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Viewpoint: ‘Choose life’ means fighting for reproductive rights

I’m wondering if the Christo Fascists have fully thought out the consequences of forced birth and imposing Sharia-law like proscriptions on secular life. I wonder if they have fully comprehended the impact of effectively ending the concept of public health by allowing soulless corporations that people depend upon for health insurance to opt out of paying for preventive care like vaccinations, HIV medication, contraception. Indeed, have they contemplated the impact of banning contraception altogether on top of ending sex education in public schools and replacing it with religion-based “abstinence”? (Good luck with that).

They might diabolically imagine that forcing every woman and child to give birth might result in more subjects for their flock and more voters for their “team”, and lots and lots of cheap labor, but the opposite could unfold.

Or they may salivate at the prospect of these baby factories producing inventory for adoption. There are presently 407,000 children in foster care, 9,100 in orphanages but only 135,000 children are adopted each year. And there is a cost to society in maintaining them.

And since Americans seem to be obsessed with “economic” issues – inflation in the cost of eggs and gas – more than their fundamental rights, well, abortion is an economic issue, a genuine kitchen-table issue.

Who will pay for the neonatal care, the delivery, the post-natal care, or will people just be forced to fend for themselves? Giving birth costs $18,865 on average, including pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Family Foundation Health System Tracker. And what of a difficult pregnancy, when too many of these women don’t even have the cash to travel out of state to obtain a legal abortion?

How many mothers will die in childbirth, leaving their living children motherless? How many teenagers will be forever harmed, perhaps rendered infertile or permanently disabled? How many women, forced to undergo pregnancy until they are at death’s door, may survive but suffer permanently? How many single mothers will fall into poverty – the image in “Les Mis” comes to mind.

And how many women will see their lifetime earnings, their Social Security (if the Republicans don’t take that away altogether), their pensions suffer, the lack of resources the family has to provide for their children – to go to college, for example.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found in 2021 (before the fall of women’s constitutional reproductive rights) that restrictive abortion laws cost state and local economies $105 billion annually by reducing labor force participation and earnings while also increasing time off and turnover among women ages 15 to 44 years old. Now multiply that for federal taxes and the GDP. Now multiply over a lifetime.

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Society will be deprived of the productivity, creativity, innovation of those who are forced to give birth, whose ability to fulfill their own life’s goals are curtailed (no different than when women were barred from voting and jobs). Their progeny, so many of whom will not have the resources or loving attention, may well go on to become burdens on society – not just in health care costs, but may well become the mass murderers and criminals that gun activists insist are the product of bad parenting rather than the easy access to weapons. How many of these unwanted children will be abandoned (there are more of those century-old baby boxes being put at churches and firehouses)?

It is not a coincidence that the (red) states where abortion bans are most extreme also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality, poorest health care, poorest public education, poorest everything. Most have even refused to adopt Obamacare and expanded Medicaid. Because their interest is simple: punish the vulnerable, because they can. The Republicans are even out, yet again, to repeal the Affordable Care Act which. enabled tens of millions to access health insurance. Cruelty and control is the feature, not the bug.

Young women now have to take into account what states they will apply to college or pursue jobs, what employers they can work for – in effect, cutting off opportunity.

What about the cost of prosecuting these new crimes? “Concerns about women’s liberty during a pregnancy aren’t theoretical. Already, between 2006 and 2020, more than 1,300 women have been prosecuted for their actions during pregnancy, according to the data from NAPW,” Sophia Bush writes in Glamour, Why the Right to an Abortion Matters. States including Texas have even proposed a death penalty for women who obtain abortion. (Not even the Parkland mass murderer got the death penalty.)

“Our right to reproductive choice is fundamental to our democracy, so much so that one of the societal changes that signifies a backsliding democracy, one of the surefire things that happens anywhere when equality is being chipped away, is the rollback of the rights of women, and particularly those relating to bodily autonomy. Without reproductive choice, we have no autonomy,” Bush says.

But if you want to insist someone else’s religious “freedom” has more validity that yours or your own civil rights, Jews are standing up for woman’s right to life as a religious tenet.

“On this Yom Kippur we challenge this assault to our rights and our faith by heeding the call at the core of this sacred day. ‘I have set before you life and death, choose life, that you may live’. Yes we challenge this ruling by choosing life – that phrase so closely associated with antiabortion activists does not belong to them,’” Rabbi Sara Y. Sapadin declared in her gripping Yom Kippur sermon at Temple Emanuel in New York City.

 

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