What about the children?

Stanley - Thursday

This week's leak of a draft opinion from the US Supreme Court indicating the likelihood of Roe v Wade being severely curtailed or even overturned made me think of the few anti-abortion friends I have who have never adequately answered my normal questions: 'What about the children who are born unwanted? What do you propose to support them?' 

Instead of writing about it myself, I'm going to reproduce an entire opinion piece in The Washington Post by columnist Michele L Norris entitled The GOP roars about abortion. Then they abandon the children. It conveys my thoughts far better than I can.

What about the children?

For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?

Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.

The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.

Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.

“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book The Turnaway Study. “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”

A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.

The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.

Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.

The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.

The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.

That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.

What is happening sickens me. The 'great experiment' is failing.

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Upcoming events:

Crimefest in Bristol:

THURSDAY, 12 MAY, 15.50 – 16.40
A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A REST: WRITING MORE THAN ONE SERIES
* M.J. Lee
* Douglas Lindsay
* Michael Stanley
* T E Kinsey 
Participating Moderator: Michael Ridpath

 

FRIDAY, 13 MAY, 12:30 - 13:20
DIVIDED SOCIETY: HATE CRIMES AND SOCIAL FACTORS
* Kia Abdullah
* Antony Dunford
* Sarah Sultoon
* Holly Watt

Participating Moderator: Michael Stanley

FRIDAY, 13 MAY, 16:00 – 16:50
ITW: THRILLING FOR A LIVING
* Alison Bruce 
* Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
* Alex Shaw
* Michael Stanley

Participating Moderator: Zoë Sharp 

The Victorious KBJ

Kwei--Wednesday 

History in the making

The Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson (KBJ) is poised to make history as the first African American woman on the Supreme Court. Let it not go unsaid that since its first sitting in February 1790, of the 115 justices who have served at the Court, 110 (95.7%) have been men, and all but seven of them have been white men. Two (0.017%) have been black men (Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas), and four (0.035%) have been women: Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett (after the death of Ginsburgh), but there has never been a black woman. The Supreme Court has largely been the territory of white males, who typically don’t like sharing privilege with people who don’t look like them.

After President Biden nominated Judge KBJ, an outcry rose in some senatorial circles that “the president shouldn’t be considering race as a criterion for nomination to the Court.” The source of this pedantic objection? White men. The laughable irony of this statement was apparently lost on them: What, if anything, has the Supreme Court been but a twisted affirmative action program for white men? So, yes, this is a nomination of huge historical importance in the United States.

Diversity is important

When confirmed, Judge KBJ will come to the SCOTUS with some of the same qualifications of the other justices: she graduated (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law, as did Breyer, Roberts, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, while Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh studied at Yale. However, she is the only judge among them to have served as a public defender. That experience gives her a broader outlook on not only the American justice system, but the injustice system. Writes Laura Coates, a former prosecutor, "Public defenders are not soft on crime — they are hard on injustice. In a country where race and bias are far too frequently elevated above fairnesenders are the welcome foil to balance the system.”

It’s true that Jackson won’t significantly tip the 6-3 conservative-progressive imbalance on the Court, but think of the effect her assenting and dissenting opinions will have on people’s thinking. It could be a subtle shift, but one of a kind never seen by SCOTUS before,https://www.cnn.com/profiles/laura-coates regardless of the Court makeup.

Equanimity under duress

If you weren’t able to catch Judge-soon-to-be-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, then you missed a master class in how to hold one’s position in the face of enemy fire. To use a regrettable analogy, the mostly white Senators of the Judiciary Committee are Russia, and the KBJ is Ukraine.

The likes of Josh “Hypocrite" Hawley and Lindsay “Grandstand" Graham launched missiles at KBJ that either missed their target or were shot down by KBJ herself or by Democratic members attending the hearing.

Apparently flummoxed Josh Hawley questions Hon KBJ (Image: msn.com)

The MO of the Republicans was to set up a false-flag operation--the assertion that KBJ is “soft on crime” and has too much “empathy” for child pornographers. The basis of the accusation is the claim that the judge has historically displayed “a consistent pattern of giving child porn offenders lighter sentences,” as Sen. Marsha Blackburn said. But some fact-checking shows that this is not accurate. Jackson’s sentences in five of the seven cases mentioned by Hawley were consistent with, or above, probation’s recommendation. In two, Jackson’s sentences were below the government and probation’s recommendations. Hawley conveniently left out another seven cases KBJ sat on, in two of which her sentences were consistent with the prosecutors’ plea agreements.

But let’s not get distracted by the details. These odious, bloviating men were making an accusation and forming an opinion based on a false or unproven premise. If they had queries about her sentencing “methodology" (KBJ’s word), then ask her without presupposing a notion which, on its face, is highly unlikely. After all, KBJ is a mother, she has two daughters, and she asserted this clearly during the hearing. Members of the American Bar Association (ABA) panel that investigated Judge KBJ's legal record rejected GOP claims that she has been soft on child pornography offenders.

Personal observations

• Compared to the self-centered, entitled antics of then-nominee Brett Cavanaugh, played brilliantly by Matt Damon in a must-see skit on SNL, KBJ was as serene as a clear-water stream in a verdant forest.
• Up against Jackson, Ted Cruz looked like a clown (my apologies to professional clowns), particularly with his absurd posters.
• Judging from the looks on some of Jackson’s attackers, particularly frat-boy Josh Hawley, it’s quite possible they were having difficult time following Jackson's reasoning, because, well, she's probably a lot brighter than they are. I liken it to an amateur tennis player lobbing a ball to Rafael Nadal and not even seeing the return for its blistering speed.
• None of these white males know what it’s like to be constantly doubted as a black woman, constantly having to excel beyond what is conventionally required of white men, and shrug off the slights directed at her every day.
• The bottom line: in the battle of boorishness and ignorance against steadiness of character and courage of conviction, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was victorious.

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