Fuck Georgia!
I need to explain that.
Or do I?
I mean, whether you share the sentiment or not, if you hear someone say “Fuck Georgia,”
you can at least make a couple of guesses why they might say that, can’t you?
In 1915 the Ku Klux Klan was reformed in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
In 1964 Lester Maddox refused to serve Black customers in his restaurant in Atlanta, and
the people of Georgia responded by electing him governor three years later!
This was Georgia’s state flag from 1956 to 2001, with the Confederate battle flag,
America’s most popular and enduring symbol of white supremacy, prominently featured.
And this is Georgia’s current state flag, adopted in 2003, which as you can see is based
on the Stars and Bars, which was the first official national flag of the Confederacy.
They got rid of one Confederate-inspired state flag and replaced it with another Confederate-inspired
state flag!
So, do I?
Surprisingly enough, this time my “fuck Georgia” is not inspired by the state’s
still blatant and pervasive racism, but by its recently enacted attack on the bodily
autonomy of its citizens, which came in the form of HB 481, also known as the Living Infants
Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act.
This bill was signed into law earlier this month by Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp – who,
in case you forgot, was just elected last year, in an election where he was also the
sitting Secretary of State, which means that he was a candidate in an election that he
was also technically in charge of overseeing, an election in which there were accusations
of voter suppression made against Kemp, who was also accused of practicing voter suppression
a few other times during his tenure as Secretary of State –
Fuck Georgia?
Anyway, HB 481 is Georgia’s version of a heartbeat bill – that’s a bill that outlaws
abortion in cases where the pregnancy is far enough along that a fetal heartbeat is detectable.
Fetal heartbeats can be detectable after as little as six weeks, which is before many
pregnant people even know they’re pregnant.
So for many people, a heartbeat bill amounts to a ban on abortion.
That’s bad enough.
We describe laws like this as abortion bans, which they are, but we could also describe
them as forced pregnancy laws, because it’s the same thing.
The law is saying to people who become pregnant that they now have no choice but to remain
pregnant.
And I know the anti-abortion folks will say, yeah, but it’s about the life of the baby,
why should the pregnant person be allowed to choose to do something that results in
the ending of someone else’s life?
But if you need a kidney transplant, and I’m the only matching donor, it’s still up to
me whether or not I give you my kidney.
Even if you’ll definitely die without it, and I’ll definitely be fine with one kidney,
the state can’t force me to give it to you.
It’s up to me.
Why?
Because it’s my body.
If I expect other people to respect my bodily autonomy – and I do – then it’s only
fair that I respect the bodily autonomy of others, which includes giving pregnant people
the right to decide whether or not they stay pregnant.
Practically speaking, giving people the right to control their own reproduction means making
contraception safe, accessible, and affordable, so people can control whether or not they
get pregnant in the first place, and doing the same thing for abortion, so people who
do get pregnant can control whether or not they stay pregnant.
That’s my position on abortion, that it should be safe, accessible, and affordable.
So I’m dead-set against heartbeat bills to begin with.
But the new Georgia law is even worse than a typical heartbeat bill.
HB 481 not only bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detectable, it declares that
a fetus with a detectable heartbeat is legally a person and entitled to all the same rights
and protections that any other person is entitled to in the state of Georgia.
What does that mean?
It means a doctor who performs an abortion could conceivably be prosecuted for first
degree murder, which carries a maximum penalty of death in Georgia.
It means a pregnant person who goes to a doctor for an abortion could conceivably be prosecuted
as a party to murder.
It means a pregnant person who leaves Georgia to get an abortion in a state where it’s
still legal could conceivably be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder once they
return to Georgia.
That’s not all.
As Georgia State Senator Jen Jordan explained on Twitter, HB 481 expands the legal definition
of “abortion” to include self-termination, when a pregnant person takes a drug to induce
an abortion themselves rather than go to a medical professional.
Someone who self-terminates could also conceivably be prosecuted for murder.
That’s still not all.
As Senator Jordan explains in an interview with Slate.com, the law could also allow the
state to prosecute people who miscarry, if it can be shown that the miscarriage was the
result of the actions or negligence of the pregnant individual.
Proponents of the law have tried to wave off these concerns, saying that the purpose of
the law is to stop abortions from happening, not to prosecute people who have them.
