How can crude laws serve people’s most intimate medical needs well, unless they affirm each woman’s Fourth Amendment right to privacy and bodily sovereignty?

It is an unfortunate historical fact about our constitutional jurisprudence that these rights have been weakly grounded in a shitty “penumbral” theory instead of strongly in the Ninth Amendment’s clear embrace of the inviolability of unenumerated natural law rights. I have posted about this in the past at my place:

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/repost-constitutional-originalism-natural-law-and-the-ninth-amendment/

Absolutely. Sometimes I feel as though social conservatives treat the world as they would like it to be, rather than as it is. It might be fantastic if women who had babies they didn’t want had all the financial, familial, and practical support in the world and bonded with their babies magically after birth, but the world does not work like that. I’m not completely personally comfortable with abortion b/c I grew up in a socially conservative world but I’m even less comfortable with forcing women to have babies they don’t want. I think there’s a reason they don’t want them and that has to be honored. Those who are concerned with life need to be concerned with the quality of life these children will experience. That quality will not be good if the parents shouldn’t be parents or don’t want to be.

Now, I’m not sure how many women would choose nontreatment over debt, since ectopic pregnancy can kill you (though maybe once you start hemorrhaging, that’s covered?) and, if untreated, will definitely affect your fertility. But it’s a sobering thought.

I doubt very much that women will abandon the Democratic Party in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

But I will be donating to Joe Lieberman to encourage him to filibuster this health care reform. Who cares if his reasons for wanting to wreck it are different than mine? If he has the ability to torpedo it, I’m on board.

We can talk about the many reasonable concerns raised by forced pregnancy without “giving all the important ground away.”

At the same time, just as a straight up feminist, I think we shouldn’t fight back against the “chipping away” approach of the right by saying, “omg, your middle-class right to abort a less than perfect baby is going by the wayside, watch out!” is useful at all. It’s just another version of the “except rape or incest” clause. It’s like, “except rape, or incest, or imperfection”. It opens up another window of leering inspection: were you really raped? isn’t incest not the baby’s fault? how disabled is your baby, anyway? let’s make a chart of “kind of disabled babies” and “really disabled babies” and graph where your kid appears the better to instruct you as to exactly how you should therefore feel about it and how you should respond to it.

It makes the whole thing all about “good babies” vs. “bad babies”, when we need unapologetically to maintain our defensive line at *women*.

Otherwise, the debate becomes about society-at-large’s feelings regarding the fetus: ewww, it’s a rape-baby, an incest-baby, a subpar-baby. It’s absolutely true that none of those factors are the fault of fetuses, and any such “marked” fetus could grow up to Save The Universe (or whatever). That’s not the point, and the more we are debating there the more we’ve already given all the important ground away.