Rough Draft on Abortion & Choice

I'm going to begin this rough draft as a list of topics that may or may not be logically relevant to the topic on abortion. Because I realize that as I attempt to address this politically-heated issue, the best I can do is read articles and commentary and then see if I can see what the hell is going on.

I think I read somewhere that the South Dakota ban on all abortions, except for the near death of the mother, is just a political move to get the case back into the courts: primarily the Supreme Court. If this is true (and I will attempt to locate the citation where I read it) I am thinking that it sounds as simpling as politicians playing politics with women's choices. But the argument, I realize, is not a simple argument; not as simple as the argument that women who have abortions crush their babies skulls open.

Or so I've heard.

Then there's the commentary by Ann Coulter wherein she notes that only women who have had abortions are worried about women's rights and the loss of those rights. Actually, Ann, no. You see, I can't deal with the prospect of my 20, 22, 24 and 26-year-old children facing a pregnancy without the same choice I had, and which I opted out of. And if I get going to much on Ann's sensibilities on abortion in general I may ruin my credibility as an objective onlooker as I attempt to write a 3,000-word essay on the topic.

If you haven't figured out by now what exactly I'm referring to regarding the ban on abortion, there is a wave of interest within much of the moral-majority movement to save the lives of spermatozoa. But let me not get anecdotal here and get back to the topic. According to a citation in my political science 101 text, no one cares if Roe v. Wade is overturned. But I'm going to have to check this out because I just don't believe it. Yet, I wonder why my neighbor, a woman about my age with two young children, abruptly changed the subject the other day and ended the nice chat we were having in the sun, sharing her chives from her little garden with me.

Pam Bulluck in an April 23 New York Times piece references political and ideological extremes but notes that though states rights may gain in this debate is indicative of a nation divided; merely a highlighting how our nation is not so united in the feature story titled, "The Not-So United States" on page four of the print version of Week in Review.

Ahead of the curve for some, perhaps. But for those sitting in, say, South Dakota, which recently enacted a law that bans all abortions except those necessary to save the life of the mother, Massachusetts might look more like it has gone of the deep end. And vice versa.

Such are the political and ideological extremes bubbling up from the states these days. Local legislatures are debating everything from teaching "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in public schools to financing stem cell research to preventing gay couples from adopting.

These debates raise a number of questions. Is the country destined to balkanize into a patchwork of polar-opposite policies? How will this diversity be reconciled? Does it need to be?

For some it is part of the larger spiritual mission to save the unborn, the children who can not save themselves. Todd Mitchell of Athens, Georgia writes at Articles of Faith:

Seems as those are going to be the issues du jour this fall for the Democrats v. Republicans, according to two stories in today's NYT. The Democrats plan on making stem cell research their wedge issue (1) while Republicans plan on resurrecting the false issue of gay marriage as their wedge issue (2).

Frankly, these developments are troubling for two reasons: Number one, the opposition to stem cell research comes from the highly-organized, highly motivated, fetus fetish crowd who are ready to "go to war for babies" on a moments notice. Read the Rest the article titled, The Fetuses v. The Gay, or here.

There have been other points in American history when state laws were radically different, historians say, citing slavery, and then the Jim Crow laws in the South. This could be another time of radical divergence.

This is a hopeful perpective--in my opinion--in lieu of the alternative. Because as I place it against the outspoken female commentator Coulter who ends her opinion piece with a religious reference to Jesus Christ, I recognize that because we live in a country of rights and freedoms and because I too am a woman who find an abortion ban carries great danger for the health and well-being of women, perhaps a patchwork in America is comforting news.

Belluck refers to the drama around moral issues in politics these days needs time to spill out. This is also a valuable possibility considering the plight women experience in regions such as El Salvadore, where abortion has been banned for eight years and back-alley abortion instructions are already showing up on the internet on personal blogs, such as "...saved the day."

Jack Hitt writes about El Salvador's resurgence in back-alley abortions and the attendant felony convictions that are meted out to those who perform and receive abortions in that country. He refers nonchalantly to the vagina inspectors in hospitals and other medical offices and the snitches who inform authorities if they suspect women have had an abortion. Thus the women stay away from medical helpers if their home-grown abortion has gone bad.

In his April 9, 2006 New York Times Magazine report, Hitt notes that more than a "dozen countries have liberalized their abortion laws in recent years, including South frica, Switzerland, Cambodia and Chad. In a handful of others, including Russia and the United States (or parts of it), the movement has been toward criminalizing more and different types of abortions." I would add here that the so-called morning after pilled is often billed as a murder of a child by individuals in the religious spheres (insert names/organizations here).

Hitt goes on to say that the South Dakota "governor recently signed the most restrictive abortion bill since the supreme Court ruled in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, that state laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional. The South Dakota law, which its backers acknowledge is designed to test Roe v. Wade in the courts, forbids abortion, including those cases in which the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest."

What Hitt refers to as a "new movement toward criminalization," cites other countries that completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia." Hitt however brings the readers attention to El Salvador's "active law-enforcement apparatus--the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal."