Most Americans recognize the impact the Court's opinion on Roe v. Wade could have on women's health care and reproductive rights, even if it is more about wealth inequality, misogyny, and racism. The political economy of care will be even more a contested territory.
Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality. Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all circumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be imposed.
Reproductive rights are economic rights. The latest negation of abortion rights is also about making borders between US states like those between nations. This is the problem of federalism and yet reproductive rights are like interstate commerce no different than the Mann Act. For example, surrogacy contracts are considered a form of child trafficking. The legal space that voids women’s healthcare especially in family planning is also a space compressed for right-wing political concentration of power supported by theocratic ideologies. Human rights are not or have never been protected equally in the American polity.
Commercial surrogacy and birth tourism drive the forced birth discourse into what it’s always been, population programs driven by ideology serving misogynist, racist, and classist goals, but primarily about profit.
The GOP proposing household suffrage to delimit women’s rights is where Handmaid’s Tale becomes narrativized as recruitment for right-wing traditionalist power and dominionist hegemony.
Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, earlier advocated for 'household voting' in which a husband would 'get the final say.’ (a head-of- household voting system has historically barred women and people of color from casting ballots.). This resembles the proportional voting used to disenfranchise popular voting with the electoral college and using legislatures to “represent” the popular will with GOP majority state legislatures. See the 1887 Electoral Count Act and the 1877 compromise for the election of 1876.
In the US, foundling hospitals are the equivalent of the medieval “baby hatches” used to transfer unwanted babies to some care-giving institution. Their history combines the civic role of natal care with public health. The prohibitions against extramarital relations, the taboos of incest, and care for the poor are a means of religious recruitment and conversion. Its infrastructure comes with the infrastructure of baby hatch architecture, foundling hospitals, all part of a paramedical informal economy of public health.
Cultural reproduction is literal and figurative basing its rituals in the social construction of its rituals connected to familial wealth. There childbirth is trauma and stigmatizing, celebrated and vilified depending on its cultural position, incentivized in tax policy and subsidized in foster care. Ultimately it is a measure of wealth yet negated in the national accounts as women’s domestic labor.
What happens when Ukrainian refugees cross the Polish border will soon happen when American women pass between states in the US:
“If women in need of abortion pills cross the border, it really depends who they are met by,” she says. “If it is someone progressive, feminist, then they’ll be able to put them in touch with right people. But if it is some random man, or someone religious, then no way. They’ll either not care or they’ll say it is God’s angel and you need to keep it.”
#CorpBias Amid border surge, Biden admin plans to send migrants to cities deeper inside U.S., starting with L.A., say documentshttps://t.co/AnAAw25AE8 8 Jun 2022 DHS officials have jokingly referred (it) as the "Abbott plan"#MAGA #FinishTheWall qt-maga-2702 #BorderObserver pic.twitter.com/mvhamudmvm
Women's health care is not separate from Health Care - it is integral to it. R eproductive rights are an economic issue. There's a growing body of research suggesting a link between access to abortion and women's economic stability.
Considering reproductive health to be separate from all other health care and ignoring the ways reproductive health impacts physical and economic wellbeing is sexist, classist, and racist.
At the same time, we must guarantee access to reproductive rights as key to economic opportunity for women with low incomes. Abortion in the US has become concentrated among poor women. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 42% of women having abortions are living below the federal poverty line.
This decision will cause immediate economic pain in 26 states where abortion bans are most likely and where people already face lower wages, less worker power, and limited access to health care . The fall of Roe will be an additional economic barricade.
Abortion rights are economic rights, and this decision means the loss of economic security, independence, and mobility for abortion seekers. Low- and middle-income people, especially Black and Brown women, will bear the brunt of the impact.
Here's where abortions will likely be banned or strictly limited post Roe https://t.co/Uk3sjGiREc
Abortion deserts are no different than food deserts, they have an income gradient. I may volunteer to help drive. It’s not just about travel, it’s also about sovereignty and full faith & credit as some states may try to prosecute citizens who travel to get abortions in addition to the possibility of Stasi-like bounties for snitching on such travelers. The right-wing truly wants to reverse modernity by centuries.
