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BOSTON -- Maybe this picture isn't worth a thousand words. That honor
probably belongs to the flight deck portrait of the president under
the sign "Mission Accomplished." Maybe the presidential
photo op now flying around the Internet and soon to be available on
your local T-shirt is only worth 750 words.
The picture shows the president surrounded by an all-male chorus line
of legislators as he signs the first ban on an abortion procedure.
It's a single-sex class photo of men making laws governing something
they will never have: a womb.
This was not just a strategic misstep, a rare Karl Rove lapse. It
perfectly reflected the truth of the so-called partial-birth abortion
law. What's wrong with this picture? The legislators had indeed
erased women. They used the law as if it were Photoshop software, to
crop out real women with real problems.
Indeed, just days after the shutter snapped, three separate courts
ordered a temporary halt to the ban on these very grounds: It doesn't
have any exemption for the health of a women.
This is what brings me back, kicking and screaming, to the subject of
abortion. I don't want to write about this. Like most Americans, I
want the abortion debate to end. I want abortion to be safe and rare.
That's safe and rare. And early.
Over the years, I've rejoiced at sonograms and picked names for what
we call a baby when it's wanted and a fetus when it isn't. I'm aware
that medicine has put the moment of viability on a collision course
with the moment of legal abortion. And I am also aware that not every
pregnancy goes well, that sometimes families face terrible, traumatic choices.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans have been convinced by a public
relations coup that this new law bans only a fringe and outrageous
procedure. But the refusal to include an exception for the health of
a pregnant woman takes this from the fringe to the heart of the
debate. It's a deliberate, willful first strike at some of the most
vulnerable women, those who need medical help the most.
The moment the anti-abortion leaders invented the term
"partial-birth abortion," they made women invisible. The
cartoon figures shown at congressional debates were, literally,
drawings of a headless womb holding a perfect Gerber baby of some six
or more months.
As Priscilla Smith, legal director of the Center for Reproductive
Rights, said, "they turned the argument from the right of a
woman to have an abortion to the reasons women have abortions."
And then they declared those reasons to be frivolous.
The headless womb belonged to a generic woman who, as one opponent
said, would get an abortion to fit into a prom dress. She would carry
a pregnancy for months and then casually flip a coin between birth
and an abortion "inches from life."
Time and again, abortion-rights supporters said they too would vote
for the ban if opponents recognized that some pregnancies go terribly
awry for the fetus or the woman and that some doctors found this
procedure safest. But anti-abortion forces simply declared -- against
the evidence of the AMA or the American College of Obstetrics and
Gynecology -- that it was never medically necessary.
Some years ago, when President Clinton vetoed a similar bill, he was
surrounded by women. These women had been through pregnancies that
came with words like hydrocephalus and polyhydramnia, and came with
risks like hysterectomies. But the men around Bush see a health
exception as a giant loophole. They believe a woman would leap
through this loophole to get to the prom.
Behind this is simply a mistrust of women as moral decision-makers. A
mistrust so profound that their health is now in the hands of the
courts. Not long ago, the Supreme Court ruled by exactly one vote
that a law similar to this one violated the Constitution.
This should be a wake-up call to young women, because it's their
health at risk, their role as moral decision-makers disparaged.
The most reliable supporters of abortion rights today are women over
50. It is, ironically, post-menopausal women who still lead the
struggle to keep abortion legal for younger women. Everyone will tell
you that the younger generation simply doesn't remember a time when
abortion was illegal. They can't believe that it will ever be illegal
again. How many believe they could be among those who need it?
Days before signing this ban, the president tried to reassure voters
that it wasn't the time to "totally ban abortions." But
young women should put this picture up on their desktops. The folks
in that photo op don't trust you. They don't even see you.
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