By Karen Rubin, editor@news-photos-features.com, news-photos-features.com

The repeal of Roe v. Wade by the ultra-right majority Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 not only overturned women’s ability to control their own body, decide their own future, even save their own life, but the next phase, endowing a fertilized egg, embryo or fetus with personhood, essentially strips women of their personhood, altogether.

Women are not just second-class citizens, without the right to self-determination as a man is entitled to, women are mere brood mares, a slave of to the state, not much different than a beast of burden, without any rights at all – not the right to life, due process, equal protection, privacy, cruel and unusual punishment.

And the SAVE Act will make it difficult for women to regain their rights, their personhood by putting up discriminatory barriers to voting.

“Didn’t we already fight these battles?” one asked at a recent ReachOut America-Long Island meeting hosting Lynn M. Paltrow, the founder and former executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now Pregnancy Justice), now a leader of The Beacon for Democracy, who has been fighting these same battles since the 1960s.

In 13 states with absolute abortion bans, women no longer have the same protection under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 to keep their sensitive health information private from vigilantes, bounty hunters, spurned partners or prosecutors who are arresting women for using abortion medication and even women who have suffered a miscarriage.

Women who are on the brink of death, suffering in pain, or losing their ability to ever have a baby, no longer have the same right to Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), mandating care, or for that matter, the same protection against cruel and unusual punishment as a mass murderer awaiting capital punishment.

And to make sure a woman has no ability to obtain reproductive health care, they are prosecuting doctors, nurses, healthcare workers – even those out of state where abortion care is legal.

The result is to create “maternity deserts” – places that no longer have doctors, healthworkers, too afraid of prosecution for providing care – and a rise in maternal and infant mortality. So much for “pro-life.”

Even when abortion was theoretically protected under the Constitution, states built barriers to access – requiring abortion clinics to meet unnecessary standards, allowing protesters to intimidate patients and healthworkers, even forcing pregnant women to undergo invasive probes and to look at the image of the fetus in their womb to shame her into abandoning her intention to abort. You would think that would violate the 4th amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.

Or how about banning doctors from giving factual information about reproductive health – a violation of their First Amendment right to free speech?

Texas and Alabama are among the states that are trying to ban pregnant women from traveling out of state to places like New York State, even prosecuting family members who might provide aid. It doesn’t matter, as the Justice Department is now arguing, that the Constitution protects the right to travel across state lines and engage in conduct that is lawful where it is performed and that states cannot prevent third parties from assisting others in exercising that right. Florida was monitoring girl athletes’ menstrual cycles.

Missouri and three other states ban a pregnant woman from obtaining a divorce, even if she is a victim of domestic violence and her life is in danger.

There’s a Pregnant Workers Fairness Act that went into effect in 2023 (thanks Biden-Harris) that requires employers to give reasonable accommodation to pregnant women, but Texas has decided it can ignore it.

And none of these have anything to do with “protecting life” (if that were true, these same people wouldn’t be blocking gun control even preventing doctors from inquiring whether parents store their gun safely, despite the fact gun violence is the greatest killer of children). Rather, it is about controlling, disenfranchising, disempowering and dehumanizing women.

“Abortion laws were a way of controlling women without seeming to. But abortion is about a medical procedure and ending pregnancy,” said Lynn M. Paltrow, an attorney and activist on behalf of reproductive justice, who has been fighting for reproductive justice since the 1960s/before Roe.

Indeed, while the anti-abortionists like to portray women seeing reproductive care are Jezebels, wanton or promiscuous women (no mention of those who are raped or victims of incest), six in 10 are already mothers and half have two or more children. As Paltrow noted, women seek abortion care for many different, personal reasons including not being able to afford more children or having health issues that would be compromised by pregnancy. Also, one in four pregnancies result in miscarriage, which requires a procedure, dilation and curettage (D&C), that falls under the same definition (and ban) as “abortion,” while 80 percent of pregnancy deaths are preventable, according to the CDC.