America's Interstate Slave Trade Once Trafficked Nearly 30,000 People a Year—And Reshaped the Country's Economy
Millions of Americans will soon find themselves in abortion deserts, meaning they will have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to access the medical procedure https://t.co/mcGjFjF0Ho
The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.
Similarly, it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.
If Justice Alito wants you to be governed by the laws of the 17th century, you should take a close look at that century. Is that when you want to live?
Since we are talking about The Handmaid's Tale, let's not forget Amy Coney Barrett once held the title of "handmaid" in the People of Praise Christian group. So I am not surprised she wants women to have more babies for a "domestic supply of infants."https://t.co/foGwaz3uXt pic.twitter.com/LCifwOQD5f
(2015) Beth Anderson earns extra income renting out her womb to infertile couples who dream of becoming parents—a mutually beneficial arrangement, as she sees it. "I really, really like being pregnant," she says. "They need help, it's something I want do, and it's a way for me to make a little bit of extra money."
But these types of arrangements are outlawed in many states. In Oklahoma, for example, surrogacy contracts are considered a form of child trafficking. In Michigan, surrogates face five years in jail and up to $50,000 in fines.
(2013) A world that commodifies and uses women — whether as sexual objects or reproductive commodities — is not a world worth fighting for.
LOPEZ : Does surrogacy really commodify women? Or is that just rhetoric to scare people?
SLOAN : Surrogacy is a stark manifestation of the commodification of women and their bodies. Surrogate services are advertised, surrogates are recruited, and surrogacy agencies make enormous profits. The commercialism of surrogacy raises the specter of a black market and baby selling, of breeding farms a la The Handmaid’s Tale. Surrogacy reduces a pregnancy to a service for sale and a baby to a product — an “entitlement” for those with the financial means to buy one.
Experience shows that, like any other commercial transaction, the customer — the intended parent — lays down his/her conditions before purchasing the goods. For example, some agencies insist that the surrogate be married and a mother of at least one healthy child; be medically and psychologically fit; abstain from cigarettes, alcohol, and any other drugs during pregnancy; and agree to give up her parental rights after the baby is born. The broker arranges the contract, life insurance for the surrogate’s family should she die during pregnancy or childbirth, and life insurance or a will for the child should the contracting parent(s) die before the child is born.
It is assumed that there is an equal exchange in surrogacy: money paid for the service rendered. In reality, the contract between the parties to surrogacy would not exist if the parties were equal. The woman must give her entire body and all its life-sustaining systems to gestate a child. Within this framework, the contract is always biased in favor of the financially secure intended parents. The freedom of the surrogate is an illusion; the arbitration of rights hides gender, social, and class issues that make surrogacy contracts possible.
Institutional foundling homes first emerged in late-14th-century Italy as distinct charitable initiatives of civic governments, confraternities, and guilds, and aimed to curb the exposure and to channel the abandonment of infants, most of whom were illegitimate. Some historians see precedents for institutional care in the practice of monastic oblation, and certainly by the 13th century general hospitals accepted foundlings as well. There were few specialized foundling homes outside of Italy before the 17th century, but by the 18th century their numbers had expanded rapidly across Europe. This spread, together with the different types of documentation that were kept and preserved after that time, has shaped scholarship on the homes. With few exceptions, such as Florence’s exceptionally well-documented Innocenti home where 375,000 children were abandoned from the 15th century through the 20th, the most statistically rich and quantitatively sophisticated demographic studies deal with homes from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The terms used for abandoned infants suggest differences in legal culture and mentalité across Europe. Northern Europeans used terms that emphasized these children’s status as having been “found” (enfant trouvé, foundling, findelkind). Southern Europeans more often used terms that emphasized how they had been “lost”: exposed, abandoned, or thrown away (esposto, abbandonato, gettatello). Where comparative statistics are available, it appears that far more children were “lost” in southern Europe than were ever “found” in the north, a fact that may explain the greater and earlier proliferation of institutional homes in the south.
