Right to Self-determination includes women's right to abortion

An editorial by Laura Stewart

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The Unites States Supreme Court ruled that a parent cannot be forced to give up a kidney to save a child. Similarly, no one can be compelled to donate a kidney. Furthermore, we cannot be compelled to donate our organs at death or to donate blood white living. The government similarly has no right to take over my uterus.

Whoever controls reproductive rights controls the propogation of our species. In 1800, abortion was legal in this country. When the rise of the women's movement in the middle of that century brought calls for "voluntary motherhood"--a woman's legal right to decline sex with her husband if she is ill--the anti-abortion laws struck down by Roe v. Wade were enacted. The 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade placed abortion within the protected privacy of the patient-doctor relationship.

The greatest topic avoided by anti-abortion proponents is the dangerous nature of pregnancy, As we are an industrialized nation, our rate of maternal death, about one in 50, is one of the lowest in the world. The maternal death rate is reduced by legal abortion in the case of a complicated pregnancy. Self-determination is the right to decide whether to risk death.

What does one say to the 11-year old who was raped by her father and is dying from the resulting pregnancy because the law says she cannot abort? Or to the woman condemned to sterility because she could not abort a terminally ill fetus? Or to the families of teenagers who stab themselves to death with coat hangers because abortion is illegal and an illegitimate child is the equivalent of social suicide?

The anti-abortion argument concerns itself solely with the issue of fetal life. When is a human being a human? (I say it is a human when it is a separate being.) The argument that, at conception, a one-cell zygote is the equivalent of the woman within which that cell resides, is not logical reasoning. That cell possesses DNA like the woman but not the integrity of a body. It has the blueprints but no building. In order for the zygote to develop into a human, to build a body, it needs more than nutrients and time. It must attach itself to the uterine lining and develop a placenta. The placenta supplies nutrients, oxygen, and immunities, as well as a means of waste disposal. Oftentimes, the woman can become ill due to these wastes, especially if the fetus has a blood type different from her own. In essence, the fetus develops by parasitic means.

Anti-abortion literature avoids recognizing the drain and ill-effects pregnancy has on a woman. They refer to her as a "container" or "uterine vessel," as if she were plastic. The fetus is a "little tyke" or an "aquanaut," as if it were on a voyage of discovery in the sea, rather than a uterus at all. Those women who have abortions are referred to as "empty houses where a child has died."

Third-trimester abortion is mostly prohibited; the greatest exception is those instances in which a fetus is terminal. If the woman is in danger, than an emergency Caesarean section is performed. The majority of abortions are first-trimester, which are medical procedures achieved through drugs. Surgical abortions begin to be used in the second trimester, and here anti-abortionists have latched onto "late-term" abortion as the weak link. For instance, Brian Tenney wrote a commentary (February 24 issue of The Point News), denouncing something called "partial-birth abortion," which does not exist. Anyone who uses this terminology is looking for shock-effect, rather than appealing to reason. He or she is also being blatant in his or her ignorance. I shudder at the thought of such stupidity even being considered as a bill of law.

Examining what Mr. Tenney wrote, I think he was referring to a procedure called dilation and extraction (D&X), which is only one of the methods of surgical abortion. In a D&X, inches in or out of a woman's vagina do not matter for a fetus incapable of breathing. Furthermore, most D&X abortions are performed on fatally deformed fetuses, who are lacking such things as brains or skulls, or on fetuses that are already dead.

Viability is largely embraced by the pro-life movement as a person, moral point at which to consider the fetus as an individual. I do not think it is logical to base life legally on this point. It is not because the point of viability will continue to drop, for it will not. By the use of incubators and drugs, we have already reached that point--the division of second and third trimesters--where the lungs gain the ability to process oxygen. before that point no fetus will survive outside the woman' uterus.

There are vast legal complications with the anti- abortion movement's proposed "Human Life Amendment." The simultaneous defense of the death penalty not withstanding, if a fetus is "alive" in the sense that it is an individual, it is accountable for the results of its actions, even if they are accidental. For instance, any fetus whose term of pregnancy resulted in maternal fatality would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter, in the least. Also, if a husband sues for custody of the fetus and wins, is he or the fetus then responsible for damages in the civil court awarded to the mother because of injury?

A Human Life Amendment would grant a fetus what its proponents fought against the Equal Rights Amendment to deny women constitutional recognition of a fetus' rights. The championed "parental rights" would be invalidated by any such amendment, and the government will be established as the supreme authority in the family.

My right of self-determination justifies every reproductive choice I make. I have already dealt with the morality of having an abortion and know when I would or would not have one. I have earned the right of supreme ruler over my uterus. I rule every graphic inch and change of my body, for none other suffers these things like me, especially not Mr. Tenney, who has never had a menstrual period in his life. If I were ever to lose control of my uterus, then I propose that we find out which needy person would benefit from the forced donation of one of Mr. Tenney's kidneys. Leave my uterus alone; I'll leave your kidney alone. Think about that.

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This article was written by Laura Ann Stewart, freshman at St. Mary's College of Maryland. It was printed in the March 10, 1998 issue of the college's newspaper, The Point News.

"The government... has no right to take over my uterus."

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