Roe v. Wade Decision Affects All Pregnant Women, Organization Says
Posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 and is filed under Political & General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Roe v. Wade decision affects all pregnant women the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) says. And they think the proposed supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor should be asked the question: “Is there a point in pregnancy when you believe women lose their civil rights?”
“Review of both civil and criminal cases since Roe v. Wade makes clear that what is at stake in each nomination to the Supreme Court is not only the right to choose abortion,” said Lynn M. Paltrow, Founder and Executive Director of NAPW, “but also the fundamental issue of whether or not pregnant women are recognized as full Constitutional persons under the law.”
The Roe v. Wade decision rejected the idea that a fetus is a person that is granted individual rights, separate rights from those of the women in which whom they grow. Even still, the organization says that anti-abortion claims of fetal rights are used to justify policing and punishment of pregnant women who want to carry their pregnancies to term.
They point out that pregnant women have been taken into custody and forced to have certain medical procedures done on behalf of the child, like cesarean sections, for example. Some pregnant women have been arrested for being in “dangerous” locations while being pregnant, or even arrested for denying certain medications while pregnant.
The organization concedes that most of the lawsuits that were brought against pregnant women were challenged unsuccessfully because Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, but a change of the dynamic of the Supreme Court could change that.