The United States, already with the highest rate of maternal and infant mortality of any high-income country due to the lack of universal health care, is seeing these rates surge in states that have total or near total bans on abortion. And yet, the number of abortions is not going down – only access to prenatal care and to legal, safe abortions.

Right wingers use abortion to rally the Christian Right, waving the banner of “pro-life.” Reproductive Rights activists made a mistake by framing the issue as the right to abortion rather than a woman’s human rights, Paltrow maintained – an echo of Hillary Clinton’s famous speech in Beijing 30 years ago, “Women’s rights are human rights,” the First Lady declared.

“The movement tends to narrow everything down to abortion rights but the issue is not defending particular medical procedure, it’s about defending the people who sometimes need to have the procedure as a full, whole person…Abortion laws were a way of controlling women without seeming to. But abortion is about a medical procedure and ending pregnancy,” said Paltrow.

But the most serious an assault on women’s rights, freedom, liberty and self-determination is the Religious Right’s crusade to establish the personhood of an embryo, fetus – essentially giving this entity, that cannot exist on its own, more rights than the mother whose own “personhood” becomes irrelevant.

Since the embryo or fetus cannot speak for itself, this gives the state authority and power over the woman – making her nothing more than a breeder cow or literally a slave of the state. (You would think this would violate 13^th amendment, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”)

She notes that personhood – or citizenship – according to the Constitution’s post-Civil War amendments, applies to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

You would think that equal protection and due process would apply to the mother (and should have been used to establish Roe v. Wade, instead of the right to privacy), but if an embryo or fetus has “personhood rights”, the woman does not.

A Catholic judge ruled that the expectant mother “has placed herself in a special class of persons who are bringing another person into existence. I submit a woman who carries a child to viability is in fact a member of a unique category of persons.”

What does “a unique category of persons” mean in practical terms? Fewer rights, no bodily autonomy.

Persons in this “unique category,” Paltrow said, lose their right to life, liberty, freedom of religion, due process of law (procedural), bodily integrity (medical decision making), privacy in medical information, privacy in reproductive decision making, being free of unreasonable searches and seizures and being free of cruel and unusual punishment, their right to reasonable bail, counsel, right to parent, right to equal protection of the law (race and sex), right to freedom of speech and conscience, as well as human rights more broadly.

In other words, a slave of the state.

What does that mean? It gives the state, the authorities, some nasty neighbor the ability to prosecute a woman for her behavior during pregnancy – if she has a glass of wine, uses marijuana, smokes a cigarette, goes skiing, even drives a car or falls down the stairs – while women are forced by the state to come to the brink of death or lose their future futility without receiving health care.

Between 1973 (the year Roe v. Wade was decided), up to 2005 (32 years), there were 413 arrests of women who miscarried. Between 2006 and 2022 (17 years), there were 1387 arrests – that is three times the incidents in less than twice the time interval. But in just the two years since 2024, the year Dobbs overturned Roe, there have already been 412 arrests of women who miscarried – a number equal to the 32 years.

Among those prosecuted: a woman who fell down steps while pregnant, went to the hospital for treatment, was reported and arrested on her way home to her two other children, for attempted feticide.

Paltrow provided some horrifying examples from cases she fought:

Pamela Rae Steward Monson had a baby that died shortly after birth. She was arrested for medical neglect – not getting to the hospital quickly enough on the day of delivery, not getting prenatal care early enough. And when she did go to the doctor, everything the doctor told her became a weapon against her. Ultimately, she was found to be at fault because “she subjected herself to the rigors of sexual intercourse.”

Though Paltrow won the case (it was featured on “Nightline,”) “it launched hundreds of cases because prosecutors saw arresting a woman for something she did or did not do during pregnancy as a way of getting on TV.”

