Elisabeth Smith, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Washington School of Law)

On Saturday, February 2nd, my LSRJ chapter hosted a conference titled “Reproductive Justice: Meta Rights and Milestones.” In the process of organizing the conference, I’ve thought a lot about RJ’s meta rights: the right to have a child; the right not to have a child; and the right to parent the children you have with dignity, free from violence and oppression. Two recent news stories demonstrated how some people with privilege have attempted to limit those rights by ridiculously redefining them.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the New Mexico GOP state representative, Cathrynn Brown, who introduced a bill last week that would bar abortions for rape victims. How you ask? Well, by making it a felony for women who become pregnant as the result of rape to have an abortion because an abortion is, by the bill’s definition, evidence tampering.

Yep.

When this story went viral, the esteemed representative released a mind-twister of a statement:“House Bill 206 was never intended to punish or criminalize rape victims. It’s intent was solely to deter rape and cases of incest. The rapist–not the victim– would be charged with tampering of evidence.”

So, the rapist whose assault “created” the evidence would also be charged with tampering with that evidence if his victim chose not to have a child? Hmmm. Try substituting another crime into this scenario if you want to really see how ridiculous it is.

Just over the border in Colorado, another story emerged. As a defense to a medical malpractice suit, lawyers for St. Thomas More hospital, a Catholic hospital in Cañon City, Colorado, argued that a fetus is not a person.  The hospital is run by Catholic Health Initiatives, a national chain that follows the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Part IV of the directives state “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn and the care of women and their children during and after pregnancy. [at p23] Many people have crowed about the hypocrisy of championing the legal argument that a fetus is not a person while at the same time prohibiting abortion and contraception on the theory that life begins at conception.

In New Mexico, a fetus becomes evidence and at Catholic hospitals following the bishops’ directives, a fetus is a fetus in cases of medical malpractice, but not when someone would like access to contraceptives or abortion. In such cases, your ability to decide how and when to have a child or how to grieve for lives that you anticipated welcoming is interpreted through the prism of someone else’s ideology and whether its convenient for them to demonstrate some consistency.

Those who oppose the right to have an abortion need to demonstrate integrity to their position. Abortion is not felony “evidence tampering” and if life begins at conception, it does so even when money is at stake.

Rosie Wang, Resident Blogger (’14, Columbia Law School)

Here is an alarming fact that I didn’t know until recently: Some studies have found that it is actually more likely for a woman to conceive after rape than after consensual sex. So much for the woman’s body having a way to shut that down. On the contrary, this tragic reality seems to highlight the necessity of abortion as an option.  But what is behind the link between lack of consent and increased likelihood of conception?

Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall looked at the results from the National Violence Against Women survey and found that out of the 405 women who said they had been raped, pregnancy occurred at rate of 6.42% Horrifyingly, this is more than twice the rate that women become pregnant from consensual sex. The Gottschalls eliminated a few possibilities: rape does not induce ovulation, nor is the sperm of the rapist unusually viable. One hypothesis they present is that of male choice. Supposedly, rapists target women who are young and desirable. And since the markers of beauty and the markers of high fertility overlap, a woman with high fecundity is more likely to be chosen by a rapist because of these physical cues. Various news outlets [Huffington Post here, Politico here, Washington Post here]  have trotted out these findings as a refutation against the blatant misinformation perpetuated by Todd Adkin and his ilk.

However, there is something very wrong with this picture.

First of all, rape is not primarily about sexual attraction, rape is about power and anger. Second, this type of correlation between visible fertility and rape veers straight into the territory of victim-blaming. I imagine wildly misguided “advice” based on these findings that puts the onus on the victims to obscure their physical cues of fertility. “If she had worn something baggier, that would have obscured her ideal hip to waist ratio, she wouldn’t have been raped.” Sadly, since two-thirds of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, and 38% of rapists are a friend or acquaintance, it would seem like rapists do not target the women with the highest and strongest fertility cues, but those whose familiarity and trust they can exploit. Thus, even if some piece of information or research looks like a good argument for reproductive justice, it’s often worth it to dig a bit deeper and look at what the implications mean.

Betty Yang, Guest Blogger (’15, Boston University School of Medicine, Medical Students for Choice)

This post is part of Blog for Choice 2013, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ).

Also found at bostonreprojustice.blogspot.com

The term “pro-life” sounds like it should have a nice sentiment. It conjures up the pursuit of health and wellness, the prevention of disease, ambitions not unlike the themes of the Hippocratic Oath. As a future physician, though, the words “pro-life” evoke a very different, less wholesome feeling.

I feel scared. Scared for the women in the world who don’t have access to safe abortions and resort to alternative means. Scared for the girl who is shamed into a life she is not prepared for. And most personally, scared for what might happen to me or my family when I stand up for my beliefs and become an abortion provider. The history of violence against abortion providers and their communities is long and world-wide. There have been countless death threats, physical assaults, kidnappings, and even cold-blooded murders, all in the name of having a “right to life”. Do these abortion clinic security guards, receptionists, and physicians not also have a right to life? Are their futures worth any less than that of an embryo that has never “seen” the light of day?

Wanting all living things to live is a beautiful thought. And, according to my definition of life—which takes into consideration the life of a woman unprepared to care for, or to birth and subsequently give up a child, and the life of a doctor who stands up for a woman’s right to choose, and a definition which excludes bodies of life that cannot independently live without a supplemental blood, immune, and digestive system—I am of the same opinion. But to believe bombing, or suffocating, or shooting others based on their beliefs, all under the guise of an “Army of God” is where the title “pro-life” falls apart.

