What I propose is this. Should this heinous Supreme Court draft attacking Roe actually come to pass, women ought to harness the power of the courts to exact real pain.
Since Alito and his compatriots seated on the Supreme Court are making the case to deny women full personhood in deference to primacy of the embryo, which I don’t recall was mentioned in the Constitution either, we have to use every tool in the arsenal.
As this attack is in reality an effort to promote authoritarianism by scaling back the economic and political empowerment of women and is anything but preserving the sanctity of life, let’s hit back.
As a twist on Texas Governor Abbott’s Senate Bill 8 in which virtually anyone can sue someone aiding or performing an abortion, let’s sue the catalyst for the reason for needing an abortion in the first place, given that women do not impregnate themselves.
I propose civil lawsuits based on the premise of the Unlawful Use of Sperm. Seeking compensation for damages is the most common reason for civil lawsuits in which the plaintiff pursues monetary compensation for personal injury, as in forced impregnation.
Someone, either deliberately or through negligence-oops, expired condom!-has caused you bodily harm, you can demand payment for hospital bills or lost wages…if you are no longer able to fully enjoy life and do the things you love, you can seek compensation for emotional distress.
Seems to me the floodgates can really open here. Hmm…nine months of medical care, possibly short term disability if bed rest is needed, hospital costs for labor, maybe premature birth and insanely high NICU costs, loss of wages postpartum, but maybe much longer if there is job loss resulting from the pregnancy.
Maybe the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest and it is the government standing in the way of the child or woman aborting the criminal’s offspring. After all, U.S. citizens have the right to sue both the state and federal government, meaning you can receive compensation if you were hurt or harmed by a government agency or employee. I would certainly say a twelve year old forced to carry her foster father’s baby would be entitled to ample financial compensation from the government, especially all those years of private therapy she will need to process and manage the trauma.
The Unlawful Use of Sperm lawsuit could apply to crime victims as well. On January 1, 2000, Population Today looked at research by Stanford Law School professor John J. Donohue III and University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt who considered several factors post Roe v. Wade on the premise there would be a decrease in criminality through the years 1991–1997.
Their findings; https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/
The timing. The abrupt drop in crime coincided with the coming of age (roughly 20 years later) of young people born after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Also, in states where abortion became legal before 1973, the drop in crime started sooner.
The magnitude. States with high abortion rates have experienced more dramatic declines — the authors estimate 15 percent higher declines — in crime.
The pervasiveness. The reduction in crime has occurred both in cities that have waged war on an acknowledged cause of violent crime, crack cocaine, and in cities relatively untouched by crack. Similarly, crime has fallen both in cities that have expanded their police forces and changed policing techniques and in cities that have not changed their policing techniques or expanded their police forces.
So, this sounds as if terminating a pregnancy caused by rape or incest prevents the introduction of additional offspring of let’s say a sociopath into the population. A pedophile. A sexual sadist. There will be more serial killers trolling for victims, more crimes in general if women cannot choose to abort. Who then will compensate these crime victims for their trauma or the family members left behind? That’s a lot of therapy.
If women don’t have control over their bodies, then someone has to be responsible for the fall-out that results.
Since the right to privacy is being challenged here, men cannot complain when required to submit DNA routinely upon turning say, age eighteen, to ensure the right guy is being sued civilly. They will just have to get over the assault on their privacy and lack of bodily autonomy just like women are expected.
If women are going to be harmed physically, emotionally and financially, if their ability to pursue life, liberty and happiness are compromised by the imposition of a minimum of an eighteen-year commitment to house, feed, care, and educate the byproduct of some man’s wayward sperm, they are well within their rights to sue for financial compensation. And this could be upwards in the millions if said offspring is a disturbed, sadistic pedophile criminal wreaking havoc on others.
Or we can be really radical here and simply accept the premise that women are people too, entitled to bodily autonomy as is any man and only they and their medical provider have any voice in their reproductive health.
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Previously Published on Medium
Paul Hudson on Flickr under CC License
