In large states including Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, legislation has been introduced that would require some variation of this scenario: when a woman shows up at an abortion clinic having made the choice to schedule an abortion procedure, a procedure that is fully legal in the United States of America, her doctors will be required by law to perform on her a medically unnecessary ultrasound, either over the belly or, because it provides a clearer image of the fetus, by means of a probe inserted into the woman's vagina. The idea is that a woman in the process of exercising her legal right to obtain an abortion in these states, at least to the extent that she's opted to schedule the procedure (whether she goes through with it is a different matter) would be legally coerced into viewing an ultrasound image of the fetus in the womb (the Pennsylvania legislation specifically says that the ultrasound monitor is to be turned by the doctor toward the patient). Crucially, as I mentioned, this procedure is medically unnecessary, meaning that doctors would be forced by the hand of the government to perform a procedure of varying degrees of invasiveness against both their own will and better judgment as licensed physicians and the will of their patient. After this unnecessary and invasive procedure is carried out against the will of the doctor and of the patient, the woman would then be forced to wait 24 hours before she is allowed to have the abortion procedure.
Unlike the politicians touting these kinds of laws, let's just be clear about what's going on here. There being no medical reason for these ultrasounds, and hence no incentive aimed at safeguarding the health of the patient, the objective of these types of laws is to appeal to the emotions of women in the vulnerable position of making the undesirable choice to have an abortion. Proponents of such laws often say that the intent is to provide women with 'all the information' they would require to 'make the best decision'; yet these laws do not require the handing out of pamphlets or even a lecture from the informed physician about the nature and risks of the procedure, both physical and psychological (patients are given this information before an abortion anyway, with or without new legislation). Instead these laws specifically call for a scenario in which the patient is made to confront a visual image of what's going on inside of her womb. The logic behind this attempt to emotionally blackmail women who are already in many cases in a vulnerable emotional state before having a difficult, invasive, and often traumatic medical procedure is that after seeing a picture of what looks like a proto-human, the patient will question the long series of decisions she already made to land her at the abortion clinic, and reverse them all in a final moment of emotional uncertainty.
Let's also be clear about what these types of laws say about proponents' attitudes toward women.
As I said, in the United States, abortion is legal, with some restrictions. If you believe abortion is murder, whether as a private citizen or an elected legislator, you have every right to petition the government to make abortion illegal, to draft legislation that would make abortion illegal, and to state your case before the court of law that abortion should not be legal. But today, right now, abortion is legal. This means that even if you believe that a woman who chooses to have an abortion is a bad, fragile, or emotionally inept person, anymore than you believe that a man purchasing a bottle of vodka at the liquor store is that sort of person, the onus is on you to come up with a damn good reason for why your opinion that what these people are doing is wrong should interfere with the rights of these people to do that which is perfectly legal.
You will notice, however, that when a man who looks less than presentable drives up to a liquor store, walks in with valid identification and no ostensible signs of impairment (other than, perhaps, a ragged beard, a facial scar, some 'unprofessional' attire), no citizens' movement, not even Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is petitioning the government to force the sales clerk to show this man a video montage of drunk driving accidents, or a collection of old photos of him passed out shirtless on his ex-wife's kitchenette table, before permitting this man to purchase a bottle of vodka (after a mandatory 2-hour waiting period, during which he is to reflect on the potential gravity of his decision). After all, alcoholism and drunk driving are not things to be taken lightly; and how can we know that this bottle of vodka won't be THE bottle of vodka that leads this poor man to take to the roads after a bender and kill someone, or to strike his insubordinate daughter, or lay that final, catastrophic joker upon the house of cards that was his failing marriage)?
(Alabama ranks 6th in the nation for worst states for drunken driving; Virginia 28th; Pennsylvania 30th, if you're curious. For most abortions, Pennsylvania is 21st; Virginia 18th; Alabama not in the top 25).
But when it comes to women and abortion, proponents of this flavor of anti-abortion law make clear that they simply don't trust or respect women as decision makers on matters concerning their own reproductive systems. There is, without question, a misogynistic component to the types of legislation we're seeing in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Because rather than attacking directly the issue of abortion itself, proponents of these laws attack women. More specifically, these laws say that women who choose to schedule an abortion procedure are not capable of deciding for themselves, without state intervention, whether they can pursue the wholly legal option of having an abortion. Again, to be clear, these laws explicitly say, just as their supporters frequently argue, that what's at issue here isn't the right of the woman to have an abortion: after the medically unnecessary and invasive ultrasound, and the 24-hour waiting period, she may 'choose freely' to have an abortion. The aspect of the abortion-scheduling that these laws take issue with is precisely the woman's independent decision-making, not the right to have an abortion.. The creators and supporters of these laws, who are probably against the legal right to have abortions, nevertheless avoid tackling the actual issue at hand, choosing instead a cowardly and misogynistic form of opposition that strikes at the heart not of a woman's right to choose, but of her capability of choice.
