Supreme Court Lets Kentucky Force Vaginal Probes on Women Seeking Abortions

Here’s Some Informed Consent, You Fascist Creeps

by Sunsara Taylor

December 12, 2019 | revcom.us

 

This week, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal being brought by doctors who provide abortions at the only abortion clinic in the entire state of Kentucky. In short, the highest court in the land just said that it's okay for the state to force doctors to force women to listen to a state-mandated lecture about the contents of their developing pregnancy while lying naked in stirrups with an ultrasound probe stuck up inside their vaginas before these women are allowed to undergo an abortion. This is just one of a whole avalanche of humiliating and shaming obstacles that anti-abortion fanatics are imposing on women as part of moving to their nightmare world where all women are forced by the state to bear children against their will.

In defending this law, lawyers for the state of Kentucky wrote, “Nothing can better inform a patient of the nature and consequences of an abortion than actually seeing an image of the fetus who will be aborted and receiving a medically-accurate description of that image.”

BULLSHIT.

Here are just a few things off the top of my head that would “better inform a patient of the nature and consequences of an abortion”:

• Fetuses are NOT babies. While a fetus has the potential to become a baby, as long as it is inside your uterus it is a subordinate part of your body. Terminating a fetus is not “committing murder,” it is stopping a pregnancy from developing into a person. You can learn more about this here.
• Women are full human beings, not breeders of children. Having a child can be wonderful, if that is what you want. But choosing not to bear a child—at a particular time, with a particular person, in particular circumstances, or at all —is also a perfectly moral choice.
• One in three women will get an abortion and the overwhelming feeling they experience is relief.
• Abortion is 10 times safer than childbirth.
• The people who harassed and shamed you on the way into the clinic are waging a fight to ENSLAVE women. The anti-abortion movement is driven by Old Testament Biblical literalism that preaches women should be silent, obey men, and bear children in pain to redeem themselves for supposedly committing “original sin” that supposedly got humanity kicked out of the “Garden of Eden.” This Christian fascist movement doesn't just oppose abortion, they oppose birth control, divorce, LGBTQ people, the right of women to have sex outside patriarchal marriages, evolution, science, and so much more. They have absolutely no claim to any moral high ground.

But, while we are on the topic of informed consent, there is one group that needs to be informed about the “nature and consequences” of their actions even more than these women.

To all those who are growing alarmed at the cruel and humiliating anti-abortion restrictions being hammered into place and by the Christian fascist fanatics now packed into all the highest levels of the state:

If you continue to stay in your comfort zone, relying on the courts (which are now packed with fascists) or the Democrats (who repeatedly capitulate) to stop this juggernaut for you, you will be complicit in condemning half of humanity to barbaric patriarchal enslavement.

On the other hand, if you join with others in taking history into your own hands, seizing back the high moral ground and stepping out in the streets to demand the removal of this whole fascist regime and abortion on demand and without apology as part of that, there is still time to stop this nightmare.

This is not an abstract or timeless choice. This Saturday, December 14, people across the country will be in the streets raising the demand Trump/Pence #OUTNOW! and fighting to call forth thousands and ultimately millions more to join them in sustained protest until the regime is removed. Which side will you be on?

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