Another case involved Angela Carter, who had survived childhood bone cancer but had lost a leg. But after she was pregnant, she found a tumor the size of a football. “She wanted to live, so wanted to have the chemo or surgery that would save her life, even if it posed a risk to the fetus” Paltrow related. Instead, her desires were ignored and a judge – who never met her – appointed a lawyer to represent the interests of the fetus and ruled that she would have to undergo a Caesarean section to remove the 25-week old fetus – which in those days, had little chance of survival – even though the operation could kill Angela. Though she refused the C-section, the judge ordered it anyway. The baby lived two hours then died; Angela lived two days, then died.

In 2008, Jennifer Jorgensen, a Long Islander, was pregnant when she was involved in an automobile crash that killed two others. She was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated and manslaughter, and though the baby was born alive, the prosecutor couldn’t convict her for anything but her behavior while pregnant that caused the accident. “They couldn’t convict her for the two who died, but violating her special obligation to unborn child.”

But this is New York State. Patrow’s group, National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Pregnancy Justice, filed an amicus brief in state Supreme Court arguing that there is no state law that says a woman can be held criminally liable for something she did or didn’t do while pregnant.

In a 2011 case (Dray v. Staten Island University Hospital), a Northwell Hospital had a secret policy allowing a doctor to overrule a mother’s decision if the doctor felt the fetus was at risk. That led to a woman being given a c-section against her will.

Since then, New York has passed an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution, outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex, pregnancy, or pregnancy outcome. “Abortion can’t be banned in New York State and women cannot be held criminally liable for doing something in pregnancy that somebody else doesn’t like.”

In contrast, 80% of arrests and prosecution of pregnant women that NAPW documented come from states that have passed abortion bans, like Mississippi and Texas.

“Blaming women is particularly cruel because, thanks largely to the abortion bans, there are now ‘maternity care deserts’. Since August 2023, more than 5.6 million women live in counties with no or limited access to maternity care services.

“They have nowhere to go because doctors don’t want to be in a state where they can be prosecuted for addressing a woman’s pregnancy crisis.”

Not surprisingly, the United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income nation, and the rates of maternal and infant mortality are highest in states with abortion bans.

“Over 80 percent of those deaths are preventable. MAGA wants to lock up women as murderers – South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Oklahoma are proposing to make homicide laws applicable to women who have abortions.”

A Nebraska teenager who had a medicinal abortion was sentenced to 90 days in jail. A Texas woman, Mallori Patrice Strait, 33, was arrested (the charge was abuse of a corpse) and spent nearly five months in jail after a December 19, 2024, incident where she experienced a miscarriage in a Whataburger bathroom in Converse, Texas. (The charge was later overturned for lack of evidence, but still.)

“If fetuses are declared children, they will be covered under criminal law,” she notes, citing a case where a woman who had a cocaine addiction, gave birth, and was convicted of delivery of drugs to a minor through her umbilical cord.

There is also renewed effort to extend abortion bans to banning contraception as murder.

If the “pre-born” have personhood and a right to life, “we lose our right to life.”

“The push to have fetus as person – fetal rights – is an argument based on fantasy that fertilized egg, embryo, fetus inside woman’s body are really outside” and have more constitutional rights than any person (including mother).

Instead, “make [reproductive justice] a conversation about our personhood, our experience, someone who needs to be treated with a right to healthcare.”

Feeling empowered to deny a woman’s personhood, though, goes back to the fact this country was founded on the notion that one could own and control people (slavery). After being shipped to America, slave women were raped – forced reproduction was a primary way slaveholders made money – producing more slaves to sell, she said.

“We need to change the conversation [from abortion] to personhood… We win when we make argument that this isn’t just about abortion, it is about women being recognized as people.”

The nearly 50 years of legal abortion made a huge difference for women – their lives were better, maternal and infant mortality went down. 

Before even before 1973 when abortion was illegal, as many as 12 million were having illegal abortions – “a form of mass civil disobedience.”

Before Roe, she said, 20-25 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion. 

