Objectify This

Last week, the long-awaited passage of health care reform came at a hefty cost. Bart Stupak’s amendment to HR 3962 prevents women receiving federal subsidies from buying  health insurance that covers abortion.

This attack on the reproductive rights of poor Americans may have dire repercussions for women and society, and that may be what the pro-life movement wants.

A significant portion of the pro-life movement does not truly care about fetuses. If they did, they might advocate good nutrition or smoking cessation to prevent miscarriages. Miscarriages cause the loss of 10-25% of clinically recognized pregnancies, according to the American Pregnancy Association.

Nor does the pro-life movement advocate for accessible contraception to prevent the conception of unwanted fetuses. The National Right to Life Committee “does not have a position on issues such as contraception [or] sex education,” despite the causal relationship between a lack of contraception and unwanted conception. The online forum LifeSiteNews deplores sex education workshops taking place at St. Mary’s College, and offers contact information for the office of the college’s president, Dr. Carol Mooney, with the heading “To express concerns.”

What concerns me is that LifeSiteNews doesn’t want these female college students to be “encouraged to receive STD screening and build relationships with their sexual partners.” The Christian right espouses values that amount to a movement against the woman, inasmuch as the woman can expected to be an independent agent who makes informed decisions and directs her own life.

It’s not my imagination running away with me: women are included in the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Women already earn less than men do. Academics who study welfare argue that it is based on a gendered model that is built for and by men, without considering issues such as child care. Women are therefore more likely to receive federal subsidies in the first place than men are. They are thus further at the mercy of the state, and stripped of any financial means of escape to a private system.

If we are cutting health care, let’s not cut it from the people who need it most and have no alternatives. On a practical level, since a pregnancy and labor are much more expensive than an abortion, the state would save money by covering abortion for those who wanted it.

This is an incredibly important issue in light of the horrifying rape statistics our culture racks up. Those statistics indicate that women are already subjected to a terrifying lack of control over their bodies and often, over their conception.

This is exactly the kind of disempowering situation which can perpetuate inequality because, as Professor Wraga’s research shows, stereotype threat affects certain kinds of mental performance, and affects people most strongly when the stereotyes are upheld by high authorities. Thus, by legally decreasing the rights of women–which is to say, decreasing the rights of women under the auspices of highest authority in secular society–Stupak and his cronies are likely to decrease the power and confidence of individual women — even women who would never get abortions. This is a reversal of the same principle which caused the so-called “Obama effect,” in which black test-takers’ scores improved following the election of our first black leader. The Christian right has a definitively misogynistic message, which has misogynistic implications.

It troubles me especially because of what it will mean for people who experience rape and sexual assault. Of course, Stupak makes an allowance for those people–along with mothers whose pregnancy endangers their health, they can receive abortions.

But Americans are very, very suspicious of rape claims.  Remember, in 94% of rape cases which are judged to have enough evidence to stand trial, the alleged rapist is allowed to go free. And 60% of rape cases are never reported, because the survivor convinces him or herself that others would judge him or her, that it’s his or her fault for wanting to go out looking cute, that the other person was too drunk to know what he was doing.

The survivor is always guilty until proven innocent: his or her case is too shameful, too sordid, too vengeful to identify with. (Some survivors have trouble believing their claims themselves, even after they’ve had surgery to repair their bodies, because having your entire culture negate your experience is so disempowering.) We don’t want to perceive the threat of rape, even when it’s all around us, because that would mean shattering our comfortable worldview. So American courts do not believe survivors 94% of the time.

So now, what Stupak is saying is that the only way that a survivor can get an abortion is if she can prove to a doctor that she experienced rape or incest. The survivor still bears the burden of proof, only now much more is at stake. Instead of not getting justice, the survivor stands to not get justice and be forced to bear and raise injustice’s child for 18 years. I don’t doubt that there will be more reports of rape by women with unwanted pregnancies, but I also believe that this law fails to offer women the life of liberty and happiness that was the foundation of this country.

Title IX is supposed to protect women from a “hostile environment” in educational institutions, requiring

“immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains.”

Yet little has been done to address the hostile environment created by our culture. You can start liberating women today by signing Planned Parenthood’s condemnation of the Stupak amendment here.