“They want us dead.” Jessica Valenti on forced-birthers

“Of course they want us dead,” is how Jessica Valenti responds to the recent court decision saying that no, emergency rooms have no obligation to provide life-saving abortions (something I discussed last week). Her point is that when a conservative proposes an anti-abortion bill that will kill women — criminalizing abortion for ectopic pregnancies for instance — the assumption is that they’re clueless. In reality they know women will die, they just don’t care. “In the conservative imagination, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live.”

As I’ve blogged about repeatedly, to the forced-birth movement women are aquariums. Their value is in the precious fetus swimming inside them. As Valenti says, “the judges ruled that when emergency room doctors are faced with a patient who has a dangerous or life-threatening pregnancy, they have a responsibility to ‘stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.” That means a 6-week embryo would warrant as much emergency treatment as you do.”

I agree with Valenti, it’s not that they’re clueless — there’s a misogynist logic at work. If it’s wrong to make the fetus feel pain, then it’s wrong even if the mother’s life is at stake. Even if the fetus can’t survive, as in the case of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland; she’d miscarried and the fetus couldn’t survive but doctors couldn’t abort as long as it had a heartbeat. Halappanavar died as a result. A Catholic representative wrung his hands but still said saving her would have been an evil act because it would have killed the fetus.

Then there’s the argument htat if abortion is wrong, it’s wrong even when the odds the fetus won’t survive are 99 percent — what if that fetus would have made it through the 1 percent miracle window? Although even if the odds are zero, they don’t care: Georgia State Rep. Terry England argued in 2012 that women should have to carry dead fetuses to term. I think the logic there is that abortion is always bad, therefore even with a dead fetus the woman is out of luck. Or, as Valenti discusses here, they’re manipulating language: life-saving abortions, if they happen should be called “maternal fetal separation” reserving abortion for those optional surgeries they imagine slutty women get.

Like I said, women are aquariums to them, You don’t kill your tropical fish to protect an aquarium. Anti-abortion forces have believed this for decades but until Dobbs they couldn’t show us who they are.

For more about bullshit right-to-life arguments, feel free to check out my Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.