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Related: About this forumDoes Alabama Abortion Law Make Women Property Again?
Alabama law makers are trying to ban abortion in the state, and with no exceptions to this rule, even the life of the mother is in danger.
Does this new Alabama law make women and those who can get pregnant essentially property again?
Jefferson Smith talks to a woman who had an abortion, about what her life would be like if she had to live through the Alabama law.
Shrike47
(6,913 posts)redstatebluegirl
(12,265 posts)we have always been.....
dawg day
(7,947 posts)From TPM-
> It makes an exception for abortions required to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn childs mother.>
You thought you were a woman, huh? A person? Oh, no, actually you are nothing more than the "unborn child's mother."
dlk
(11,576 posts)They are truly the women haters party.
CousinIT
(9,257 posts)Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm Xs distinction between the house Negro and the field Negro, erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the favorite that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
We dont commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their stock, their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a windowabortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Toms Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: If we could get a breed of gals that didnt care, now, for their young uns would be bout the greatest modrn improvement I knows on, says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewaters argument, which continues thus. If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.
Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendments language is unadorned, so it was left to the political system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant in all particulars. In a series of successive legal cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its badges and incidents, and recognized Congresss power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all [of those] in the United States.
Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholders right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the laws understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.
https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/
Snoopy 7
(528 posts)These are the same people who are taking away the womens ability to control OF NOT getting pregnant. They cheer as migrant children are taken from their parents and stored like wild animals living in cages, sleeping on the ground and god know what they get for food (we are not allowed to see how they are fed). These are also the people who cheer when we go to war "pro life" (?) I think not it's more like PRO DEATH. They are the same who took food, health care, home assistance and education from the "living children". How many of these people do you see fighting for the children they want to see born(?) ZERO. Oh and let's not forget they are "Christian" after all I will never forget when Jesus said: Save thy not born and be damed with them when they see the light of life. If our/your Jesus were here or if they really believed in his teachings life could be a paradise. Instead they believe in the "Prosperity Gospel" in which God gave me wealth so he doesn't like you or he would have give you money. And they leave out the 'man should not honor mama for it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle that for a greedy man to enter Gods kingdom'.
leftyladyfrommo
(18,870 posts)RussBLib
(9,035 posts)although the bible never mentioned abortion, except perhaps when the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, destroyed many thousands of women, pregnant or not. Or when He commanded his "followers" to kill everyone in sight.
Another example of how people have twisted the bible to justify atrocities.