I'm back from Amsterdam people ... and I'm not happy. Perez Hilton, of all people, pinged me this morning with Let's Get Political [1].

I've been flying under the radar because, well, I was tired after so much partying in Amsterdam. But honey, you know this shit is big when Perez is as appalled as anybody else about this. In honor of my BFF, I'm dittoing what he said --FUCK YOU SOUTH DAKOTA :

[via South Dakota passes abortion ban - Yahoo! News [2]]:

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) - South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure.

The law, which would punish doctors who perform the operation with a five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine, awaits the signature of Republican Gov. Michael Rounds and people on both sides of the issue say he is unlikely to veto it.

"My understanding is we are the first state to truly defy
Roe v. Wade," the 1973 high court ruling that granted a constitutional right to abortion, said Kate Looby of
Planned Parenthood's South Dakota chapter.

State legislatures in Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky also have introduced similar measures this year, but South Dakota's legislative calendar means its law is likely to be enacted first.

From now on South Dakota's state legislature will be known as the South Dakota Hangers [3].

I have been keeping an eye on South Dakota and, quite frankly, I regret not having blogged more about them. I have been tracking "abortion" news on the web now for over a year and the legislature of this state has consistently been tryinng to introduce one measure or another to ban abortion. With the confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito we can see they have found the way to get a full ban on abortion back front and center.

Now, let me just tell you one thing. The obvious issue at hand with this ban is the control of women's bodies. As Digby has put it so well,

Hullabaloo : Innocent Life [4]I hate to point out the obvious but children who are conceived in rape or incest are just as innocent as those who are conceived because birth control failed. The difference is not in the relative innocence of the children --- it's the "innocence" of the woman. Most people believe that she should not be forced to bear the child of her molester, her relative or her rapist. And I think it's fair to assume that they think this because they believe that the pregnancy wasn't her "fault".

Coincidentally, on my way back from Europe, I read about the Berlinale [5], Berlin's Film Festival. The winning movie was none other than a little seen film about the new generation of Bosnian rape children.

[via Bosnian tale wins at Berlin festival | www.azstarnet.com [6] �]:

The movie, "Grbavica," a joint Austrian-Bosnian-German-Croatian production, beat out 18 rivals to secure the Golden Bear award Saturday night for the best film, sustaining the festival's reputation as a backer of lesser-known filmmakers.

Director Jasmila Zbanic's film tells of how the young girl forces her mother to confess that her father was not a hero who died fighting Serb guerrillas during Bosnia's ethnically charged civil war, but rather a rapist at a Serb camp for prisoners-of-war.

But before we go on and on about the idea of controlling women's body for power, let's talk about it from the idea of enslavement for the sole purpose of human harvesting.

As I have commented before at Feministe [7], I don't look at rape as a sex crime. I look at rape as a violent crime way up there with murder. You kill the men in the village and rape the women so that you can impose your authority over that geographical dominion. That rape looks like a sex act, there is no question about it. But rape can become more than that in our technologically advanced present. You don't need to stick a dick by force in a woman to get her to reproduce your DNA anymore. You can incarcerate them, implant an RFID chip and impregnate them through in-vitro fertilization.

Science fiction?

Barbara picked up on this back in January. We even had a brief discussion about this before she published her essay. While we were in Washington DC for the march, we had discussed this very subject with Roxanne [8] and we all agreed : this is indeed about the South winning.

[via The Mahablog | Abortion and Slavery [9]]:

Fast forward to today's anti-abortion rights movement. Fetus People like to see themselves as the heirs of the abolitionists, and they compare the struggle to protect fetii with the stuggle to end slavery. And they like to evoke the Dred Scott decision, which declared that a black man could not be a citizen and could have no standing to bring suit against a white man. The "Cantis" want fetii to be given full citizenship status; those who would deny them that status are bad people, just like the justices who ruled against Dred Scott.

But in truth, the anti-choicers more and more remind me of the old white supremacists and Klansmen, not the abolitionists.

First, the line of reasoning that blames the abortion wars on Roe v. Wade (see previous post on abortion) and not on a faction of fanatics who will try to stop abortions by any means is just too much like saying the 13th Amendment was responsible for the formation of the Klan. Let's pretend that tomorrow Roe is reversed. Does anyone seriously believe that states which allowed abortion to remain legal would not be descended upon by Randall Terry and the screaming culture of death hoardes? Puh-leeze.

The Right argues that the Roe v. Wade decision amounted to judicial activism and judges "ruling from the bench", which is exactly the same thing they said about Brown v. Board of Education. Many on the Right insist they don't really want to impose a ban on abortion; they just want the question to be decided by elected state legislatures according to the democratic process. Does anyone really think that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, and abortion given a full and fair debate in every statehouse, and the 50 states separately wrote abortion law that reflected majority opinion in each state, that the Fetus People would accept any state's decision to keep abortion legal?

