Why is North Dakota Torturing Women?

[ismnotwasm]

Kris Kitko leads chants of protest at an abortion-rights rally at the state Capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota, March 25, 2013. (AP Photo/James MacPherson)

According to a recent United Nations report, North Dakota is torturing women. Seriously. Juan Méndez, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on torture, has included lack of access to abortion in his yearly report on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Considering North Dakota’s new law which bans abortion after six weeks, it stands to reason that the state is torturing its female citizens.

I’m not trying to be trite—I do believe, as Méndez does, that forcing women to carry pregnancies they don’t want is cruel:

International and regional human rights bodies have begun to recognize that abuse and mistreatment of women seeking reproductive health services can cause tremendous and lasting physical and emotional suffering, inflicted on the basis of gender. Examples of such violations include abusive treatment and humiliation in institutional settings; involuntary sterilization; denial of legally available health services such as abortion and post-abortion care.

But if you believe abortion is a “convenience,” rather than a human right, saying as much is controversial. To the American anti-choice movement, it’s even laughable.

But how else would you describe laws that are meant to punish women for being sexually active? Sure, anti-choice legislation and activism prides itself on showy pro-woman rhetoric. Women’s Right To Know! Women Deserve Better Than Abortion! But at the end of the day, forced pregnancy is less about protecting women or “life” than it is about punishment and humiliation.

Rape exceptions are the clearest example. While I agree that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy that is the result of rape is an even further assault on women’s bodily integrity, the foundation of a rape exception is that some women “deserve” abortions and some don’t. The underlying message is pretty clear—a woman who has been forced to have sex has done nothing wrong, a woman who had consensual sex has. (Bill Napoli’s now-infamous example of a “sodomized virgin” comes to mind.”)

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173636/why-north-dakota-torturing-women

[Aerows]

1. It's the same

crazy legislation that they are pushing in the South. Close all abortion clinics, try doctors.

This is personal to me. I would literally not be here were it not for a father that moved my mother from a Catholic hospital. They determined that she still had a child in the womb, even while she had miscarried. My father said he could smell the decay from outside of the hospital room. The Catholic hospital would not do an abortion, even though my mother was dying of an infection, because, well, it would be a sin to save a woman's live since they somehow detected that the baby was alive - even though the stench of death was reeking. I am not making this up. This was in the late 60's.

They moved my mother to a public hospital and did a procedure that also included extracting dead tissue and a dead ... clump of nearly necrotized flesh that legislation would have considered a child because it was too dead for them to figure out if it had a heart beat or not. Had they waited another day, my mother could never bear children again, because she would have been dead. Three years later, I was born.

This is a personal issue for me. It is a personal issue for my mother. My rabidly bible-obsessed sister, who cannot carry a child to term due to heart problems and depends upon birth control is completely against abortion. I love her, despite how misguided she is and I hope that if she gets pregnant, someone is there to terminate the pregnancy that would kill her and her child.

[ismnotwasm]

2. That's a horrible story

I work as a nurse and one of the things I do is dialysis. I dialyze pregnant women from time to time. They usually aren't able to carry to term and the babies end up on NICU. It's these women's choices to do what they have to do, risking their lives to bear a child.

I've also cared for women who have chosen to terminate. One young woman, A ESL immigrant, had a kidney transplant. One of the drugs she has to take for the is a teratogenic drug, and the chances were good shed miscarry, but at great danger to herself. A Catholic, she didn't tell her family, and I ended being the one to to hug her, cry with her and help her on the stretcher on the way other abortion, she's healthy and happy now--she had a very supportive partner, but her desolation that day was in part because she couldn't tell her mother, she couldn't trust the church she was raised with.


This kind of shit has got to stop.

[Aerows]

3. It's the truth

I wouldn't be here to tell it if my father didn't move my mother to a hospital where she could have a removal of her miscarriage. They wouldn't do it. I literally would not be here.

[ismnotwasm]

4. That is an incredibly moving story

And it sure beats some of the anti-abortion right wing crap they fling around.

[niyad]

5. k and r + a gazillion

interfering with women's lives, their bodies, the choices, forcing them into the status of talking incubators or brood mares, is, indeed, torture.

and that fact that, in many areas, the catholic hospital is the ONLY medical service around, simply compounds the problem. women who are not of the faith are subjected to the same insanity as the faithful.