Turning women into incubators

SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG does an admirable job covering the impact that anti-abortion "fetal personhood" rhetoric has on the fight for abortion rights, and how such ideas help chip away at the bodily autonomy of women.

However, the concept of fetal personhood also attacks the other side of reproductive rights, which is unfortunately not discussed often enough in your paper: the rights of women to give birth without state interference. The "gradually increasing interest" that the state claims in the protection of a developing fetus, as established in Roe v. Wade, is frequently used to deny women basic human freedoms during pregnancy and childbirth.

The case of Samantha Burton illustrates a dangerous legal precedent in this arena. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blog, in March 2009, Burton was 25 weeks pregnant when her fetus began to show signs of distress, and in response, her doctor at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in Florida ordered her to undergo weeks of hospitalized bed rest.

Already the mother of two other children, Burton refused the treatment, which would have left her unable to care for her living children. Upon her refusal and request for a second opinion, her doctor alerted county officials and obtained a court order requiring Burton to submit to any and all medical treatment deemed necessary by the hospital. Her subsequent request to switch hospitals was also denied by the court. Three days later, under horrific stress, she miscarried.

The ACLU has filed a brief on her behalf with the First District Court, appealing the lower court's decision. The brief argues that the court grossly overstepped its authority by extending the state's right to order medical treatment over a parent's objection for the best interests of a (born) child to an unborn fetus: "[T]o ignore this fundamental constitutional distinction between the state's interest in protecting fetal life and its interest in the protecting the lives and health of people is to risk virtually unfettered intrusion into the lives of pregnant women."

This case is just one recent, visible example of increasing state interference into the lives of pregnant women; there are countless more examples caused by the unhappy intersection of paternalistic government, a health "care" system that continually devalues women's choices, and a society that treats pregnant women as public property whose rights are subordinate to those of their fetuses.

But if we as socialists do not take care to fight for the rights of women who do choose to give birth as well as those who do not, we run the risk of becoming just as obsolete as the mainstream feminist left and its myopic focus on abortion.
Veronica Bettencourt, from the Internet

An ACLU article on the case, including a link to a PDF of the ACLU's brief, can be found on-line.