And with the idea of enslavement, let's take it one step further. What is mostly lost in the discussion of abortion rights is the very reason why this country was torn apart for five years during the Civil War : State's Rights. Which, coincidentally again, takes me to another review. This time it's for Kevin Willmott’s CSA: The Confederate States of America that appeared in New York Press | BONDAGE & DIMINUTION : Brilliant new film looks at an alternate racial history [10] :

I’ve read negative reviews of CSA complaining that the movie is simplistic and unbelievable because so much of it rests on the presumption that slavery could have gone on much longer than it actually did, and that the rest of the world would not have stood by over the decades as the victors devised new excuses for treating non-white people as property (Native Americans and Chinese laborers included). This complaint represents a complete misunderstanding of what Willmott is up to, and an ignorance of how radical he is. He’s not doing anything as mild as saying, “If the South had won the war, black folks would still be in chains.�? He’s doing something much deeper and more incendiary. He is using absurdist speculative-fiction to expose what he considers to be the real values of the Confederate South, many of which persist, in coded form, to this day, along with a watered down form of slavery. He’s using hyperbole, slapstick and pop-culture minutiae to construct a demented alternate universe that informs our understanding of this one.

Like Godard in Notre Musique and Oliver Stone in Alexander, Willmott suggests that many of America’s current and seemingly eternal troubles—from the tendency to get involved in wars with nonwhite people, to the inability to figure out how to raise the descendants of slaves to full economic and political equality—are rooted in very old events and cultural assumptions, cultural forces that merely submerged or disguised themselves for survival’s sake, like the fugitive Abe Lincoln putting on blackface. Willmott is saying that the South actually did win the war, it just took 150 years to do it, and the full implications of the phrase “Southern values�? have yet to be felt. CSAisn’t comedy, it’s prophecy with jokes.

The battle over women's bodies is just one part of the equation. What the South Dakota Hangers are after is bringing the governmental confederalism that existed before the Civil War back into the mainstream of US politics. This is not even about Jim Crow anymore. If you can control the women you inseminate or who are born of your semen because the voting majority in your state approves so, then you can control any kind of social, political and economic activity that happens within your state's borders.

Even in Wikipedia's most excellent article about "state rights" [11] there is mention of euthanasia and gay marriage but none about abortion. Why? I think I have a pretty good idea : Because the women's equality movement has been historically an upper-class white woman's fight for social mobility --the breaking of that glass ceiling-- not necessarily one that encompasses the whole range of social justice.

This comment is not about pointing fingers. It's just about bringing to the fore the fact that when you have Gloria Steinem talking about Hugh Hefner's "moslem" life-style [12], and white latino lower-class women like my mom talking about "the right to choose" something only American "blanquitas" would talk about, you need to face the inherent problems within the ideological foundation of the women's movement. The matter of abortion, by having been made a women's only issue paved the way to becoming the perfect "pick and choose bait" needed by Dominionst/Confederalists to revert the governmental landscape of this country to it's pre-Civil War tyranny. Under what guise? "Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act" [PDF] [13]. In truth, it should read "OUR Women's Health and OUR DNA Protection Act", to really go in line with the Dominionists/Confederalists worldview that beget it.

I will be coming back to this but, to close, I leave you with Maryscott O'Connor's most excellent words :

My Left Wing :: ABORTION: Intact Dilation & Extraction [14]

I hope I have clarified any questions about my beliefs you have on this issue.

Incidentally, you still haven’t clarified for me how you can choose to vote for George W. Bush SOLELY on the basis of his “pro-life�? stance and probable Supreme Court appointments to reverse Roe v. Wade ... when George W. Bush is an avid proponent of the death penalty and has taken us into a war, killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions by the time it ends.

I, at least, have some moral ambiguity on my side, due to my belief that abortion is not murder.

You seem to be choosing the lives of the unborn over the lives of those dying in Iraq, Afghanistan and off Death Row. Is it about quantity, then, not quality?

Another Bush term in the White House might well result in a reversal of Roe v. Wade, perhaps even send abortion back to the alleys and illegal abortionists, thereby cutting down on the number of abortions (and increasing the number of abused, neglected, malnourished children without health care or parents who want them – and the number of women who die from illegal abortions) – but it is also guaranteed to send more American soldiers back in body bags, and more Iraqis into mass graves.

I just don’t understand that. It would seem that you believe George W. Bush is the lesser of two evils; that you believe eliminating safe, legal abortion is a lesser evil than mass murder by way of war, along with the unpleasant repercussions of criminalizing abortion I just mentioned.

I choose the living over the “potentially living.�? I choose the woman over the fetus. I choose to allow for the potential of reckless, feckless abuse of abortion by the few in order that the MANY may have the freedom to make their own medical decisions without government interference. And until someone can prove to me beyond a SCIENTIFIC doubt that a “potential human being�? has a SOUL, I’m going to assume that whatever Deity there is out there, if there is one, has factored abortion into the universal equation and that those SOULS… are doing just fine wherever they may be, thank you very much. The God in whom I believe (occasionally) is not so sadistic as to consign millions of unborn souls to limbo, nor so sadistic as to have created a world where women are forced to give birth to their rapists’ offspring because every sperm is fucking sacred. If that’s the kind of God that exists, I want NO PART of that God. That God can kiss my apostate, irreligious ASS.

See also :
Ezra Klein: South Dakotan Anti-Choicers Gearing up for Roe Challenge [15]

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Welcome To South Dakota: Bring Your Own Coathanger! [16]

Shakespeare's Sister : South Dakota Abortion Bill Passes State Senate [17]

Bookmark/Search this post with:

[18] | [19] | [20] | [21] | [22] | [23]