Today, post Dobbs, despite the bans, the number of abortions has actually increased – because there is safe, effective medication and groups organized to get it – a post-Roe abortion “underground railroad”. (Actually, more than 50 percent of abortions are through medication and not that gruesome surgical procedure the anti-abortionists love to display.)

“Research shows restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions- abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated back alley procedures. Maternal, infant mortality rise especially in marginalized communities.”

How ironic that other countries have seen a green wave of abortion rights. Over the past 30 years, more than 60 countries and territories – many Catholic conservative countries like Ireland – liberalized their abortion laws.

(After Dobbs, France amended its Constitution to make sure women would have their reproductive rights. “The rights of women are reversible — you are never sure to have really won,” said Geneviève Fraisse, a French feminist philosopher. “The proof is in the United States.”)

Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) just this month (Women’s History Month) introduced legislation in the Senate that would revoke FDA approval of mifepristone and make it illegal to distribute nationwide. The bill builds on legislation Hawley introduced last year that targeted mifepristone access through the mail.

The Mississippi House and Senate voted to advance House Bill 1613 that creates criminal penalties for anyone who manufactures, sells, distributes, dispenses, or prescribes medication abortion, including mifepristone and misoprostol. House Bill 1613 takes Mississippi’s already extreme abortion ban a step further by seeking to criminalize any manufacturer or provider of abortion medication, punishing any violation of this law with up to 10 years in prison, and empowering the state’s attorney general to sue people for violating the law and to recover monetary damages. (Wouldn’t you love this kind of penalty for manufacturers of assault weapons that are used in mass murder?)

Last year, Texas initiated legal action against New York doctor Maggie Carpenter for mailing mifepristone to a Texas resident, marking a major legal test of state abortion bans vs. shield laws. New York officials refused to enforce the $100,000 judgment due to state shield laws. (So just imagine if a Republican, like Bruce Blakeman, defeats Kathy Hochul for governor.)

So, with 60 percent of Americans saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases (38% say it should be legal) and 55 percent supporting medication abortion, to succeed in nationalizing abortion bans and dehumanizing women, they have to strip or suppress voting rights – fundamental to protecting every other right – especially by women, a majority of whom consistently vote Democrat.

The SAVE Act would require every American citizen to show a passport or birth certificate and government ID with the same name to vote. While 146 MILLION Americans do not have a passport (which is expensive, and is akin to charging a poll tax in the Jim Crow days; also passports take weeks to get, Trump has shut down thousands of places that issued them, are valid for 10 years during which a person could get married/divorced/remarried), 69 MILLION women do not have a valid birth certificate due to surname changes -a clear violation of 19^th Amendment, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Under the SAVE Act, with exception of NY, WA, VT, Mi, MN, your RealID driver’s license would not be acceptable proof of US citizenship; the birth certificate will not be proof of citizenship if the name does not match; a marriage license will not be acceptable proof of the change of name from the birth certificate and RealID, a woman would have to have her name legally changed. And while already registered women might feel secure, the act would allow purges of voters without notification and time to correct any error. 

And just as there is more control over a woman’s uterus than an assault weapon, the same party that blocks universal background checks or any regulation of gun ownership when “gun” or “firearm” is NEVER used in the Constitution (“arms”, which in 1781 meant any weapon worn on the body, is used once), but “vote” and “voting” is used 37 times in the Constitution, in order to set up a government “by the People, for the People,” it will be easier to buy an assault weapon than to vote.

Come out March 28 for the third No Kings protests.

This would be the third No Kings protest – each one bigger than the last, with ever more grievances to protest (ICE/deportations, military in the streets, launching wars without Congress, suppressing free press, public education, free speech, voting rights, environment and climate destruction).

But what is disturbing is that Women’s Rights have kind of receded into a background (it was more prevalent at the earlier Hands Off! Protests).

On March 28, bring Women’s Rights back to the forefront.

Go to www.nokings.org to find a protest to join. So far, close to 3,000 protests are planned.

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