Why a New Abortion Ban in Poland is Tearing the Country Apart
Tens of thousands of Poles have defied Covid-19 restrictions to protest against a new high court ruling that imposes a near-total ban on abortion, blocking major roads and bridges and chanting anti-government slogans.
The demonstrators, some dressed as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” have even disrupted masses and vandalized churches — a rare case of lashing out at the government’s ally, the Catholic Church, in the staunchly Catholic country.
The protests began Thursday over the ruling that tightened what was already one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws. But they have increasingly turned into a broader expression of anger at a right-wing government that opponents accuse of hijacking the judiciary and chipping away at the rights of women and minorities.
“What is happening in the public space, those acts of aggression, attacks, barbarism, is unacceptable,” the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Tuesday. “I don’t give my consent to attack people, churches, and the right to pursue values by others,” he added, appealing to protesters to refrain from acts of aggression.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-a-new-abortion-ban-in-poland-is-tearing-the-country-apart/ar-BB1arlDW?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP
A preview of what's to come here?
= new reply since forum marked as read
2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, [email protected]
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers
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I. The basic argument The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion. When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude."6
Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into a servant caste, a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.
This argument makes available two responses to the standard defense of such prohibitions, the claim that the fetus is a person. The first is that even if this is so, its right to the continued aid of the woman does not follow. As Judith Jarvis Thomson observes, "having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person's body -- even if one needs it for life itself."7
Giving fetuses a legal right to the continued use of their mothers' bodies would be precisely what the Thirteenth Amendment forbids. The second response is that since abortion prohibitions infringe on the fundamental right to be free of involuntary servitude, the burden is on the state to show that the violation of this right is justified. Since the thesis that the fetus is, or should at least be considered, a person seems impossible to prove (or to refute), this is a burden that the state cannot carry. If we are not certain that the fetus is a person, then the mere possibility that it might be is not enough to justify violating women's Thirteenth Amendment rights by forcing them to be mothers.
Parents can't be compelled to donate their organs to their child, even to save the child's life. Why does a fetus have more claim on a woman's organs than her child who has been born?
THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION A WOMAN CAN MAKE ISN'T YOURS.
