By Larry Durstin
Back in 1998 when I was editor of the Cleveland Tab alternative newspaper, we conducted endorsement meetings with the area’s political candidates. Running against U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich that year was Republican Joe Slovenec, an anti-abortion zealot affiliated with Randall Terry’s radical Operation Rescue group.
The main purpose of Slovenec’s campaign was to advocate what has come to be called Personhood – then a relatively obscure policy that was far removed from the anti-choice mainstream – which stated that the fertilized egg was a person and therefore any abortion at any time after conception would be murder. In addition, Slovenec asserted in his literature that under this doctrine certain forms of birth control also should be banned.
During the interview I asked him who would be punished for an abortion and he said it would be only the doctor, knowing that this exemption from murder charges against the mother was a political ploy to not enrage the electorate. I was having none of that and basically called him a fraud because it was the woman who sought out the doctor and presented him the opportunity to have her “person” murdered, yet she would receive no punishment. Slovenec, who also billed himself as some sort of reverend, muttered something about God handling the details. Then I asked him if a mother brought her day-old infant to the doctor and allowed him to murder the child, would she be punished or left to walk free? And what was the difference between that and having an abortion?
He had no answer to that, nor did he respond to my question as to what would be done to the individual who drove the mother to the doctor’s office and the friends or neighbors who knew about the impending murder yet let it happen anyway. Would they be treated as accessories to murder? He got up and began to leave after I said that if I believed as he did, I would hope that I had the guts to act with more honesty and send women to prison in order to stop the slaughter. As he walked out the door, I wondered out loud how he could live with himself for proposing to allow so many murderous mothers to get off Scott free.
As an aging hippie, I’ve been battling with the extreme element of the anti-choice movement (which used to be a scant a minority of all the so-called pro-lifers) for nearly four decades. I’ve been in the trenches with them and can tell you that it’s no place for the faint of heart. And as witness the escalating extremism of the Republican Party regarding this issue (no exceptions, even for the life of the mother), the struggle to keep abortion legal is still raging and requires eternal vigilance. Which is why the recent comments by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin about Personhood and “legitimate rape” are useful in exposing what has been a relatively clandestine effort by the GOP over the last few decades to systematically chip away at abortion rights.
The Republicans have gotten a lot of political mileage over the past 30 years by throwing red meat to the hardcore anti-abortion crowd while the Dems have remained somewhat timid on this issue, kind of fiddling while Rome burned. The only exception to this was the 1992 election, which took place following two turbulent years that saw the Supreme Court’s Webster decision (which placed significant restrictions on the right to choose and unmasked the Religious Right’s efforts to eviscerate Roe) and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, a considerable part of which focused on Thomas’s position on abortion. These events woke up the dormant pro-choice movement and resulted in the election of Bill Clinton and produced the so-called “Year of the Woman.”
But after that, religious crusaders within the GOP kicked their offensive into gear and began focusing on taking over state legislatures, getting anti-abortion federal judges appointed and introducing incremental restrictions to abortions that to the casual observer appeared to be harmless enough. Now, however, they’ve really turned up the heat with Personhood bills and extreme legislation like the one in Virginia that would require a woman to receive an unnecessary and invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion – a practice that has been called “legal rape” by its critics.
Of course, the dirty little secret of the GOP is that the last thing the vast majority of its members and leaders want is abortion to be made illegal. They don’t want total victory. They want the issue to remain urgent in order to continually stoke up parts of the base but wisely realize that an overturn of Roe would likely release the pro-choice hounds which – coupled with the demographic advantage the Dems have among growing minority groups – could reduce the Republican Party to a minority status for a long time.
Now, however, Akin’s bizarre comments and the revelations about how numerous other Republicans share his “legitimate rape” views have ripped open the scab for all to see the ugly underbelly of this allegedly righteous movement that purports to be doing God’s work. Speaking of the Almighty, and with all due respect to the transcendent nature of faith and its immense value to billions of people, my message to the Personhood crowd is: Don’t bring your personal religious opinions, biases, theories, superstitions, beliefs, notions or whatever-you-want-to-call-them to the public square with the goal of codifying them for the entire population. America is not a theocracy.
In my view, the most important social issue facing America today is keeping abortion legal. By criminalizing it, not only would a maze of legal questions surface as to whom should be put in jail but, more importantly, by taking away a woman’s control over her reproductive system a major step would be made toward a more restrictive, patriarchal society. A huge part of women’s ascension in every area of our culture dates back to the progress made in the ’60s and ’70s, much of it due to the availability of contraception and the legalization of the right to choose. Criminalizing abortion (and limiting or eliminating contraception) would profoundly impact women’s lives and severely limit their capacity to manage their families and/or careers. It would, of course, play right into the hands of this country’s religious fundamentalists who – like the Taliban – love their women pregnant and subordinate.
