Can we ever win the abortion wars?
The fanatical fringe has hijacked medicine and wrought terror. But there is hope, says the author of a new book By Lynn Harris As jury selection continues in the Wichita, Kan., trial of Scott Roeder -- whose alleged murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was lauded by the extreme antiabortion group Army of God -- the title of sociologist and reproductive rights historian Carole Joffe's new book becomes all the more chillingly apt. In "Dispatches From the Abortion Wars," Joffe shows that the battles over abortion rights in the United States are being "fought on numerous fronts": not only with guns, bombs and fire, and not only in foreign relations, national politics and state legislatures. Antiabortion forces, Joffe writes, also deploy the psychological weapon of antiabortion stigma, a potent contaminant of conscience and community that has led to, among other things, "a chronic shortage of [abortion] providers" and even antiabortion hospital practices "that put women's health at unacceptable risk." (One Onion-esque example: a woman whose deep-vein thrombosis made her too sick for a clinic abortion. She was cleared for a hospital procedure only after much negotiation; there, her OB tried to persuade her to continue her high-risk pregnancy by making her take a tour of the newborn nursery.) Even when we win, we lose, Joffe argues, observing that even preposterous doomed-to-fail "fetal personhood" initiatives, simply by dint of being out in the cultural ether, "reinforce the idea that abortion is a contentious and stigmatizing issue." And all of this is an important thing to remember, today especially, the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Visit salon.com to read the entire article.
|
