According to Think Progress (via ACLU), “2013 is shaping up to be the worst year for reproductive freedom in recent history”.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 2011 saw the highest number of anti-abortion restrictions enacted on the state level since 1985, when the women’s health organization first began tracking the data. 2012 was right behind with the second highest number of restrictive abortion laws. And now, even following an presidential election season that heavily emphasized the ongoing War on Women — post-election polling suggests that Mitt Romney’s right-wing positions on women’s health issues may have cost him the White House — local lawmakers in red states are continuing to pursue a stringently anti-abortion agenda.
The ACLU considers the mounting pile of state-level restrictions to be a “coordinated campaign” to eventually ban abortion in every clinic in every state. The group points out that there are three prongs of attack in this national strategy: making abortion services inaccessible for women, making it impossible for abortion doctors to continue their work, and forcing abortion clinics to close their doors.
Since the first part of that three-tiered strategy often involves outright bans on abortion, like the unprecedented 6-week ban in North Dakota and 12-week ban in Arkansas, it tends to incite the most outrage and receive the most media coverage. But the second and third tactics employed by the right wing are also incredibly successful at limiting women’s reproductive options — and, since those laws can more easily fly under the radar, they can actually be more dangerous.
And the War on Women encompasses issues that have traditionally been less politically polarizing than abortion access. When taking into account other legislation intended to police women’s body, like measures regarding birth control or teenage pregnancy, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that states proposed more than 600 provisions about reproduction in the first three months of 2013 alone.
And while state level measures continue to make abortion all but impossible for millions of women (of course, by and large, poor women who can’t afford to have it done at places where it is still available), attempts at total bans at federal level haven’t stopped, symbolic as they may. Haven’t stopped, as in, happening literally today:
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, authored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), bans abortions after 20 weeks, based on the medically disputed theory that fetuses can feel pain at that point. It contains exceptions for women whose lives are in danger as well as some rape and incest victims who can prove that they reported their assaults to criminal authorities, but it contains no exceptions for severe fetal anomalies or situations in which the woman’s health is threatened by her pregnancy.
In essence the bill tries to turn the entire US into another country where pregnant women die because they can’t have terminations (like Savita, the woman in the picture above).
What have secular organizations done in the face of the horrifying attack against individual rights, fueled to a great extent by religion? Not much. The Freedom From Religion Foundation ran the ad “It is time to quit the catholic church” in response to bishops’ lawsuit against the contraception mandate, but that was about it.
This is a shame. Organizations such as FFRF and American Atheists take on court battles against symbols of religious endorsement on government and public property, and that is all good work and needs to be done. However, it will do little to convince the broader public that secularism is something they should care about. If the only image that people have of secularism is litigation against nativity scenes and ten commandments displays, they will miss the elephant in the room, which is religious intrusion into their personal lives. This is a dangerous church-state entanglement, and it can cost lives.
The same can be said for organizations focused primarily on skepticism. The very basis of the House bill mentioned above is the claim that fetuses “feel pain”. This is not a matter of scientific consensus. Aren’t skeptics supposed to come out against public policies based on pseudoscience?
Secularists and skeptics should be at the forefront of fighting these laws, not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is an important outreach opportunity for them. But it seems they are looking the other way in the face of vanishing personal rights, motivated by religion and grounded in pseudoscience.
