Single-Issue Voting: Reason #1
I was just remembering what I said a while back about how reproductive rights really are a litmus test. It's not that I automatically trust anyone who appears to be pro-choice (Feinstein), it's just that I definitely don't trust anyone who isn't. Basically, no one who doesn't believe a woman should control her own body can be trusted to place individual rights and human compassion above money and repression. Period.
[Avedon Carol, "Political Stew", The Sideshow, 17 December 2007.]
In the original post Ms. Carol was making a point about Harry Reid, but I thought her remark was much more general. I thought about making some remarks of my own about misguided political rhetoric concerning "single-issue voters" — on this and other issues — but I don't want to dilute this observation, so I'll leave extrapolation to the interested reader.
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on Thursday, 20 December 2007 at 00.17
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My eighth- and ninth-grade social studies teacher warned in some detail about the folly of voting on the basis of a single issue, unless maybe it's on the scale of importance of abolishing slavery. She made a believer out of me, and I've cautioned others about doing voting on a single issue.
However, I strongly believe women's right to choose vs. criminalizing abortion is far from being a single issue. That's because it's really not just about women's autonomy over their own body, important and basic a right as that is.
Criminalizing abortion inevitably creates a two-tiered system of justice, which in fact guarantees a system of injustice. What happens is, affluent, worldly wise women go to where abortions are legal, or to places where they're performed discreetly as a "D&C" by a qualified practitioner.
Poor women and underage girls wind up going to quacks, butchers and dangerous amateurs or trying some cockamaie home "remedy" too often with disastrous results.
Well-off women and practitioners who perform their "procedures" get no grief from the law. Poor women are at serious risk, and with few or no resources with which to defend themselves legally.
The long, ugly history of abortion bans make clear the above will be commonplace. It's not just a possibility. No way can it be considered an unintended consequence.
So, people who demand abortion be made illegal aren't just denying a fundamental individual human right, they're messing with what's supposed to be a system based on equal justice for all.
Bad business doesn't get much worse than that.