Re: Tammy Skinner case: Is it crystal clear “Any person” means “other than the mother
The woman is a hysterical selfish lunatic
I disagree.
No organism has any right to take up residence inside her body and sustain itself by leeching away her bodily resources if she doesn't want it there.
It's not murder to oust an unwanted invader from your body; I don't care if said invader is nine months old or nine
years old.
No woman is under any moral obligation to host an unwanted parasite in her body any more than any man is.
What I perceive this tragedy to be is a failure of the system.
The person who was failed is Ms. Skinner.
The system itself should be held accountable for it's failure to help her.
Tammy Skinner, age 22, is a single mother of two living in poverty.
Her bodily resources, particularly her iron levels, were almost
without a doubt already severely depleted when she conceived her third pregnancy in just a few years. Her
emotional and psychological resources, apparently, were at an end, as well.
It was
without a doubt in Tammy Skinner's
and her childrens' best interests that she terminate this third pregnancy.
But perhaps, as a single mother of two living in poverty, Ms. Skinner was unable to lay hands on the 450+ dollars that an abortion costs.
She has, after all, two children to support.
How the #$%@ do you suppose she's going to come up with that sort of money in two months, tops (D&Cs are only performed until gestational week 12).
After
that window of opportunity closed, she still could've had an abortion... she could have left her kids, traveled to one of the few states that still offers
second trimester abortions, and paid 3,000 to 4,000 dollars for the procedure.
Oops, guess she wasn't able to manage that, either. Whatta loser.
If privileged white women from the upper and middle-class socioeconomic brackets didn't have access to safe, legal abortion, you'd see many more cases of women blowing their guts out or carving themselves up with knives, because unfortunately involuntary occupation by an unwanted invading organism is simply intolerable for some people, in some situations, and death or self-mutilation is preferable.
Of course, privileged white women from the upper and middle-class socioeconomic brackets never have and never
will be without access to reproductive choice, whether abortion is legal or illegal at any given time. Primarily, only the Tammy Skinners of this world- only the poor- are truly affected by such restrictions. And for the Tammy Skinners of this world, abortion might as well be illegal
already; Roe v Wade might as well already have been overturned, because so many obstacles have been placed in the way of their obtaining safe, legal health care in recent years that the option might as well not even exist at all.
In a case like Tammy Skinner's, I imagine that shooting herself felt less like a choice than an
imperative.
Tammy Skinner could not afford, in any sense of the word, another child.
And there is not the slightest guarantee that any child of Tammy Skinner's would've been adopted.
Tammy Skinner is black; state foster care systems are clogged with unwanted black children; most will remain in state care until they age out of it.
Even if a loving adoptive couple was just dying to adopt a little black baby like Ms. Skinner's, however, it is Ms. Skinner's perogative whether or not she wishes to allow her body to be used as an incubator or contribute any more of her (almost assuredly already depleted) bodily resources to such an endeavor.
We can't force pregnant women to gestate fetuses if they do not want to.
A society that promotes forced childbearing is barbaric.
A society that makes contraception and/or safe, legal abortion inaccessable to women like Ms. Skinner, a society that makes reproductive health care either financially or geographically/logistically out of reach, is for all intents and purposes engaging in the barbaric practice of forced breeding; or at least, it is forcing women like Tammy Skinner to take guns and blow their own guts out in order to avoid being forced to breed... and then reviling them for their desperate actions.
As if
any of you would've ever though of Tammy Skinner as anything but inhuman garbage, anyway, even if she'd given birth to twenty children.
You- I- WE as a society
treat the Tammy Skinners of this world as garbage.
We show them in every way possible that we are indifferent to the desperate conditions they exist under. We show our indifference to their children, and to their struggles to raise them to adulthood under conditions we can't imagine.
And then we act appalled-
personally affronted- when they reach the end of their ability to cope and take matters into their own hands rather than turning to us for help. As if we've
ever acknowledged their humanity or their children's humanity.
But isn't it fun, isn't it
delicious... to show
just how superior we are to someone like Tammy Skinner, by giving vent to a bunch of pompous, rhetorical bluster?
Some people must be
really insecure, if they get off by bombastically announcing their moral superiority to an abused and poverty-stricken single mother who shot herself in the stomach.
:roll:
