In the ongoing legal battle over whether Missouri inmates have a right to access abortion services, an appeals court panel heard arguments this week as to whether the state is required to transport incarcerated women off-site to have an abortion.
As we've noted before Missouri usually has from 35 to 50 pregnant inmates in any given month and surveys of incarcerated women have shown that more than 83 percent have had a history of unplanned pregnancy.
RH Reality Check sums up nicely what's at stake here:
For more than twenty years, courts have ruled that incarcerated women retain their abortion rights, and yet for all those twenty years, jails and prisons have continued to violate those rights. Across the country, women have been told by sheriffs to get a judge’s permission, something that takes time, money, and the services of a lawyer. Women are routinely told that they must pay not only for the abortion, but for the costs of employees’ time and of transportation, down to turnpike tolls, even though people in prison have a constitutional right to medical care. In many cases, these requirements are unwritten and ad-hoc, reflecting the whim of local officials. From California to New York, from Louisiana to Pennsylvania, women have wound up carrying pregnancies to term because jail officials stood in their way until it was too late to have an abortion – or until they gave up.Every woman has a lot to think about when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, but for women inside, the question takes on special urgency. Women may be concerned about the kind of prenatal care they will receive in prison and worried about what the future holds. Those facing long prison sentences may find the prospect of having a child unbearable. A woman serving as little as fifteen months can lose her parental rights if she has to place her child in foster care, even if she has never been accused of child abuse or neglect.
I'd add that if the state of Missouri regularly transports incarcerated women as many as three hours off-site to take the State Board of Cosmetology exam, the legislature don't have grounds to complain about transporting them that far for abortion care. If they're worried about the cost of gas, the state legislators could always consider rolling back some of the TRAP laws that make it cost-prohibitive for abortion providers to open clinics in more counties. (Riiiight....)
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You know, I'm sort of surprised by this. I would think the type of woman who is in prison is not the kind that the right-wing is typically worried about carrying a baby to term. Their agenda (for the most part) seems to be about forcing white women to carry a pregnancy to term. We all know the prison population is made up primarily of poor women and women of color. Since when do the wingnuts care about those women? Plus you would think it would be cheaper for the state in the long-run to provide an abortion than it would to provide prenatal care and pay the hefty hospital bill.
As a resident of Missouri I'm not surprised by this at all. The government is currently doing all it can to shut down all of the Planned Parenthood services in the state. With a Republican Governor, Senate and House, it's no shock that they are trying to control the reproductive options of the women in prison.
Their agenda (for the most part) seems to be about forcing white women to carry a pregnancy to term. We all know the prison population is made up primarily of poor women and women of color. Since when do the wingnuts care about those women?
Babygirl,
Here's your chance to re-think your attitude about pro-lifers. Maybe we actually think that poor black babies also have a right to life. I know it's earth-shattering, but you're a big girl.
Doesn't this also raise disturbing questions about how some female inmates are becoming pregnant to begin with?
Exactly Sara,
There is very little said here about the reality of prison guards (authoritarian sadists generally [sorry to generalize]) raping the inmates. I saw some statistics in Ohio once, and the numbers were very high. Does anyone have good data or will this be another research project for me?
Here's your chance to re-think your attitude about pro-lifers.
Re-think how? They're busy stripping women of their basic rights. Business as usual.
Also, what mirm said. There's a pretty good chance these women were impregnated as a result of rape.
"Maybe we actually think that poor black babies also have a right to life. "
What about muslim babies? You know, the ones that grow up to run around Germany with T-shirts that read “We will outbreed the infidels, etc�. Remember that? Is it ok to abort those? Or is it only ok to bomb them after they are born?
And those same poor black babies when they are outside of the womb, oh we can’t have state-sponsored health insurance for them, that would be communism.
Sojourner dahlin,
I think that all children have a right to life. I do not think that anyone - mothers-to-be, terrorists, or murderers - have the right to strip that right from people. Clear?
Yeah, I HATE state-sponsored health insurance. Guess what? I wasn't the one who fucked and get knocked up; until I get state-sponsored orgasms, I'm not shelling out for the burdens of sex.
I'm sorry that you are mentally incapable of distinguishing between murder and freedom. Last time I checked, by the way, communism has killed what, over 100 million people? That was just Stalin. Pro-life means anti-communism, chicky.
You people really need help. You want black babies to die and your only argument against pro-lifers is "You're bad people!" Well, for y'all who flunked Logic 101, "ad hominem" attacks do not undermine the argument.
Scarlet,
We don't want to strip women of their rights; no one has the right to kill another human. "Right to Life" means just that: the right of ALL humans to life. That includes black fetuses.
Gotta love how the warm fuzzsy liberals are the ones advocating a system that has had a substantial negative effect on the black population. Then your only response is a bunch of ad hominem attacks.
Face it: the last great civil rights battle is for the right to fetal life. Jump on the train if you would like, but don't pretend that it's not there. "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Dred Scott: slaves aren't people. Pro-life: fetuses are people, too. Parallels are stunning.
(Eye roll.) Keep up the killing. If you do it long enough, you'll have your dreams of white supremacy. :) :)
I wouldn't assume that the majority of these women were raped by guards. It happens, but I've seen MANY pregnant women sentenced to prison. Either they were committing crimes while pregnant, or (more commonly) get pregnant while their cases are pending. Some try to use their pregnancies as a bargaining chip at sentencing - "please don't make me have my baby in jail!"
If you're in jail and pregnant, you still have a legal right to get an abortion. It's terrible that prison officials feel they have a right to force female prisoners to give birth.
@oneophile: Abortion is legal. Your personal disagreement with the law is not a license to prevent women from doing what they are legally entitled to do. If abortion ever becomes illegal, transporting female prisoners to get abortions will be moot. Right now, however, abortion is not illegal.
Sara,
When I read about abortion access for women in prison, I always think of women who come to prison pregnant. It's really horrifying to think of women raped in prison and then forced to continue the pregnancy. And then the horrible conditions of giving birth in prison! It's like they want women in prison to have the worst experiences possible. I don't understand. I understand it's often difficult to prove rape beyond a reasonable doubt, but if we're talking guards and prisoners can't we expect the guards to be able to control themselves during work and fire them if they can't, even if we can't prove it was unconsensual? If I had sex at my work place I'd expect to be fired. Sane policies like that I think would cut down on rape a lot, but first people would have to care. (ggrr)
As for the pro-lifers, I think their position here is that they don't want their tax dollars spent on abortion. They've been pretty consistent on that. I think pro-choicers should get together and lobby the government not to spend our tax dollars on healthcare for pro-lifers. Maybe they'd feel differently when it's their healthcare being denied.
Oeno,
It’s always fun to watch you show your true colors, but I don’t recall having seen you so very incoherent before. Did you even get the reference to communism or healthcare? Let me explain it to you:
The point was that you so-called pro-lifers are not interested in polices that actually help the conditions of *born*, living human beings. In fact you vehemently oppose any such policies and accuse those who do support them of being commies. What does “Stalin killed people yada yada� have anything to do with this argument.
Oh, and what part of my comment constitutes “"ad hominem" attacks�?
Ok, I am done feeding the troll.
Whenever I think of women being pregnant in prison, I generally assume that they arrived there pregnant. But my God, being RAPED by a prison guard? I wonder if the men who do this ever get punished for it. Fuck.
I was actually thinking along the same lines as babygirl; for all the time and effort the right has spent trying to keep poor women and minority groups in general (who, at least in California where I used to live, made up a substantial portion of the prison populations) from having children (I'm thinking in particular of the organization formerly known as CRACK), you'd think that they'd WANT women in prison to have abortions. But I guess they just want women in prison to have children who later become wards of the state.
If these right-wingers are mostly Republican, why would they want to spend millions of tax dollars for a woman to have a child? I mean $10,000 to have a child (not including prenatal care) as opposed to $300-$500 for an abortion? Common sense says that will raise tax dollars, which of course they are against. Where's the consistency?
" for all the time and effort the right has spent trying to keep poor women and minority groups in general (who, at least in California where I used to live, made up a substantial portion of the prison populations) from having children (I'm thinking in particular of the organization formerly known as CRACK)"
Didn't that group try to discourage addicts of any color (including white) from having addicted newborns? Or am I confusing CRACK with some other group?
Mina, CRACK (AKA, "Project Prevention") promotes sterilization of women addicted to drugs. Yes, these women may be white, but we all know that the overwhelming majority of crack addicts are black.
Babygirl wrote: we all know that the overwhelming majority of crack addicts are black.
If you were being sarcastic, please disregard this post.
If not, I have to say that I was disheartened to read that comment. How, exactly, do we know who (exactly) is addicted to crack? Is there a registry?
If you are relying on prison statistics, you are only counting people who are caught and convicted - and not all of those people are addicts.