Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.

Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones asks how birth control came to be left out of most healthcare legislation.

Sharon Lerner at DoubleX ponders how birth control came to be a politically toxic issue.

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On the one hand, I can understand why birth control wasn’t included in the minimum benefits package. When you’re making a big change, and not including birth control simply leaves the status quo (rather than actively making the status quo worse), it’s easy to run from the least whiff of controversy, just to keep your bill intact. On the other hand, it’s discouraging that birth control, of all things, which practically everyone uses, should be controversial.

Read the quote in context here.

Actually I can say exactly how contraception became toxic in Congress so long ago. It’s actually the issue that first inspired me to start a website back when I thought I could become a regular political web-logger back in the days before actual blogging tools. That old website is now so long-gone I can’t even find the (hand-coded) source files.

Anyway, while I evidently no longer even have notes for my sources I learned the answer in an old print-based Washington Monthly from back in what must have been the early 1990s. What they said was that beginning in the 1970s pressure politics was such that no conservative Republican Senators would allow any legislation referencing birth control to move forward if it included support for abortion. No liberal Democratic Senator would support anything that didn’t include support for abortion. And no matter who brought it up or how reasonable the proposal was it always turned into a fight that would often spill over into other bills, with pro-choice attachments showing up here and anti-choice attachments showing up there and, since passions ran quite high, no possibility of resolution.

The result was a cordial agreement on both sides not to even bring it up. By the time the Monthly published the story the agreement was already nearly 20 years old. It would have been more than 30 years ago now.

What was particularly disgraceful was that at the time contraception itself wasn’t particularly controversial. Not for liberals, obviously, but also not for non-Catholic, pre-Reagan-revolution conservatives. And so absent the abortion issue what little legislation that did make it through tended to pass by overwhelming majorities in both parties.

Warn’t them the days though? Bipartisanship sure was great back then.

Via Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors, here’s another chance for me to play Crankypants about the idea that the only possible, conceivable option for single pregnant women is — whether by abortion or adoption — to get it over with as quickly as possible so you won’t ruin your chance to be dependent on a man.

Crawford quotes New York Times

[E]ach year, social pressure drives thousands of unmarried women to choose between abortion, which is illegal but rampant, and adoption, which is considered socially shameful but is encouraged by the government. The few women who decide to raise a child alone risk a life of poverty and disgrace.

Nearly 90 percent of the 1,250 South Korean children adopted abroad last year, most of them by American couples, were born to unmarried women, according to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs.

Read the quote in context here.

So! How much reproductive choice is there in a country idea of keeping and raising a child is both so inconceivable and intolerable that the economic and social costs of doing so — for the mother and her child — is effectively punishment?

Oh, did you think I was talking about Korea there?

Remember, I’m not saying there should be no adoption. And I’m sure not saying there should be no abortion. Nor, for that matter, and I saying unplanned pregnancy ought to be no big deal. And I’m especially not saying that if we could somehow overcome the social and economic obstacles of single motherhood then single motherhood would become everyones magical preferred choice over abortion or adoption. Because bwhahahaha. Wouldn’t that be making universal assumptions about human nature

I’m just pointing out the gaping chasm in ostensibly “pro-life” logic with it’s absolute intolerance of social transformations that would be something other than a social, economic, familial, personal, and relationship disaster to be single and pregnant in the first place. Let alone single and a mother after.

[Note: you may need to read this post with a little more care than usual. I always get a little ranty about the three-legged stool of the anti-abortion, pro-adoption, “crisis” pregnancy mindset. —fl]

Kathryn Joyce of RHReality Check has a lovely article about an extra ugly practice: infant traffickers posing as “pro-life” supporters. The immediate subject is a woman, Carol Jordan’s, experience with a South Carolina branch of a “crisis pregnancy” network that’s actually a front for a the largest adoption agency in the country. At the end of her pregnancy — which she’d been coaxed and convinced to carry to term by the “clinic” — the woman started having second thoughts about abandoning the baby she’d carried in her own body for nine months.

The story is heart-wrenching.

“My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money,” says Jordan. “Or here’s a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life.”
The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she’d signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn’t stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.

When Jordan called Bethany’s statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan’s lament. “You’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock,” she told Jordan. “You have no right to grieve for this baby.”

Read the quotes in context here.

I know it sounds quirky that I’d support abortion “on demand” but not adoption on demand. The problem, though, that “on demand” means really, really different things depending on how it’s used. In one instance it’s an expectation that an individual can have a medical procedure she decides best suits her needs. In the other instance it’s an economic term for the other side of a transaction wherein the “supply” is coaxed out of human beings by intermediary vendors.

