If Abortion Were About Equality, Would Americans Like It Better?
If Abortion Were About Equality, Would Americans Like It Better?
It isand thats the problem.
Would abortion rights be more secure today had Roe v. Wade been decided on the basis of womens right to equality rather than privacy? Many smart people have thought so.
A rally on the steps of the Texas Capitol, February 26, 2015. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
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The same people who reject the right of women to control their own bodies also disapprove of womens equality. But would a different Roe have prevented that stagnation? I dont think so. The same people who reject the right of women to control their own bodies also disapprove of womens equality. Look at the backbone of the antiabortion movement: the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, the fundamentalist Protestant churches. They dont believe women are mens equals; they themselves practice female subordination quite energetically. There are, of course, liberal and feminist and atheist anti-choicers, and doubtless many believers too, who would say they believe women are mens equals. But what they usually mean is that women and men have different, equally valuable social roles determined by their reproductive roles. I have never found an abortion opponentand believe me, Ive triedwith a serious program for achieving gender equality in a world in which women are forced to carry every pregnancy to term. Theyre pursuing a different goal: reconnecting sex and reproduction by raising the cost to women of sex for pleasure. Even among the squishy pro-choice majority, that women should have sex like men may be taking equality too far.
Lepore notes that the courts could have used the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, to expand womens rights on equality grounds. Instead, it proved legally sterile. This is a fascinating observation. The right to vote didnt even win women the other rights that came with citizenship for menthe right to serve on juries, for example. The legal victories for womens equality that came in the 1970s were based on the 14th Amendments guarantees of equal protection and due process.
Why was the 19th Amendment the path not taken? If Lepore had asked that question, she might have been led to a depressing conclusion: American jurisprudence didnt build on the 19th Amendment because Americans didnt support the concept of womens equality. Suffrage (which, lets not forget, took 75 years to win) was a one-off. The womens movement is sometimes blamed for grounding abortion rights in privacy, but the fault doesnt lie with it. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the decision, was presented with both pro-equality and pro-privacy arguments. He preferred privacy. Not only did it fit in better with traditional ideas about women being sheltered within the family; it also fit in better with Blackmuns concern for the right of doctors to treat their patients as they thought best.
Privacy has fallen out of favor with feminists, but Americans have a real tradition of respect for the individual versus government intrusion. It appeals to both liberals and conservatives, and connects naturally with individualism, libertarianism, civil liberties, and what Justice Brandeis called the right to be left alone. The tradition of womens equality is much shallower: Even when the womens movement was at high tide, we could not win passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Indeed, I would argue that its precisely because the right to abortion is a necessary guarantor of gender equality that it has attracted so much hostility. Those who say that privacy doesnt cover the right to kill your baby also say that if killing your baby is what you need to be equal, youll just have to lead the lesser life.
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http://www.thenation.com/article/if-abortion-were-about-equality-would-americans-like-it-better/
marble falls
(57,172 posts)niyad
(113,527 posts)PicturingPolitics
(12 posts)Hestia
(3,818 posts)for women, who finally had access to the Constitution. Voting rights doesn't guarantee that but Roe does. It is through Roe that women had access to their own credit for the time and could legally use their own name Jane Roe instead of Mrs. John Roe.
niyad
(113,527 posts)malthaussen
(17,216 posts)At best, we pay lip-service to it, but my experience has been that for the most part people who are part of the power structure already want freedom and equality for themselves and their homies only. They may couch it in universal terms, but when the time comes to enforce institutional behavior, it's all about exclusivity and perpetuating the status quo.
-- Mal
niyad
(113,527 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)why the typical conservative supports lower taxes for the wealthy than for themselves -- it's only right. In general, cons tend to believe that the more wealth one has accumulated the more deserving one is likely to be overall. And vice versa for people at the other end of the ladder. Social scientists see this as a manifestation of "belief in a just world." Some even occasionally refer to conservatives as BJWs, because it's such a strong factor in the behavior of strong conservatives.
BTW, I think the more moderate conservative and liberal parts of our population would to well to understand these differences so that they can value their importance to the nation our founding fathers envisioned. And so that they do not blame themselves as "Americans" for directions society has taken that they really would not have chosen. To help us all understand the job we have to do.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)This reality is something most abortion proponents refuse to address. When is a fetus/unborn child "equal" and endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
As for "Americans" being for equality, we now know that a basic difference between the liberal and conservative mind is in attitude toward equality. Conservatives tend to regard various degrees of inequality as part of the natural order and to be tampered with only at great risk to society. As long as they're not actually suffering personally, they have no problem with supporting super-privileged classes of their socioeconomic superiors, as well as benefiting in turn from the problems of their socioeconomic inferiors.
If our founding fathers had mostly been conservatives, the Declaration of Independence would never have included that line about all men being created equal -- something many conservatives consider not only just plain silly, but potentially destructive to a naturally just world.
niyad
(113,527 posts)anything else is cant from the woman-hating gestational slavers, period.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Response to niyad (Original post)
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