The only problem with that is, there have already been multiple attempts in Georgia
to prosecute people who terminated their own pregnancies or caused themselves to miscarry.
Five years ago, a woman from Albany, Georgia, who attempted to self-terminate by taking
an abortion pill was charged with malice murder.
She was too far along for the pill to work as it was intended, and she went into labor
and delivered the baby prematurely.
It died after about half an hour.
The murder charge was eventually dropped after prosecutors determined that the law – as
it was written back then – didn’t allow the prosecution of someone who terminates
their own pregnancy.
Twenty-two years ago an 18-year-old woman who shot herself in the stomach while eight
months pregnant was indicted for “acting with intent to produce a miscarriage.”
The case went before the Georgia State Court of Appeals, where the judge ruled in favor
of the defendant, writing in his decision that the state’s application of the statute
was “overbroad,” and that the potential ramifications of allowing people to be criminally
prosecuted for their miscarriages “certainly give pause.”
Among those potential ramifications: people who miscarry being prosecuted for smoking,
drinking, or using drugs during pregnancy; failing to obtain adequate prenatal care;
even exercising or dieting excessively, if such activity was found to contribute to a
miscarriage.
That ruling was made in 1998.
Back then, the judge knew that prosecuting people who miscarry their pregnancies was
a bad idea.
Today, a generation later, that bad idea could very easily become the norm in the State of
Georgia.
Speaking of potential ramifications, Andrew Fleischmann, an appellate attorney in Atlanta,
took to Twitter to lay out one of the less obvious consequences of HB 481:
If fetuses are legal persons with all applicable rights and protections, then all pregnant
people currently in jail or prison in the State of Georgia should be released, because
the fetuses they carry are being detained without cause.
As Fleishmann puts it, “If you're a criminal defense lawyer with a pregnant client, now
is the time to petition for a guardian ad litem or juvenile attorney to represent the
unborn to secure their release.”
Carliss Chatman, a professor at W&L Law School in Lexington, Virginia, tweeted a few questions
about possible consequences of the law, too:
“If a fetus is a person at 6 weeks pregnant, is that when the child support starts?
Is that also when you can’t deport the mother because she’s carrying a US citizen?
Can I insure a 6 week fetus and collect if I miscarry?”
She concludes, “Just figuring if we’re going here we should go all in.”
Anti-abortion activists like to say that life begins at conception.
But where the law is concerned, life has traditionally been thought to begin at birth.
It might not be the ideal position from a scientific or a philosophical viewpoint, but
for legal purposes it’s an acceptable compromise, because there’s usually clear dividing line
between “unborn” and “born.”
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court was compelled to look beyond that traditional dividing line
in order to find a compromise that both preserved the bodily autonomy of a pregnant person and
allowed the state to enact reasonable protections for the rights and health of fetuses.
The court rejected the notion that life begins at conception, citing in the majority opinion
of Roe v. Wade that since science, philosophy, and theology were all unable to definitively
determine when life begins, it was hardly the court’s place to speculate on the question.
Instead, the court established the trimester model: during the first three months of pregnancy,
the state could impose no regulation on someone’s ability to obtain an abortion other than minimal
medical standards to ensure the safety of the procedure.
During the next three months of pregnancy, the state could impose reasonable regulations
as long as they were in the interest of protecting the health of the pregnant person.
During the final three months of pregnancy, after the point at which most fetuses are
viable – that is, able to live outside the womb – the state may regulate abortion as
it sees fit, even up to the point of banning it, unless it is deemed necessary to preserve
the life or health of the pregnant person.
The trimester model allowed the interests of all involved parties to be protected: the
pregnant person could choose to get an abortion during the first two-thirds of pregnancy,
while the state could prohibit abortion and protect the life of the fetus after it passed
the point of viability in the last third of pregnancy.
By the way, you may have noticed that I’ve been using gender neutral language, saying
“pregnant person” rather than “woman” or “mother.”
In doing so, I’m not trying to say that abortion isn’t a gendered issue, because
it very much is.
You’d have to be completely oblivious to not notice the pronounced strains of misogyny
and paternalism that run through the anti-abortion movement.
The effort to ban abortion is predominantly driven by men who want to assert control over
women.
It’s one of the most pernicious modern attempts to preserve the gender imbalance that has
oppressed women and afforded unwarranted privileges to men since time immemorial.
