Just a little shaming ritual to make them feel better
by digby
Amanda Marcotte writes about this op-ed in the Times in which a woman discusses the fact that you have to go before a tribunal to justify your reasons for wanting an abortion in Israel. The piece is chilling but as Marcotte points out, it’s hardly unique.
In fact, the process of needing to get approval for an abortion is surprisingly common in a lot of Western European countries. In England, abortion is paid for by the National Health Service, but a woman has to get two doctors to sign off on the claim that she will be physically or mentally hurt by continuing the pregnancy. In Germany, it’s a similar story: Women need a doctor to claim mental distress, undergo counseling, and wait three days for the procedure. Same thing in Italy, where a doctor must detail a woman’s reasons for abortion and she has to wait a week to reflect. New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland: Requiring a woman to cough up a reason deemed acceptable enough by third parties is really standard practice. France used to have a similar law, but it was changed last year on the grounds that it’s sexist to have policies that carry the built-in assumption that women aren’t capable of making this choice on their own and need someone else to decide if their reasons are good enough.
She points out that these laws rarely result in denial of abortion and addresses the fact that when conservatives bring up these laws they rarely mention that abortion is also easily accessible and extremely affordable in those countries.
To me this just seems like a sort of prurient shaming ritual. At least in the US they are upfront about the desired result — the want to coerce women into changing their minds about having abortions. If abortions are routinely allowed then I can’t see what the purpose of doing this is except to humiliate women into divulging the details of their private lives to strangers for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to me.
And as Marcotte says:
There’s something very telling, though, about requiring women to tap-dance a little to earn an abortion, particularly when no one would dare suggest—for good reason—that women have to ask for permission to give birth. It shows that attitudes about abortion are actually shaped by attitudes about sex and gender roles. Women are supposed to want babies, and if they don’t, they’re supposed to be apologetic and do penance for defying their “natural” role.
I think that’s right. There is this assumption that women are having abortions for frivolous reasons, but that belief collides with the idea that women are human beings with a right to self-determination. The anti-choice fanatics would like to be able to simply deny that they have that right and force them to give birth against their will under all circumstances. But there’s obviously some discomfort with that among other, less clear-headed anti-abortion folks so they’ve developed a ritual shaming mechanism that allows women to have human rights but requires them to humiliate themselves to exercise them. It serves the purpose of allowing women to have practical control while perpetuating the broader sex and gender roles that keep them in their place.
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