on bill

It is reprehensible, he’s a misogynist, it’s pop and trite and terrible, all those mucousy scribblings, yes, but anyway I occasionally read Perezhilton.com. And among his glossary of hate crimes is the increasingly frequent pointing of a fascist finger at women who behave “inappropriately” while pregnant. Bad bad pregnant woman charged with a DUI, he publishes her photo like she’s Mansonic and on the run.

This month the rallying against bill C484 is revving up. The “Unborn victims of crime act” is a private member’s bill that has already passed second reading. It makes harm to a fetus a separate crime to that of harm to the pregnant woman, effectively giving personhood to the fetus. Supposedly an anti-violence-against-women response to an Edmontonian woman’s death by bullet-to-the-belly when she was six months pregnant, the bill’s introducer, MP Ken Epp, has been seen protesting choice. It is true that the greatest threat to a pregnant woman’s life is homicide, but similar bills in the US did nothing to amplify penalties against abusive partners (not that that necessarily reduces domestic violence anyway), and did everything to criminalize a woman’s actions during her pregnancy. If it is a crime to harm a fetus, a pregnant woman’s drug use (even legal and highly necessary drug use), addiction, and hell, any activity that she might fall down doing is criminalized.

The crass and nauseating extent of the bill’s potential ramifications is enormous. Forget the what-ifs (what if she’ll commit suicide without her anti-psychotics? What if she lives or works around second hand smoke? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant? What if she was trying to self-abort?). Start with WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU THAT YOU NEED TO CONTROL PEOPLE SO BAD, MISTER EPP? And why would I be so naïve as to imagine this bill will not affect the provision of abortion, the purposeful termination of a fetus?

It is disappointing if a child is born with FAS. But more children are born with disabilities that have no link to alcohol. Are we also going to criminalize mothers with bad genes? Unfavorable uterine environments? Advanced maternal age related to having ambition and a successful career?

Where the hell will this Atwoodian state reproductive control end?

Obviously this bill needs to be tossed. But more broadly, let’s face facts: the vast majority of women can and WILL get pregnant. Women, duh, struggle with addiction, mental illness, and pain. They drive cars, go running, and get out of bed in the morning. Life is risky. Pregnant women are putting the fetus at risk by carrying the pregnancy. Pregnant women are vulnerable to violence because some men for some sick reason hate women even more when they are pregnant.

Today a possible “National Birthing Strategy” was announced in Ottawa. Again, forget how Atwoodian that title is. Ignore how it makes you imagine being raped by (at the very best) a turkey baster. Pretend you believe the bureaucrats behind it actually thought it would invoke safe and gentle births awash in olive oil and lavender and love. Also forget how irrelevant it is for the feds to fund a national strategy affecting what is in provincial jurisdiction only. Forget the waste.

The strategy is a reaction to the dramatic jump in NICU exports to the US. We have so many neonates in need of intensive care that we do not have the resources to provide, we send them southwards at huge expense and inconvenience to the new parents.

A number of explanatory factors undoubtedly lie behind the surge. The key issue is that more of these babies are being born AND improved technology means more of them can live, provided the technology and providers are available, which they are not. Yes, drugs and alcohol and bad luck can result in serious neonatal complications. But beyong that, even though maternal age at first birth (and associated complications) is rising steadily, and more mothers are using fertility treatments that increase the risk of multiples (and of complications), the supply side of neonatal care hasn’t shifted with these trends. Does anybody think that difficult newborn cases are going to stop if the NICUs just persist in being underfunded?

Pregnant women are not healthy sedate obedient married 27-year olds who refuse to touch a drink or a prozac or a coffee for almost a year. They aren’t. They are 40 and drank seventeen martinis that Saturday before their first missed period and they are addicted to benson and hedges lites and yeah they know it’s bad. But none of these things are crimes nor do they merit passive aggressive refusal or diversion of health care. Pregnant women are women and JUST women. They don’t need extra doses of judgment and disciplinary action.

Men who fatally shoot women in the gut, however, need incarceration and rehab.