This is some chilling stuff from Oklahoma. A minority of state Supreme Court Justices make it clear that there is no constitutional right to life for women — only their fetuses. They say that if the state wants to protect the vessels they’re going to have to write a law demanding it. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist:
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, dozens of reports from red states have told of hospitals withholding care from pregnant patients until they are hemorrhaging or suffering catastrophic infections, lest the doctors be prosecuted for providing an illegal abortion. When confronted with these effects of abortion bans, anti-abortion advocates often blame the doctors for misinterpreting the law. There are exceptions for medical emergencies, they say, and it should be easy enough for a doctor to tell when a patient is in deep enough danger to protect her medical team from possible prison time.
This is a mealy-mouthed attempt at misdirection. Health crises are never so predictable and containable; they do not progress in linear fashion, with easy off-ramps at every level of endangerment. But anti-abortion conservatives would never admit this, because it would imperil their entire mythology of pregnancy. So they pretend that their laws will never endanger patients’ lives and issue grave, self-exonerating statements when faced with an anecdote to the contrary.
Most of the time, that is. In Oklahoma, a recent set of chilling dissents from right-leaning justices shamelessly lays plain how the anti-abortion movement justifies its assault on pregnant people’s right to life.
The dissents come from the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 this week that the state’s near-total abortion ban must include an exception for cases in which there is “a reasonable degree of medical certainty or probability” that a pregnancy would endanger a patient’s life, whether due to a current medical condition or to one that would likely arise later in the pregnancy. Previously, the justices explained in their ruling, Oklahoma law only allowed exceptions when patients were “in actual and present danger.”
This ruling will hopefully provide clarity to doctors and save some patients from undue suffering and mortal peril. But to the four Republican-appointed conservatives who dissented from the majority ruling, the question of whether women should be forced to risk their lives—for a fetus that, in many cases, would stand no chance of survival outside the womb—shouldn’t have been any of their business.
“The Oklahoma Constitution, as currently worded, does no expressed or hiddent [sic] establish a fundamental abortion right under any circumstance. Any change to that status quo must come from the people or their elected representatives,” writes Chief Justice M. John Kane IV in his dissent.
On the surface, such a proclamation seems sensible and straightforward. But in the context of an abortion ban exception to preserve a patient’s life, Kane’s argument takes on a new tenor. If a patient does not have the right to abortion under any circumstance, unless the privilege is granted to her by the people and their legislators, the people and their legislators could legally force her to die.
If Kane had his way, that possibility would remain on the table. “The unborn have no voice, say, or consideration in the opinion of the majority,” he writes, urging Oklahoma to commence “the thorny medical, philosophical, and practical debate of balancing the developing life of the unborn against the life of the mother.” But, he cautioned, there is no right to any abortion—even a lifesaving one—“to consider as part of that dialogue.”
Justice Dana Kuehn offered a similar take in her own dissent. Even if she believed that the Oklahoma Constitution included the right to a lifesaving abortion, she writes, she would not support the court’s attempt to define what a lifesaving abortion is: “That task belongs to either the people or their legislative representatives.”
Elsewhere in her dissent, Kuehn writes, “The Legislature and people of Oklahoma have had over a century to preserve this exception as a Constitutional right. They have not done so.”
In other words: If Oklahomans want to sentence pregnant women to death, let them go ahead and do it.
There is a faction in the anti-abortion movement that believes women should always sacrifice their lives for the fetus They even have their own patron saint, a woman who chose to die rather than have an abortion.
This is obviously the choice of any pregnant woman should she be faced with such a terrible situation. But to say that a bunch of throwback weirdos in some backwater state legislature, mostly men, are the ones who should decide if women’s lives are important enough to save is an abomination. If there is a right to life, surely pregnant women have it. Surely…