Guest post: How many women will die?
Originally a comment by iknklast on The right to refuse to do your job.
I nearly lost my mother when I was 9 because a Catholic doctor had refused her any contraceptive care – then bawled her out when she got pregnant again. I suppose he felt my mother, a married woman in her mid-30s, had no right to have sexual relations anymore because getting pregnant was dangerous.
For the record, my mother was not, and never had been, Catholic. She was a member of a religion that didn’t go around poking its nose into married people’s bedrooms, though they could be fierce if someone got pregnant outside of marriage.
My mother had five children at the time, ranging in age from 3 to 14. She had decided 5 was enough, but her doctor refused to treat her like she was adult enough to make such decisions for herself. Fortunately, she did manage to survive the 6th pregnancy, but spent the entire time bedridden, with her 7, 9, and 12 year old daughters having to care for her instead of doing 7, 9, and 12 year old things. What if we hadn’t been able to do that?
Also for the record: this doctor did not work for a Catholic hospital or a Catholic clinic. He worked for the United States government. He was a Navy doctor, and the Navy had no rules prohibiting married women from receiving contraceptive care, even surgical. The Supreme Court had already declared that to be a right of married women (which took too damned long, having happened only 4 years before!)
Trump would love for us to go back to a time where women have no say whatsoever over their own reproductive rights. And until the Supreme Court gets rid of those 4 pesky liberal judges who persuade Justice Kennedy to vote with them on not totally knocking out the right to these procedures (though Kennedy does vote to uphold every limitation short of overturning), the best he can do is put in a religious provision that does the same thing in effect for many women.
How many women will die? And who in the Trump administration will give damn? (That last question is rhetorical; the obvious answer is “no one.”)
I want to see a soldier refuse to fight in a campaign based on these new rules. I bet suddenly it won’t be outrageous at all that a person might be “forced to kill against their moral conviction”.
Margot, that’s pretty much the position of the conscientious objector, and society has never treated them very well, never accepted that concept. Many of them were prosecuted if they could not demonstrate convincingly enough for the deciders that their religion forbade them from killing. And if you tried to be a conscientious objector without being Christian – woe be upon you!
I know. My point was, that I sincerely doubt all this talk about allowing people the freedom to follow their morals extends to such inconvenient people as conscientious objectors. And that it would be interesting to see someone defending such objections on the basis of this legislative logic.