Who cares about the birthing vessels?

Created
Sun, 26/03/2023 - 08:00
Updated
Sun, 26/03/2023 - 08:00
This is some chilling stuff from Oklahoma. A minority of state Supreme Court Justices make it clear that there is no constitutional right to life for women — only their fetuses. They say that if the state wants to protect the vessels they’re going to have to write a law demanding it. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist: Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, dozens of reports from red states have told of hospitals withholding care from pregnant patients until they are hemorrhaging or suffering catastrophic infections, lest the doctors be prosecuted for providing an illegal abortion. When confronted with these effects of abortion bans, anti-abortion advocates often blame the doctors for misinterpreting the law. There are exceptions for medical emergencies, they say, and it should be easy enough for a doctor to tell when a patient is in deep enough danger to protect her medical team from possible prison time. This is a mealy-mouthed attempt at misdirection. Health crises are never so predictable and containable; they do not progress in linear fashion, with easy off-ramps at every level of endangerment. But anti-abortion conservatives would never admit this, because it would imperil their entire mythology of pregnancy. So they pretend that their laws will never endanger patients’ lives and issue grave, self-exonerating statements when faced with an anecdote to the contrary. Most of the time, that is. In Oklahoma, a recent set of chilling dissents from right-leaning justices shamelessly lays plain how the anti-abortion movement justifies its assault on pregnant people’s right to life. The dissents come…