[lbo-talk] abortion poll

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 18:58:26 PST 2007


On 3/9/07, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> >If Joanna is talking about the case of women who are mentally ill,
> >rather than religious, well, that's a matter of disability rights.
> >Mentally and physically disabled women have often been denied sexual
> >rights and freedoms as well as reproductive rights and freedoms. What
> >do leftists think about that discrimination against the disabled?
> >
> The issue that I'm raising is that sometime after conception and before
> full term, a foetus is viable outside the mother's body. Given that this
> is the case, does a woman have the right to end a life that could
> continue outside her body? Or is that possibly a space in which society
> has a voice.

The current constitutional standard that is the basic framework of legal thinking about abortion, Roe v. Wade, is already in part based on the concept of viability:

3. State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here,

that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure

on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her

pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due

Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which

protects against state action the right to privacy, including

a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.

Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate

interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health

and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests

grows and reaches a "compelling" point at various stages

of the woman's approach to term. Pp. 147-164.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of

the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation

must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's

attending physician. Pp. 163, 164.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of

the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in

the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate

the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably

related to maternal health. Pp. 163, 164.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State,

in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life,

may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe,

abortion except where necessary, in appropriate

medical judgment, for the preservation of the life

or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164-165. (Roe v. Wade, <http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZS.html>)

So the starting point of our discussion should be the recognition that the right to abortion guaranteed by the constitution is a right limited to the first trimester and that availability of abortion in general and abortion after the first trimester in particular has become increasingly scarce, due to both more and more legal restrictions placed on abortion and fewer medical practitioners willing to perform abortion.

The questions leftists need to ask themselves are _whether_ they are content with the reality of more and more restrictions on this already limited constitutional right and worsening scarcity of abortion providers; and, _if they are not_, what they think they can do to make it easier for women to obtain abortion in the current political climate, where both pro-choice and anti-abortion Americans have moved to the center, which, as Wojtek noted, may make it easier for states to put even more restrictions on the right to abortion. We really need reality-based discussion. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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