will is forcing women to pay the dearest cost for having sex, a cost only they could ever possibly pay.
It’s state-sanctioned pain and future hardship so a group of politicians and their constituency can stick to their patriarchal principles. File another one under the voluminous category of “Evidence of the GOP Empathy Gap.”
*****
Readers: This kind of things just infuriates me to no end. I am so sick of men controlling the decisions of women and girls as if they know what is best for us. This young girl is being forced to have a baby when she does not want one. This is one sick example of a result women and girls have to endure when their future and livelihood is decided by the hands of men.
Happy Saturday.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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October 26th, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Quintessential knuckleheads presenting an oxymoronic scenario (we can’t trust her to know she doesn’t want a baby bc she’s too immature so lets give her one she doesn’t even want. And now visualize the heel of my hand pushing firmly into their cranium as my knee lifts to that place of total physical pain /or pleasure depending on the circumstances/ for a full body response to the boneheadedness of this suggestion).
*heavy sigh*
Luv ZL