Here's your choice

So I recently posted on forced pregnancy in the reactionary fiefdoms of South Dakota, and coming soon to Mississippi and Indiana, and other places besides.

In response, with all due respect to the commenters in question, I got the usual sob stories about babies, adoption, guilt, responsibility and all the other blah blah blah that serves only to emotionalize and obscure the underlying issue.

That issue is this: does the state have the right to take away the reproductive freedom of its citizens?

Let's leave 'the babies', the ones you don't give a damn about once they poke their heads out of your captive vagina, aside for a moment, and concentrate on the mother. Does the mother have any rights in this? Or is the moment when sperm meets egg the one where she signs away her life for nine months to Uncle Sam? Is there any compensatory effort by the state? Who bears the costs of the pregnancy and the subsequent child-rearing, once the voluntary element is taken away from reproduction? How is forced pregnancy compatible, from the point of view of the mother,with equal justice under law? If you/re talking about 'responsibility', where's the responsibility of the guy who graciously donates the sperm?

And lastly, if we allow the roughly 25% of Americans who adhere to the forced-pregnancy view - and that's all they are - to dictate their, um, 'values', to the rest of us, where does it stop?

In real life, these laws will have little practical effect on actual abortion rates, much as the NYT recently pointed out about with regard to the failure of parental notification laws to achieve any actual reduction (an aside: I'd love to see any example of reactionary policy that actually achieves what it sets out to do). Anybody who believes that reversing Roe v. Wade will usher in a blessed age free of 'baby killing' might care to recall that there was no noticeable spike after the ruling was handed down; think of the 'war on drugs' as a good example of the effects of criminalization.

As noted, this is a political issue above all. With the Supreme Court now firmly in the hands of the nutjobs, we'll see more forced-pregnancy legislation coming into effect. From where I stand, that's a good thing; because once it moves from the realm of theory into the practical, we are looking at a political earthquake.