In the case of every other kind of behavior within the sphere of legal action, we, especially the conservatives and Republicans among us, assume that adult humans are capable of making rational choices for ourselves, without the intervention of government to steer us one way or another. Further, conservatives and Republicans believe fundamentally that not only do we not need the government to assist us as individuals in making rational decisions, but that we're actually better off when we make our own decisions without government intervention; that if the government intervenes to make decisions for us, our outcomes will be less favorable, and our society will deteriorate. Today, we can plausibly add a caveat to this sacred, fundamental belief: women, on the other hand, are not always capable of making rational decisions without the assistance of the government.
This is what I mean when I refer to as infantilizing this Republican strategy of drafting and promoting a series of legislative initiatives that places exceptional government requirements on women, who, we must assume, choose rationally and legally to schedule abortion procedures, and who make such choices under the sacred protection of freedom of conscience and in their capacity as free and and law-abiding American citizens, dignified by such freedom and such protections. This is what I mean when I say that this is a strategy that treats women like children, making women a special case for extra governance while seething against 'Obamacare' as that which would 'put the government between doctor and patient' (curiously enough), against 'invasive' and 'demeaning' security patdowns at airports, and other such violations of the liberty of individuals.
Why, you ask, would a major party in an election year coalesce around such policies, and others that strengthen the rights of the employer against those of the individual in providing contraception as part of health insurance? Don't they understand that women, today, also have the right to vote?
I have a grand and speculative theory about this generally anti-woman strategy. In the past I have written about what I see as the crux of American political disagreement and partisanship, the pluralists versus the singularists. In brief, I align much of contemporary conservatism with a singularist politics, which I think is more illustrative of this politics than the label 'conservative.' A singularist believes in a narrow set of characteristics of Americans and America, which I described this way:
America's success stems from America as a Christian nation with a free-market economy, a particular set of family values, a way of educating in the great Western European tradition, and particular versions of individualism and self-determinism that sanctify the pursuit of wealth for its own sake.
A pluralist, on the other hand, takes a fundamentally rights-based approach to Americanness and American identity, believing that the primary strength of the country is its great historical diversity and plurality, its privileging of the right to dissent, its welcoming of difference, creativity, etc. A singularist is less likely to call 'un-American' that which s/he disagrees with, or that which deviates from the mythical, Puritan narrative of the Shining City upon a Hill.
As I see it, contemporary conservatism is increasingly dominated by singularism. You see it trivially when the likes of Sarah Palin ridicule coastal city life, and hold as the 'real America' the 'American heartland' of the rural midwest, along with a set of values abstractly identified as 'heartland values.' More recently, in his presidential campaign, Rick Santorum has sought to portray as 'snobs' those who believe in the virtues of widespread higher education, suggesting that while a group of elitist professors in the image of President Obama indoctrinate innocent, unthinking students, the 'real' America is busy doing 'real' things in the 'real' world. For these singularists, there is no room in the American tent for people who simply enjoy the hustle and bustle of city life, or believe that education is among the highest virtues to aspire to. Nevermind what it would mean to be a conservative college professor from Boston or Chicago (no shortage of those advising Republicans on economic policy), or a New York financier backing the GOP. The singularists are so politically committed to defining what's acceptably 'American' and what's intolerably 'un-' or 'anti-American' that they're willing to give up, essentially, on America itself as a wider project.
In this vein, you will have noticed the prominence of 'states' rights' rhetoric among contemporary conservatives, particularly among national-level politicians attempting to speak about the types of invasive anti-abortion laws being proposed in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Virgina. Mitt Romney, for example, doesn't seem to believe that the Federal government ought to have an opinion on such laws that are, after all, legitimately proposed and moving through the democratic process at the state level (he's not entirely wrong about this, at least as Federal legislation currently stands); but he's happy to comment on the Federal 'Blunt' amendment to a transportation bill, an obviously transportation-related amendment that would allow employers to decided based on their conscience, religious or otherwise, what things it will or will not cover for employee health insurance.
What's going on here, I think, is that Republicans understand that at the national level--meaning with regard to the US population in the aggregate--the country is not as singularist as its party positions are. The US population in the aggregate probably does not want to scale back on contraception, or to force women to have medically unnecessary vaginal probes should they chose to schedule an abortion. The US population in the aggregate likely does not think that consumers need fewer protections, rather than more, or that it's snobbish to aspire for one's children to go to college, or that the poor should pay a higher percentage of taxes, or that gay people should have fewer rights under law than straight people, or that a gay war veteran should be booed rather than thanked. I think Republicans smartly recognize that these singularist positions are losing positions, increasingly so, at the national level. On the other hand, Republicans also recognize that there are regions and clusters throughout the US for which these singularist positions are very appealing. While I don't think that Republicans are giving up on the national stage, I do think they're strategically re-focusing on state-level politics, bolstered with intensifying 'states' rights' rhetoric at the national level, as a means of advancing singularist positions at the local level. By overtly ostracizing women who'd like to think that they can make important decisions about their own reproductive systems competently for themselves, without government intervention supposedly 'on their behalf,' Republicans can better identify smaller regions throughout the country that will go in for such policies, approaches, and beliefs, taking advantage of the intricacies of the American democratic-republican political system, and building strength and support from the ground-up, so to speak.
This raises many questions.
