Hat tip to CrooksAndLiars.com and a follow up on Sen. Brownback's force-pregnancy fantasies
Goodness! Looks like my post casting aspersions on the motives of Sen. Brownback's pro-rape supporters got linked to in a blog roundup by BlueGal, guest posting at Crooks & Liars, a rock-solid political weblog. I'd like to thank them and say welcome to all the folks that have followed the link back here. Here's a follow-up post.
In my former post I reacted a bit harshly to Republican Presidential candidate and sitting Senator from Kansas Sam Brownback, who brought 500 men at the National Catholic Men's Conference to their feet with the following statement:
"Rape is terrible. Rape is awful. Is it made any better by killing an innocent child? Does it solve the problem for the woman that's been raped?" the Kansas Republican asked at the St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers gathering.
"We need to protect innocent life. Period," Brownback said, bringing the crowd of about 500 to its feet.
While I stand by my previous post, this afternoon I'd like to take a little time questioning the consequences of his proposed policy rather than his motivation.
In the narrowminded fantasies of the forced-pregnancy crowd, making a rape survivor remain pregnant extends her assault from 30 seconds (the putative average) to 38 weeks (the average length of pregnancy to term.) And I *think* that's as far as their fantasies extend.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they're assume that upon birth the newborn will be "voluntarily relinquished" to baby traffickers who, for an average fee of $15,000 will "place" the infant for adoption in the hands of a preferably affluent, white, conservative couple who can the child a "good home."
Because, after all, not even Republicans would expect a survivor of criminal sexual assault to actually keep and raise the unwanted, unplanned offspring of their rapist. Right? Oooh too bad! I mean, before the Supreme Court's Carhart v. Gonzales decision depriving women the right to terminate a pregnancy through "intact dilation and extraction" that *might* have been true. But since that decision no less than Justice Anthony Kennedy (suddenly not only a lawyer and judge but now also a practicing physician and a clinical psychologist) has decreed that it's not just obvious but outright *self-evident* that a woman will regret having an abortion. (Hormones and all that, and you know how temperamental them dames is and all *anyway!") And by that highest-court-of-the-land medical reasoning if it's hard to lose a child *before* it's born (and our personal experience it really *was* hard even after only 14 weeks although that was a planned, wanted pregnancy) then almost by definition it'll be even harder to lose the baby after carrying it for 38 weeks (some of them possibly while strapped to a gurney to keep Sen. Brownback happy), maybe the last two months or so on total, life-threatening pre-eclampsia-induced bed-rest, and anywhere up to 45 hours of increasingly intense contractions and pushing, to just blithely hand the newborn (everything but 23 original seminal half-chromosomes of which was tinctured from your own body) over to some legalized baby-snatcher who'll make a tidy "non-profit" profit from it... assuming she survives.
Based on Justice Kennedy's opinion, signed by a majority of the Supreme Court, any woman who "voluntarily relinquishes" a child is going to regret it *big time.* It's just nature's way y'know. And, in all seriousness this time, rates of "relinquishment" are way down -- from around 20% in 1973 for unmarried young women (the most typical victims) to less than 1% in 1995.
Although, of course, contrary to Sen. Brownback's hot fantasies, not all victims of sexual assault are either young or single. The rate of infant "relinquishment" for married women is even lower.
So....
If Justice Kennedy is right (and by law if not actual justice he is, at least till Congress changes it) then Senator Brownback's position condemns victims not only the the minutes of violent assault, not only to 38 weeks of unplanned, unwanted, and unterminable pregnancy, but also 18 years of missed opportunities, not to mention extremely awkward silences around the dinner table at Thanksgiving. All to be born (as it were) at the expense of the victim since, by coincidence I'm sure, Senator Brownback and his coven of forced-pregnancy enthusiasts also oppose funding for prenatal care, postnatal care, daycare, family-leave, healthcare for children, aid to families with dependent children, and (since the infant could easily be born with health issues) crutches for Tiny Tim. Heck, since my medical and psychological qualifications are exactly the same as Justice Kennedy's I'm going to say it's *self-evident!*
So anyway. If Justice Kennedy is right (I'm not saying he is) then giving a child up for adoption is even more of an affront to maternal human nature than having an abortion. Of course if he's wrong then the foundation for his decision (which Brownback backers claim applies to abortion techniques used as early as the 12th week of pregnancy) then there's really no legal foundation for prohibiting pregnant rape victims from aborting their criminally-imposed pregnancies.
