leticia

38 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that a woman had a right to rule her own body.

That it took a Supreme Court decision is disturbing; that we still have the kyriarchy hedging in on that right every time they can is disgusting.

So many of these so self-righteous oppressors of women start with "It's about the value of human life."

The value of human life has no relevance. Given that anti-abortion political views are highly matched with anti-single-payer-health-care or even basic-health-care-access-reform political views, we can make a mockery of it right there.

But even more.

In the United States, the sale of body parts for medical reasons is forbidden. You can't sell a kidney. You can't sell your dead grandpa's liver. You can't even sell your -blood-. (You can, however, be compensated for your time while donating plasma/blood. It's a dodge. But it illustrates the essential point.)

There's a reason for that, and it's not to drive down health care costs. The reason is to ensure no one can be coerced by financial causes into sacrificing their body.

We have no laws requiring you to be an organ donor, nor benefits for being one. (Despite the fact that people die for lack of donated organs - actual, real people who have names and personalities!)
We have no laws requiring you to be registered to donate marrow or a kidney, nor penalties for not.
We have no laws placing financial duress on those who do not choose to give blood.

The law does not even require a mother to give a kidney to an ill minor child! (Much less a father.)

Yet across the nation, there are a plethora of laws doing just that to force women to give up the control of their womb to an uninvited invader.

The fetus is a -trespasser-. If the fetus is, in fact, a human life, it still has no right to my blood, my body, my home, my food, any more than a homeless man freezing to death in the park does. If a fetus is a full 'person', I should be able to get the police to serve a trespassing complaint on it, and remove it from the premises. Those premises, by the way, are my body, and the removal is what we call an 'abortion'. If a fetus is a person, rather than a part of my body, the government -owes- me an abortion same as it owes all tax paying citizens a police response to a prowler.

I clearly fall under another line of thought - the fetus is a part of the woman's body and the woman has the right to dispose of it as she will.

We admire people who give their kidneys, or their blood, or open their homes to the needy. But we do not codify it into law. Why are women expected to sacrifice control of -their- bodies, and their long term health (pregnancy is hard on the body, make no mistake, even without complications; it drastically increases the chances of a number of later life health problems) to an unwelcome individual?

38 years ago, and they're still pussyfooting around trying to apply at least financial coercion to women in need of protection.