Abortion rights being squeezed ever tighter

It has been almost six years of unrelieved gloom with the Bush administration’s reactionary grip on America. But some cheering news has recently come out of Washington: approval of the morning-after contraceptive pill.
After a three-year struggle in which religion and ideology prevailed over science and common sense, the over-the-counter sale of the Plan B pill has been OK’d by the Food and Drug Administration. (Unfortunately, the FDA ruled out sale to minors.)
A scientific panel recommended, 23-4, adoption of the pill in 2003. But Bush right-wing politics intervened, presidential appointees obfuscating, stalling and constantly demanding further studies.
The FDA’s assistant commissioner for women’s health, Susan Wood, angrily quit over the reversal, pointing out that “scientific and clinical evidence” had been “fully evaluated and recommended by professionals.”
What caused the change of heart? Two things: the threat by Senate Democrats to hold up the nomination of a new FDA commissioner until the pill was approved and a lawsuit putting the fear of God into the agency.
But despite the pill victory, anti-choicers nationwide are putting more and more restrictions on the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The Casey decision in 1992, reaffirming the right to abortion, declared that states cannot put an undue burden on access. But they are.
South Dakota began a new legal assault earlier this year with the aim of overturning Roe. It outlawed all abortions except to save a mother’s life. (The law is under legal challenge.) As it is, South Dakota, the 17th biggest state in the union, has just one abortion clinic. Reaching it sometimes requires a 700-mile roundtrip. This is particularly onerous for poor women living in remote areas.
Some states have imposed such restrictions as parental notification, a ban on late-term abortion and waiting periods. Missouri has abolished state funding for family planning and is encouraging childbirth.
A few states have adopted laws warning women seeking an abortion that the fetus will feel pain. Some states even approved legislation declaring that aborting an embryo is homicide.
Florence Ruderman, retired sociology professor at Brooklyn College, writes: “Some women have been hectored and humiliated. And some refusals have involved women who have been raped or whose lives or well-being would be endangered by pregnancy.”
Adding to abortion obstacles, some pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control, placing their moral and religious objections above professional obligation.
Columnist Katha Pollitt of Nation magazine says of the Bush base of right-wing Christians: “faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraceptions for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone--even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl” in Florida without home and family.
Pollitt rightly concludes: “Ah, Christian compassion! Christian sadism, more likely.” Meanwhile, the wing-nuts of the Right are cheered on by Fox, “the Right’s own network,” Pollitt concludes,
The zealots recall the Brendan Behan remark in “Borstal Boy”: “These religious bastards, they have empty minds on account of not going in for sex, or sport, or drink…or reading bad books.”
Then we have cretins like Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma who would execute abortion providers. He is too dense to understand that abortion is a matter between a woman and her doctor, not for blockhead lawmakers. The Roe guarantee of a privacy right should be inviolable.
Abstinence-only is one of the silliest policies of the Bush administration, on a par with sending Karen Hughes on a goodwill mission to Arab countries. As James Trussel, director of population research at Princeton, notes: “It all comes down to the evils of sex. That’s an ideological position impervious to empirical evidence.”
Bush is the idiot who backs the unintelligent “intelligent design” and opposes meaningful disease-combating stem cell research, bars global funding to any group that even talks about abortion, and attacks family planning and contraceptive use.
No other civilized country is still fussing over abortion rights as America is. Call the roll of civilized countries that have been allowing the over-the-counter pill for years: Canada, Britain, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The late-term abortion banned by Congress in 2003 has been struck down three times by federal appeals courts. But the Supreme Court nearly always has the last word.
Often it is a baleful word. Indeed, pro-choicers fear that the packing of the court with conservatives like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito could doom Roe, an outcome of tragic proportions leading to senseless deaths and absurd criminalization.