I'm not exactly sure where Senator Brownback gets off wanting to have have it both ways. I'm not exactly sure why he and his supporters are so eagher to coddle rapists and help extend victim's torment by 18 years and 38 weeks (thought I've mentioned have my suspicions) but like most decent, moral, right-thinking people the're not just wrong, he's sick and wrong.
It's self-evident.
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Final note: however faulty or misplaced, the Carhart vs. Gonzales decision Justice Kennedy's opinion is based on concern for women's feelings. The same can not be said, at all, at all, for Senator Brownback.
Actually, I think people like Brownback believe that some magical "mommy hormones" will kick in and allow the woman to find out that she loves the "baby" after all.
[And of course that's true (although it's not just *mommy* hormones that kick in.) And also beside the point, especially in terms of the world Brownback et al. want us to live in since, after all, any real or hypothetical baby-loving hormones kick whether, say, the baby was born into a straight, maximally-intolerant nuclear family, a gay family, an illegal immigrant family, an areligious, liberal Blue-state family, a polygamous hippie-commune family, say, an impoverished, ethnically-marginalized single-parent one, or the family of a survivor of sexual assault. Brownback abhors all but the first and, evidently, the last. And if *he* gets to abhor most of those family arrangements it's logically consistent for us to abhor the last. And allow the victim to prevent such arrangements by safe, medically appropriate methods. Thanks, PeanutCat. --fl]
Figleaf,
Why in this day and age can we not come up with contraception that is 100%?
Rape victims should be given emergency contraception as standard procedure.
When a mother’s life is in danger, then the fetus should be delivered and I don’t mean by killing it in the womb. But that’s just me.
Sen. Brownback was just out to make headlines. I read in wiki that less than 1% of abortions were performed as the result of rape. So why wasn’t he talking about the 74% that sought an abortion because they didn’t want their lifestyle to change? Because the word rape grabs your attention; I’d call him an attention grabbing whore, but that would be an insult to whores.
[Yup. Even one partner's elderly, conservative-Catholic father, a physician, felt strongly that emergency rooms should offer assault victims emergency contraception as a matter of course. But then, of course, he wasn't invested in the woman-hating lie that EC is an abortifacient. As for the *general* case of contraception, I agree with the statistics you cite and have addressed my concerns about opposition and/or disregard for safe, effective, affordable, easily-used, and avaliable contraception for both women *and* men many times on this blog. Thanks, Cathy. --fl]
In response to Cathy, there is plenty of good contraception, the problem is that it isn't used properly.
[It's worth mentioning that todays contraceptives are often unreliable even when used correctly (see condoms), also often difficult to use correctly, also expensive, and also often unavailable when needed most. *AND!* Men currently have only three options they can bring to sex: vasectomy, condoms, abstinence -- a situation that hasn't really changed in more than a century! Thanks, A. --fl]
I love people like Sam Brownback who believe that their moral compass should be used by everyone in every situation... Except of course, that his moral compass is based on his Catholicism... so he is a bit off whenever he talks about innocent life... Since every good Catholic girl and boy know that we are all born with the stain of original sin.. hence the purpose of baptism.
Senator Brownback is now parroting the new position of the Church that now says that all children are innocent and should be protected. The fact that the Church has now changed its stance of two millenia to combat a modern political issue is disingenuous and evil.
[I'd only disagree with you on one point, LM: the Church hasn't changed its stance to *combat8 a modern political issue, it's changed it to *advance* one. Theirs! Thanks. --fl]
In response to A. I hear ya...in 1978, I was on the pill (but didn’t wait long enough) and we used a spermicide (Encare ovals). Let’s just say I was most relieved when my wedding dress fit on d-day. 7 months later our lives changed forever.
The abortion issue is not one that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Figleaf’s post prompted me to look up a few things in Wikipedia: Rape Kit, Emergency Contraception, Roe v. Wade, Carhart v. Gonzales, Intact Dilation and Extraction, Fetus, Viability. The more I read, the more I needed to look up and on it went.
For me there is no easy answer, but maybe rules do need to be updated as advances in neonatal care make viability earlier and earlier. Maybe there should be some sort of test strip in toilet paper so unwanted pregnancies could be caught and eliminated at the earliest of stages. Oh, then the problems of having his and hers TP and of course hers would be soooo much more expensive. OK, I’m still dealing with all this info.
[What's important isn't so much what you *find* as that you're looking, Cathy. Believe it or not, one good place to look for info on contraception is on sex-hater's sites because they're really *really* invested in poking holes in their effectiveness. Of course *their* conclusion is that we should therefore not use any. Mine is that we should push hard for the development of safer, more effective, easier to use, more affordable, and more readily available forms for both women and men. But then I always say that. :-) Thanks! --fl]