The morning began with the public radio streaming live the arguments at the Supreme Court. This was the day that anti-abortion forces have been waiting for a long time, to make abortion illegal across the country. Or as close as possible to that stage.
During her questioning, the junior-most justice made an irresponsible, cavalier, comparison of pregnancy and vaccines when it comes to bodily autonomy:
Such are the politics of today that the "my body, my choice" argument of the pro-choice movement has found an echo in the anti-vaccine mob!
I have always had enormous sympathies for the anti-abortion sentiments, even though I am firmly settled on the side of the mother having that choice.
I understand how deep down that opposition is not merely to the horrors of abortion itself, but is about a philosophical understanding of what life is.
Centuries before the biology of making babies was scientifically understood, it would have been clear, perhaps even to the caveman and cavewoman, that a couple of minutes of frolicking around could result in a baby nine months later.
Since that rudimentary understanding, we have come a long way, but our inability to create life artificially and to prevent deaths mean that life itself remains a mystery. And women, who are the only ones who can bring forward a new life, are, therefore, subject to restrictions on how much their bodies are truly theirs.
This struggle, to quite some extent, politically manifested itself with the introduction of the pill. (Even now we continue to duke it out over the pill in Obamacare, about which I had blogged way back in
September 2009!)
Thus, began our big political divide, which is a philosophical issue; whether contraceptives are acceptable, after all, they clearly challenged that notion of life as a mystery.
When life is a mystery, it then provides enormous scope for interpretations, via religions and otherwise.
Science and technology have managed to remove most of the mystery out of it by continuously breaking down the process of baby-creation into mechanistic processes. The understanding of the mechanisms meant that we could also develop products that prevented pregnancy. Modern man and woman were now increasingly looking at a real possibility of frolicking around without worrying about creating a life.
Of course, science has further broken down the mechanistic process of babymaking, which has made millions of otherwise "infertile" men and women happy parents.
Science and technology have also made it possible for premature babies to survive, which has then led to technical arguments over when a fertilized egg becomes viable.
The arguments earlier this morning were quite a bit about "
viability."
When Roe was decided, viability was around 28 weeks. These days, depending on the hospital, fetuses can survive outside the womb after around 23 weeks.
“Viability has come in for criticism from some bioethicists, both pro-choice and pro-life, essentially on the theory that it doesn’t track our moral intuitions of when life takes on value to focus exclusively on dependency, especially if dependency tracks technological development or even technological availability,”
This decision, like all decisions, will be political. Some seem less political than others. But this case will be truly and completely political. It has been beginning with how Republicans blocked President Obama's nominee from getting a hearing, to Republicans rushing to swear in a vehemently anti-abortion justice only days before the 2020 election.
It is no wonder that Justice Sotomayor said this during her questioning time:
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