Thanks to Roe v. Wade, I am lawfully able to provide women a reproductive choice, but until the anti-abortion, “pro-life” culture of violence abates, I will not be able to do so without fearing for my life and the lives of those I love.

Gillian Stoddard Leatherberry, Guest Blogger (’15, Boston University School of Law - Law Students for Reproductive Justice)

This post is part of Blog for Choice, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ).

Also found at bostonreprojustice.blogspot.com

You’ve probably heard about Savita. She recently died of septic shock in Ireland after physicians refused to perform life-saving surgery that may have saved Savita, but would have aborted her fetus. Many women world-wide, like Savita, aren’t lucky enough to have access to legal abortion. Roe means that Savita might have been saved if she had been in the United States when she was in need of life-saving surgery. 

To me, Roe means to me that some women have access to meaningful abortion rights, but this choice is not accessible to everyone , and it doesn’t come without judgment. Contemporary feminists and young women are known for not appreciating our freedom to use contraception and choose abortion. I appreciate it, but I am not satisfied with it alone. One in three women have an abortion in her lifetime. Why does shame and judgment still surround this medical procedure?

Before coming to law school, I volunteered as a clinic escort. The following examples are real scenarios that evidence the success and also the limits of Roe:

•  Walking into the family planning clinic, one clinic patron was approached by anti-choice protesters who asked her why she is giving up her baby and did she know she was killing an innocent life? The patron later told me that that she was outraged by the protesters because her teenage daughter was in the car – her teenage daughter whom the clinic patron had told she had cysts, not that she was at the clinic for an abortion procedure.  Roe means that this woman can have an abortion, but doesn’t mean that her daughter won’t face the same shame if she ever needs an abortion
  
• Many women drive long distances or from out of state to come into abortion clinics. This is probably because most counties in the United States have no access to a family planning clinic. Roe means that women are able to access an abortion symbolically, but not before women must take off work, find a car, and find money to drive to the clinic and have an abortion procedure.
• A young woman who was protesting outside the clinic one day yelled at me, “Don’t you know that having a baby is free?” Roe means that clinic patients can have abortions, but Roe cannot explain to this young woman why having a child and that child’s monetary, emotional and other costs are by no definition “free.”

While Roe legalizes abortion, full access to the procedure and its acceptance aren’t things that the Supreme Court decision created. On this 40^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, abortion rights supporters should be reminded that Roe is necessary to abortion rights, but not sufficient in creating choice for all women.

Daine Stevens, Guest Blogger (’14, UIC-College of Medicine - Medical Students for Choice)

This post is part of Blog for Choice 2013, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ).

Also found at bostonreprojustice.blogspot.com

The 40^th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade is likely to bring as many protests as it brings celebrations. While American culture tends to be liberalizing in its attitudes toward civil rights, those of us in the pro-choice movement find ourselves forced to once again defend positions we thought we’d long ago settled. While the concept of reversing gains and re-instituting a ban on inter-racial marriages, for example, seems utterly absurd, we have seen serious attempts to make contraception more difficult to obtain, to ban abortion outright, or to make abortions de facto illegal, expensive, and professionally risky.

Yet despite the personal, legal, and professional challenges, we can never forget that vacating the rhetorical battleground only strengthens those who seek to ban a woman’s right to choose. Those who seek to end Roe too often resort to violence, threats of violence, and outright lies to advance their position. These threats can cow those who support a woman’s right to choose into silence and secrecy, clearing room for prominent conservatives to openly opine about which rapes should be considered “legitimate” and which ones we shouldn’t be horrified by. While we can take temporary comfort in the defeat of Mississippi’s “personhood amendment” and of such anti-choice blowhards as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, we should also be scared that the margins in Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio weren’t even larger; there’s still much work to be done.

I fully admit that as a future physician I am a biased source. It is patently contrary to medical ethics to force a patient to accept greater physical risk to themselves against their will, and pregnancy is at least 14 times more dangerous than an abortion. Even in cases where another life is at stake—like an innocent child who needs a kidney transplant—the legal structure for forcing a person to submit to medical risk—to forcibly take an organ—simply does not exist. In those so-called compromise positions where exceptions graciously exist in cases of rape and incest, anti-choice advocates presuppose a right to force women to disclose personal details of their sex lives to a body which will then judge them by moral, rather than medical criteria. Nowhere else in medicine, whether in heart disease, COPD, or even sexually transmitted infections, do we ever ask whether a patient is worthy to make their own choices or if they somehow deserve the consequences of their behavior before we grant them medical autonomy.

Abortion can only stay safe, legal, and available as long as we are willing to stand up and defend choice from those who seek to curtail it. Civil rights have moved forward because individuals have met and interacted with those who were affected, and because more people openly defended their rights; pro-choice individuals must come out to their friends and families and stand proud. This year we are celebrating the demise of the back-alley and coat-hanger abortion. Forty years on, our mission is to ensure that we never allow it to go back.

Susan Yanow, Guest Blogger (Consultant to UCSF/ANSIRH, Ibis, Reproductive Health Access Project and Women on Waves/Women on Web, Board of NARAL ProChoice Massachusetts, Board of ACLU of Massachusetts, BSSRJ Advisor)

Jennifer Rosenbaum, Guest Blogger (’15, Boston University School of Medicine, Co-President, Medical Students for Choice)

This post is part of Blog for Choice 2013, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ).

Also found at bostonreprojustice.blogspot.com

Evelyn Atkinson, Guest Blogger (’12, Harvard Law School,  Law Students for Reproductive Justice alum) 

This post is part of Blog for Choice 2013, launched by Boston Students for Sexual and Reproductive Justice (BSSRJ).

Also found at bostonreprojustice.blogspot.com