That’s why the vast majority of Americans who do not want to criminalize abortion must rise and stop this Personhood madness. If they don’t, there very well could be hell to pay for all of us.
[Photo: Elvert Xavier Barnes Photography]
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com
6 Responses to “Personhood Debate Brings GOP Chickens Home to Roost”
Leoncefalo
There is nothing wrong with repealing the corporate personhood in Citizens United, but the debate about personhood at conception is STILL a can of worms, and it must be dealt with in a rational manner that is fair to the pregnant mother FIRST, and then to the unborn child.
One of the ways to legislate this fairly is to enact no abortions, except for the health of the mother, AFTER the first trimester(10 weeks actually). Biologically, there is no brain until the 7th or 8th week(verify) and this can be moved to fit the physical realities of unborn and deformed or diseased foeti that have no hope of cure or therapeutic rehab. Otherwise the hideous partial birth abortions performed in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters are legal murder. This is a feeling being that must be protected because it is, by definition, a human being, albeit unborn and defenseless. The mother and all accomplices are liable for manslaughter charges after the 10th week, unless for one of the reasons above stated.
There must be a middle ground here that acknowledges some physical and moral responsibilities, and it is these details that will make the abortion issue a ‘reasonable’ issue aside from the hysteria it now evokes among religious groups. The government has NO compelling interest to assist in healthcare abortions because it is not only a secular issue but a moral one as well. Someone has not been paying attention, because either the religious right is screaming too loud, or pregnant women are being ill-advised about their options to natural birth. The female body suffers extensive physical and psychological damage after an abortion, and must be considered in the formula for determining the cutoff date for legal abortions.
Larry Durstin
Sounds reasonable enough
Terry L. Halfacre
The political debate on this issue is as scary (if not scarier) than Mr. Durstin has layed out. With the Governor of Arizona recently signing into law a bill that defines pregnancy as “two weeks before conception”, there seems to be no limits this group will go to attack and subordinate women. With the Republicans recent attacks on women’s rights, access to healthcare, the demonization of education, etc. etc., I think the term I heard on HBO’s “The Newsroom” fits – the American Taliban.
IndyCA35
Why is it that all the unemployed journalists in the world have to be left-wing?
Anastasia P
Leoncefaro, almost everything you propose is far from “reasonable middle ground” and is in fact more capitulation to the the religious beliefs of those on the right — beliefs which have no place in legislation. Disallowing any abortions after the first trimester would put an absurdly heavy burden on women and is very close to the unprecedentedly harsh and punitive “heartbeat” bill which fantasizes that being able to hear a heartbeat somehow endows a fetus with personhood. That too is a religious BELIEF, which has no place in legislation. Way too many women, especially those not planning or expecting to get pregnant, don’t begin to realize they are pregnant until the second or third month — and all the obstacles that have been erected to push us far to the right would take a woman well beyond the first trimester.
There is no such thing as a “partial birth” abortion, “hideous” or otherwise. This is a non-medical political term created by the right to help them demonize the idea of later term abortions, virtually ALL of which are performed in tragic circumstances on women who desperately want babies but whose pregnancy has gone wrong. The obstacles that have been erected for these women represent to me the cruelest and most invasive use of government power run amok. These decisions should be strictly between the woman and the doctor. The woman who decides in the 8th month that having a baby will interfere with her partying is a fantasy, a bogeyman dreamed up by anti-choice extremists.
The idea that the “female body” (very telling language) suffers physical and psychological damage after an abortion that benevolent anti choicers just want to protect the poor, air-headed little dingbat from doing to herself has been completely debunked over and over. This patronizing argument was cooked up as another line of attack by the anti-choice movement when it felt it was losing on other grounds and needed to sound like it really, really didn’t loathe women. But of course it’s completely clear that childbirth is far more physically damaging, and the psychological damage charge is apocryphal. Just as many women likely regret having children as having an abortion; many women report relief as their strongest emotion after an abortion. Remember we are dealing with UNWANTED pregnancy here, and forcing a woman to give birth in many cases won’t make the child any more wanted — a problem for both woman and child.
The only “reasonable” middle ground is for government to butt out. The government does NOT “assist” in abortions but neither should it interfere in any way with a woman’s choice about whether and when she wants to have a child, especially in the current climate when the same men who worship fetuses want to create a country in which it is infinitely more difficult to raise a healthy, educated child.
I will always completely support the right of any religious person who believes a fetus is a person not to have an abortion. But that person needs to support the right of women who do not believe as they do to make choices of their own. THAT is to me the only “middle ground.”
God
Good points Mr.Durstin…DOUBLE edged sword thou..IS sad when poo gal reaches point were goes to a abortion doc..PARTIAL birth IS A *$*@ to see…vs.tiny blob of whutever…CAN see WHY folks get MORE *$*@ about THAT…which gets into HOW society treats its own far as medico care to rest of it n quite frankly considering BAD shoddy GOP track record…wha is the saying..THIER concern ends when kid born…