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April 20, 2007
The New Paternalism
Here's a round-up of a few of the best posts I've read so far about the Supreme Court's ruling which eviscerated women's rights.
From Sarah Blustain at TAPPED:
"...Now Kennedy has bought their narrative hook, line, and sinker, writing that it is "self-evident" that "a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she did not know." His twisted remedy, though, is not to ensure that a woman has adequate information; it’s to ensure that she has no option. Her moral judgment is completely eviscerated. "This is," writes Jack Balkin, "the New Paternalism that is now central to the rhetoric of the pro-life movement. Either a woman is crazy when she undergoes an abortion, or she will become crazy later on."
And from Ezra Klein, also at TAPPED:
"...It is hard, in all of this, not to grow increasingly enraged at the makeup of the Court generally and the conservative bloc specifically. Kennedy could theorize all he wanted about female reactions to abortion: Within the group that voted to uphold the ban, there was not one woman. Five men made this decision for 150,000,000 women. Five men obviated the moral judgment of 150,000,000 women. And it is no surprise, surely, that the retirement of the conservative bloc's only female -- O'Connor -- finally permitted the deemphasis of maternal health in abortion cases, and that not one of the conservatives had the humility to retain O'Connor's insight after her exit."
From Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:
"...Dealing with these issues is more than a little weird. The grabbiness around the uterus is disconcerting—when you have one, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to simply accept that it belongs to you. All these weird old men obsessed with laying claim to it is just strange, but then again, I grew up in the shadow of a feminist revolution. My first inclination is to say that it’s mine because I have to, you know, take care of it. I’m the one who has to do the maintenence work on it and I’ve got to carry it around whether I want to or not. Much as I’d like to put it in a box and mail it to Justice Kennedy if he wants it so bad, it’s not like I have much of an option there. But thinking about it, from a sexist point of view, that’s the natural order of things. Men own things and women do the shit work of maintaining male property. Men own houses, women clean them. Men lead churches, but women do all the bake sales. Men make babies, women simply bear and keep them. Men own uteruses, and women have to handle the care and cleaning part...."
And everyone's pointing to this article by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:
As a matter of law, the majority opinion today should have focused exclusively on what has changed since the high court's 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. Stenberg struck down a Nebraska ban that was almost identical to the federal ban upheld today. That's why every court to review the ban found the federal law, passed in 2003, unconstitutional. What really changed in the intervening years was the composition of the court: Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted to strike down the ban in 2000, is gone. Samuel Alito, who votes today to uphold it, is here.
What hasn't changed is that Anthony Kennedy finds partial-birth abortion really disgusting. We saw that in his dissent in Stenberg. That's what animates and drives his decision. His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they'd all refuse to undergo it. Since they aren't, he'll decide for them.
Posted by jnfr at April 20, 2007 09:00 AM