I try to use gender neutral language here because I don’t want trans people to be
erased from this discussion.
The overwhelming majority of people who become pregnant and have to decide whether or not
to get an abortion are women, so this is definitely a women’s issue, but anyone with a functioning
uterus and ovaries can become pregnant, and that includes many trans men.
Their health and safety is already compromised by the ignorance and prejudice trans people
have to contend with just for being who they are, and it’s further threatened by laws
like HB 481, so I did not want to leave them out.
I know my decision to use gender neutral language throughout this video might not be the ideal
solution, but hopefully it, like Roe v. Wade’s trimester model, is at least an acceptable
compromise.
The point of this heartbeat bill – well, one of the points – is to move the starting
point of legal personhood back to even earlier in a pregnancy than Roe v. Wade did.
In the Roe decision, the court acknowledged that birth wasn’t always an acceptable dividing
line, that it was appropriate for the state to regulate or prohibit abortion beginning
after the point of viability.
Now, laws like HB 481 mean to move that dividing line back even further, to the point when
a fetal heartbeat is detectable.
Of course, supporters of such laws would really like to just ban abortion altogether, because
they believe life begins at conception.
But conception is kind of a murky, well, concept.
When does conception occur?
Fertilization?
The start of cell division?
Implantation?
The presence of a detectable heartbeat is something tangible which abortion opponents
can point to and say “There, see?
Now this is a person.”
I don’t think that’s true.
I think, scientifically and philosophically, the concept of personhood is a lot more complex
and contingent than most of us are comfortable admitting, being persons ourselves.
However, the question isn’t whether a six-week-old fetus with a detectable heartbeat ought to
be considered a person according to science or philosophy, but according to law.
And if we do consider that six-week-old fetus to be a legal person, the question then becomes,
do the rights of that person supercede the rights of the person in whose womb that fetus
sits?
For me, the answer to both questions is the same: no, a six-week-old fetus should not
be considered a legal person, but even if it is, the rights of that person should not
supercede the rights of the person carrying it.
I refer you back to my hypothetical organ transplant scenario: my right to my body supercedes
your right to my body, whether you’re an adult who needs my kidney, or a fetus who
needs my womb (if I had one).
The people who support HB 481 and other laws like it that have been enacted throughout
the country know that such laws violate the provisions of Roe v. Wade.
That’s the intent.
And that’s not me adding two and two and coming up with four – it’s the stated
intent of anti-abortion activists to pass laws that will provoke court challenges, appeal
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and hope that this time the more right-leaning
court decides in their favor and overturns Roe v. Wade.
With HB 481, such a ruling could be even more far-reaching.
Merely overturning Roe would be a disaster for reproductive rights, but it would allow
states that permitted abortion to continue to do so.
If HB 481 comes before the Supreme Court and the court upholds it – all of it, including
the section that declares a fetus with a detectable heartbeat to be a legal person – that ruling
could mean the end of legal abortion everywhere in the United States.
When abortion is no longer an option, pregnancy becomes compulsory.
I don’t think people should be forced to live in that world.
But some might say, “No one is forced to live in that world.
Pregancy isn’t compulsory.
If you wan’t want to be pregnant, don’t get pregnant.”
Fair enough.
Except the same movement that is working to ban abortion has also been working to restrict
access to birth control.
In Ohio, which recently enacted its own version of a heartbeat law, state legislators are
considering another bill that would prohibit insurance companies from covering what it
terms “nontherapeutic abortions,” that is abortions that are not necessary to save
the life of the pregnant person.
The bill’s definition of ‘nontherapeutic abortion’ includes the use of “drugs or
devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum.”
That definition describes many forms of contraception.
There’s an even darker sense in which these laws enforce compulsory pregnancy.
The Ohio heartbeat law does not include an exception for rape.
That means someone in Ohio who becomes pregnant as a result of being raped will be legally
required to continue that pregnancy.
This is still a hypothetical scenario, but just barely: last week it was reported that
an 11-year-old girl in Ohio has become pregnant after being raped by a 26-year-old man.
That girl still has the legal option to terminate that pregnancy, because Ohio’s heartbeat
law doesn’t go into effect until July.
After that?
Well, that’s the next pregnant rape survivor’s problem, isn’t it?
Fuck Ohio?
Fuck Ohio.