Here is something to be extremely grateful for……that you don’t reside in Ohio. According to this article in Salon, the Ohio State House just passed a bill that would make it illegal for a woman to have an abortion after six weeks. Of course a pregnancy can usually only be determined by the woman herself or through medical tests at approximately six weeks. So with this bill, if signed into law by Gov. Kasich, would effectively ban all abortions in Ohio.
This law is evidence that the anti-choice advocates in Ohio have gone off the deep end against women. Some of the harshest aspects of the bill extends beyond their concerns about the welfare of the fetus. For a variety of reasons, they believe that all women should be required to bear children One Ohio stateswoman actually announced on the floor of the state house that motherhood is a necessity.. Her comment suggests that women who go childless are selfish, lazy and do a disservice to the country.
It is exactly this kind of highly patriarchal rhetoric, that makes it easy to label most of the Ohio anti-choice crowd as misogynists. These people hate other women and they resent them primarily because they are choosing to retain control of their bodies. Some men, we know, can elicit hate for women- because they like to keep the notion of subjugated women alive and well. When women use family planning, their very act of independence can be viewed by some men as a threat to the established patriarchy.
The reasoning of women who subscribe to anti-choice is far more complex than the men’s. After all they are potential child bearers themselves. But they too, do not like to see other women showing independence. They can learn to resent childless women and women who have small families. After all, the thinking goes, they must be lazy and selfish for eschewing all the labor that goes into raising many children. And for women who bore many children, and toiled mightily as a result, they can also resent women who pass up that particular challenging lifestyle.
Some of this embedded thinking is cultural and/or religious. Some anti-choice women for cultural reasons believe that large families are the tradition and should be aspired to.. (On small farms in the past, large families were considered an economic necessity.) Other women have large families for religious reasons believing that the status of their wombs should be left to the micromanagement of a higher power. And thus they can easily resent women who they think, are defying some kind of natural law that says that women must bear all the children they possibly can.
The implications of this reprehensible bill actually passing in Ohio are profound. The pro-birth crowd (They don’t seem to care a whit about the tragedies connected to unwanted children after they are born) will go to any lengths to deprive women of their right to choose. Pro-choice advocates must be on alert and willing to thwart all attempts like this one in Ohio to embroil American women’s bodies into the legal system.
If this deluded action by the Ohio State House infuriates you, consider Planned Parenthood in your end of year giving plans. This article will raise your awareness of how women’s rights are jeopardized by this bill.