Historiographical Overviews on Demography, Illegitimacy, Infanticide, and Abandonment
Foundlings were most often abandoned by single mothers (servants, slaves, prostitutes, and other marginal persons) who lacked the economic or social resources to raise a child on their own. Abandonment frequently took place within days of birth, and girls were more frequently abandoned than boys (Pullan 1994). Early Renaissance commentators wrote of large numbers of illegitimate infants being thrown in rivers and on trash heaps, and their rhetoric led some modern historians (e.g., Trexler 1973a and Trexler 1973b) to link illegitimacy and abandonment as drivers in a cultural trend to infanticide; Tilly 1992 and Lynch 2000 find this assertion is not supported by either demographic or cultural data. The wide-ranging essays in Boutry 1991 explore how demographic pressures and social conditions strained informal means of surrogate care, and religious values led to the opening of institutional foundling homes and orphanages. Hunecke 1991 and Viazzo 2000 emphasize that where institutional homes opened to accept abandoned children, the incidence of abandonment increased.
Official position: During the 1850s there were thousands of children living on the streets of several major cities. The children were in search of food, shelter, and money and sold rags, matches, and newspapers just to survive.
The children formed gangs for protection because life on the street was dangerous and they were regularly victimized. The police often arrested the children, some as young as five years old, and put them in lock up facilities with adult criminals. Determined to remedy the situation, the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital devised a program to take children off of the streets of New York and Boston and place them in homes in the American West rather than allow them to continue to be arrested and taken advantage of on the streets. Because the children were transported by train to their new homes, the term “orphan trains” began being used.
Introduction: Between 1854 and 1929 the United States was engaged in an ambitious, and ultimately controversial, social experiment to rescue poor and homeless children, the Orphan Train Movement.
It was Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Childrens Aid Society, who first came up with the idea of placing needy children with families in the West rather than in orphanages. Brace felt that orphanages were overcrowded and gloomy places that did not teach children to become productive and functioning adults who could take care of themselves. Brace believed that a strong family life could help these victimized and neglected children, knew that the American pioneers who were settling the West could use help, and felt that an arrangement that would place children within these families would be mutually beneficial. He thought that the farmers in the West would welcome the children, take them in, and treat them as their own. Therefore, he arranged to send the orphaned children to pioneer families. The Orphan Trains and the practice of “placing children out” into homes that would accept them was the precursor to the modern foster care system in the United States.
“The best of all asylums for the outcast child is the farmer’s home. The great duty is to get these children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country.” Charles Loring Brace
Government Intervention on Behalf of Children
In the 1920s the number of Orphan Trains decreased sharply. It was at that time that states began passing laws that prohibited placing children across state lines. Additionally, there was criticism from abolitionists who felt that the Orphan Trains supported slavery. Pro-slavery advocates criticized the practice as well, saying that it was making slaves obsolete. In 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau was established with the mission of helping states support children and families and alleviate many of the factors that led to children living on the street. As state and local governments became more involved in supporting families, the use of the Orphan Trains was no longer needed.
Brown, A. (2011). Orphan trains (1854-1929). Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/mott-lucretia-coffin/
Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, took aim at three other landmark cases that relied on that same legal reasoning: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples had a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.
We wrote this back in October 2020: "$80 million dark money group tied to Trump Supreme Court advisor, Leonard Leo." Suffice to say, Leo and his list of secret donors are getting exactly what they paid for: the opportunity to reshape the judiciary.https://t.co/Ge8RlMMuib
From Nazi Germany to Mussolini's Italy, fascist regimes shared an early target: Women. “The fascists passed laws criminalizing abortion both for doctors and women," professor Anne Wingenter. https://t.co/JVIkDYohhD
Should men be required by law to get vasectomies so women don’t get pregnant and possibly have an abortion?
People are attempting to explain away what Cornyn is signaling here, but let’s be clear, there are still parts of United States that would like to return to to the era of racial segregation. What we’re witnessing is a revanchist resurgence of legal fascism. pic.twitter.com/3JuGMDyIsB
This is the same Member of Congress who praised Hitler. Now she’s standing right next to Trump, praising the Supreme Court for protecting “white life.” https://t.co/1kHJdRS7ma
Every ounce of your rage, sorrow, and numbness is valid, but you do not have to face those emotions & this cruel ruling alone. With this map you can find rallies & protests near you & join the millions who are mobilizing to fight this & fight it together.https://t.co/H9KBUknWwj