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Aside: Yes, there really, genuinely, totally, and completely are people who shouldn’t be parents. And sometimes they (half of them anyway) can get pregnant anyway. And sometimes parents die and leave their children orphaned. And when those things happen it’s really, really good that other people are willing to take those infants and children into their homes and their lives. So that part I’m not so dour about. At all.

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What I am dour about… in fact what I’m downright rock-ribbed morally conservative about, though, is the idea that since there’s actually not anything wrong with having sex, there’s nothing wrong with becoming pregnant when you have sex. Problematic maybe, and sometimes problematic in the extreme, but not wrong. And since there’s nothing wrong with becoming pregnant, there’s nothing wrong with choosing not to carry it to term. Nor is there anything wrong with choosing instead to have a baby. Again, problematic maybe, but not wrong.

I mention this in large part because virtually 100% of lore, tradition, convention, and law hold that except for very narrow circumstances it is, indeed, wrong to be pregnant and especially wrong to have children outside those circumstances. (Almost as wrong, incidentally, as it is to decide not to be pregnant.)

Which is where “crisis pregnancy” centers… and the very idea of “crisis pregnancies” comes in. Or, more accurately, come cashing in.

If it’s wrong to be pregnant and, oh, say, single, or young, or of a locally unfashionable race, class, ethnicity, or orientation and “oh by the way,” it’s also wrong to terminate one’s pregnancy then the answer would be…? Adoption? Right in one!

And look who’s there to help! “Crisis pregnancy” centers. Fronting for adoption agencies. Who, gee, for some reason never get around to, oh, say, helping pregnant women who want to keep their babies keep their babies! Helping them, maybe, navigate social services, mediate with the prospective mother’s partner(s) and family, locate child-friendly communities and employers and schools and places to live and even other more supportive potential partners or co-parents. And who never, absolutely ever, lobby or agitate or donate or organize for social acceptance of “unwed” mothers, or for policies to support them, or for programs to assist them.

Instead they’re invested, up to their scrawny, ugly, viscous, baby-trafficking necks in perpetuating the notion that “You’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock. You have no right to grieve for this baby.” They’re invested… or otherwise directly financially interested in… the whole thousands of years old, straight out of the patriarchy, “abortion stops a beating heart” billboarding, “contraception is abortion” propagandizing, slut-shaming, whore-naming, “ruined flower,” “no one will want you now,” poverty-relishing, healthcare-withholding, social-assistance denying, “wages of sin” trumpeting culture of “crisis” which makes a pregnancy a crisis.

Nice little racket they’re running there, eh? Do everything you can to perpetuate a culture of slut-shaming. Then use that culture to a) shame women out of terminating their pregnancies and then b) shame them out of keeping them. Then top it all off by selling the resulting infants to “deserving” couples who’ll give the little sinner’s spawn a “good” home. Pocket the agency fees and image that’s going to get you into heaven when you die too!

#%

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This post, by the way, is via Sarah Posner at TAPPED who adds that on top of profiting from “crisis pregnancy” centers the Bethany service organization also somehow gets buckets of Federal Abstinence-Only education funding. Which at the very least seems like an ethical conflict of interest.

At the very least, they should have Abstinence-Only money taken away from them. They should be made to disclose (hey, maybe they way they keep lobbying for abortion service providers to disclose things) that they’re front groups for adoption agencies and that their sole loyalty is to their paying customers, prospective adoptive parents, and that therefore they will say and do whatever it takes to get you to effectively surrogate your pregnancy on someone else’s behalf.

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One last thing: do I need to say that at no point in the preceding post have I said I think women should continue unplanned, unwanted pregnancies instead of terminating them? No. At any point have I said I think an unplanned, unwanted, and especially unsupported pregnancy is any more of a walk in the park than a planned, wanted, supported one? No. And have I ever said, anywhere, that it’s not 100% preferable to have policies that support comprehensive sex education and policies favoring safer, more effective, easier to use, more reliable, more affordable, and more available forms of contraception and sufficient agency for both women and their partners to use them? Definitely not. Have I said I believe all children should stay with their families, particularly their mothers. No. And have I said you’re a bad person if you adopted someone? Or were adopted? Or gave up a child for adoption? No, no, and not at all.

On the other hand have I said any of the very real difficulties of pregnancy are compounded by a culture of shame and blame? Yes. Have I said “crisis pregnancy” centers by both name and nature have a vested interest in maintaining and exacerbating the culture of shame and blame? Yes. And that therefore they’re not the solution but a very real part of the problem? I’ve definitely said those things.