The Heartless Way Conservatives Treat Young Women Who Choose to Have Babies

Last week, “The Rachel Maddow Show” ran a story on Michigan politics that had footage so distressing it apparently created an avalanche of mail for the show.  The new Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, signed a law that allows the state to functionally dissolve local governments and hand them over to “emergency managers,” who are using their new powers to enact a series of wish list items for conservatives under the guise of fiscal responsibility.  It’s a project that’s been dubbed “fiscal martial law”, and the latest victims were a group of school girls that were manhandled by police and arrested, all because they wanted to keep their current educational opportunities.  Maddow’s show ran the unnerving footage of police shoving, cuffing and pushing around teenage girls, while the sirens wailed over the girls’ shouts and cries.  

The girls were arrested for holding a sit-in to protest the closing of their school, the Catherine Ferguson Academy, which was established to serve students who are pregnant or mothering.  The school provides day care and parenting classes, and focuses on getting students to college and giving them skills that help future self-sufficiency.  Supposedly “pro-life” conservatives should not only be supporting this school, but demanding that every high school in the country provide these services to teenage mothers.  After all, these girls did what anti-choicers ask of them.  They chose to have their babies.  And now the very same conservatives that wax sentimental about “choosing life” are working to shut down the educational opportunities of young women who did what anti-choicers want, by having their babies.  

The imminent shut down of Catherine Ferguson demonstrates the emptiness of Republican claims that they oppose reproductive rights because they value life.  Instead, Republican policies are rooted in a sadistic desire to punish and control, and to deprive women---especially young women, poor women, and women of color---of any opportunities whatsoever.  Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, explained, “I think the range of actions being taken against pregnant women reflects what has been underlying attacks on Roe and abortion all along, a fundamental disrespect for pregnant women, regardless of what decisions they make. The combination of attacks that seek to deprive women not only of reproductive health care but food (through cuts to the WIC program) as well as education for pregnant teens makes clear that it is pregnant women's personhood and not just their right to choose that is being targeted.” 

Michigan Republicans are trying to put pregnant women in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If you don’t want to have the baby, good luck to you trying to get an abortion in Michigan.  The state already has been given an F by NARAL, especially for heavy restrictions on abortion access for young and low income women.  The state also has onerous waiting periods, complete with false information about the risks of abortion.  But some Republican legislators don’t think women who want to terminate pregnancies are hassled enough.  State senator David Robertson has introduced a bill that would require abortion clinics not only to do an ultrasound, but to provide hard copy pictures of it to the patient before she’s allowed to have her abortion.  This adds to the expense of an abortion, as well as creates time constraints that make it harder for clinics to serve all their patients with the best level of care. It also treats pregnant women making difficult decisions like they’re addled-minded morons, demonstrating further the amount of contempt that conservatives have for the personhood of pregnant women.