If this doesn’t give every normal American a chill, then you’ve been infected by the fascist culture war bug.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060606_sunsara_taylor_preconception/
Read this and weep. I think this story dovetails very nicely with the BT piece on Rick Warren’s wife and her AIDS photo op in setting out the really fucked up position of the American fascist side of the so called culture war.
Taylor states that the import of the CDC pronouncement is that women are not to be considered as independent human actors in charge of their own lives but as potential vessels for potential life.
The CDC report calls for a radical shift in medical care so that at every point of interaction, women’s doctors are to stage “interventions” to make sure they are healthy and prepared to give birth. Want to take your newborn in for a checkup or your 8-year-old in for a high fever? Expect an “intervention” into your eating habits, weight and behavioral risk factors.
Got diabetes or epilepsy and looking for the care that is best for you? Wrong approach, says the CDC: “Separating childbearing from the management of chronic health problems and infectious diseases places women, their future pregnancies, and their future children at unnecessary risk.”
Noting that attitudes and behavior related to childbearing and childbearing preparedness are “influenced by childhood experiences and prevailing social norms among adults,” the CDC calls for a cultural and media crusade aimed at changing “public attitudes” about “the importance of preconception health behaviors,” including the risks of tobacco use, alcohol, obesity, and diet.
The report bemoans the fact that half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and focuses in on the potential harm caused to fetuses by their female incubators between the time of an unexpected conception and the recognition of pregnancy. Never mind making it easier for women to decide for themselves whether or not to become pregnant. Never mind ensuring that women have the ability to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Not once, in its entire 43 pages, does the CDC’s report even mention birth control or elective abortion.
Instead, the CDC report is framed in and extends the kind of logic that has galvanized the anti-abortion movement for years. Now, not only is the developing life of a fetus–a potential human being–considered more valuable and important than the life of the mother–but the potential life of a nonexistent fetus takes precedence over the life of the woman.
Just so we understand the context of the CDC report,
……, get prepared for the religious fanatics who terrorize women at the doors of abortion clinics to broaden their harassment against women who enter bars, smoke cigarettes or eat at McDonald’s. Get ready for the prosecution of women who engage in these activities for crimes against their future fetuses. And get ready for calls to weed out and even sterilize women who are deemed by the state to be unfit to bear children.
Sound too extreme? Wake up and look around!
Already, legions of theocratic lawyers are constructing legal defenses for the fundamentalist pharmacists who refuse to fill women’s prescriptions for birth control.
Already, Louisiana has joined South Dakota in banning abortion throughout the state.
Already, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and others have called for the execution of abortion providers.
Already, laws passed to “protect” fetuses have been used to jail people who, lacking safe and destigmatized access to legal abortions, either self-induced an abortion or helped a woman induce her own voluntary abortion.
Consider that the Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the leader of Virginia-based Human Life International, has called the repressive anti-abortion laws in El Salvador “an inspiration.” As The New York Times Magazine said in describing the situation in El Salvador: “In the event that the woman’s illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government’s doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her.
Expect the first murder trial for juvenile males caught masturbating by their parents in about 2010. I’m sure each peter pumping perpetrator will be charged for about a million counts of masturbatory murder, one for every single one of those little flagellating sperm shot out to their deaths.
Let’s all throw away our condoms, birth control pills, diaphragms, viagara, cialis (sob), Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, Esquire, Time, Newsweek and that damn Christian Science Monitor and go right avay and make der babies for der Dubya. Heil Dubya. (I did that in my best Peter Sellers imitation from Dr. Strangelove).
