Abortion

ISSUES OF ABORTION CROSS CULTURALLY--Japan and Buddhism

(1) Japanese obstetricians do not practice aggressive prenatal screening; women are encouraged to accept the baby that is born, and fetal selection for birth abnormalities or sex is regarded as unethical. 

(2) A fetus is humanized—so much so that obstetricians routinely hail their clients as “Mom,” even from the early stages of the pregnancy. 

(3) At the same time, terminating a pregnancy is accepted as a morally sound means of preventing a situation in which a child would go uncared for. Small statues commemorating the unborn at Buddhist temples mark an institutionalized space in which women mourn their aborted fetuses.

(4) The discourse of “choice” offers little space to recognize the conflicted feelings often associated with terminating a pregnancy on the part of women, abortion rights advocates, and even health care practitioners themselves. 

(5) The fetus is humanized in many contexts, and yet abortion is ethically acceptable. Even second trimester abortions are legal in Japan. 

(6) The question of when life begins, central to U.S. abortion politics, is less important to the Japanese ethical framework. The focus is neither on the rights of the mother nor on the personhood of the fetus, but rather on the social life of the child, the welfare of the family, and the question of the social good more broadly. 

(7) In Japan, as elsewhere, a mother is trusted to make the decision about the fate of her fetus not because she has freedom of “choice” but rather because she is its trusted caregiver; a parent alone can provide her child with an appropriate environment. Japanese parents do live with deep psychic tensions between the acceptance of the humanity of the fetus and the pervasive practice of abortion. This notion of abortion as a social necessity differs from the notion of abortion as a “right” and deemphasizes the dividing lines between “life” and “choice.”

(8) a parent should be concerned foremost with appropriate upbringing and socialization of a child, and should thus practice birth control rigorously...the ethical focus is not on the fetus but rather on a mother’s welfare and the future child’s environment. 

(9) Infanticide was a common practice throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in many parts of Japan for reasons of poverty and food shortage. In prosperous areas, such “weeding” (mabiki, as it was called) was carried out by midwives at the behest of the family with the objective of creating “small, healthy, and economically productive families”—while the state looked away. 

(10) The anthropologist Margaret Lock, who has studied Japanese attitudes toward fetal selection and new reproductive technologies, suggests that the ethical question of whether to terminate a problematic pregnancy hinges foremost on its consequences for family life. 

(11) Japanese women have a high abortion rate. Abortion has continued to be the predominant form of birth control in Japan well after the invention and legalization of birth control medication in many other industrialized countries. .

(12) the German and Canadian legislation in contrast to Roe v. Wade, is their focus on protection. German law, like West European law more broadly, emphasizes public health and humanitarian justifications for the practice of abortion: the social costs of unwanted pregnancy, health risks to women, the psychic toll of raising unwanted children, and the state’s positive obligation to protect women. 

(13) In contrast, Roe v. Wade defined the right to first-trimester abortion primarily in terms of negative liberty—the right of the individual to decide for herself whether abortion is appropriate; it deliberately and explicitly excluded the possibility of the state’s consideration for women’s broader social circumstances.

(14) Roe v. Wade created the possibility for women to have control over their lives and choices. But the discourse of “choice” alone has not provided a sustaining moral framework for handling the necessity of abortion, which will always be a final recourse. What is needed is a framework that can simultaneously be compatible with liberal and feminist values.

In the age of Donald Trump, women’s reproductive bodies have become even more public and regulated canvases for moral narratives of women’s worth as humans and for the state’s claim to their bodies. We have witnessed increasing legal restrictions on abortion access, the undermining of insurance coverage for contraception, and a spectacular federal intrusion preventing a young woman held in immigration detention from having an abortion. But to fully grasp the scope and implications of the state’s investment in women’s reproductive bodies under the Trump administration, we must also tend to the quieter, more opaque spaces in which reproduction is meticulously regulated: in particular, carceral institutions. For there are pregnant women in prisons and jails in the United States, who gestate largely unnoticed but within the enmeshed webs of carceral violence and reproductive control. In this brief essay, I illustrate how the adjudication and restriction of abortion access for incarcerated people exemplifies the intimate violence imposed by the state on women’s bodies, from the classic bodily control of regimented confinement to the structural and racialized violence of U.S. mass incarceration. Furthermore, abortion access among incarcerated people reveals the material consequences of rights-based language about abortion promoted by prochoice activists, which then enables its carceral restriction. This carceral framing of abortion, behind the walls of the prison, tells us much about the broader politics of reproduction and the politics of indifference in the age of Trump.

THE JUDICIALIZATION OF PRISON ABORTIONS

• Some carceral institutions explicitly prohibit abortion at any point, some allow it only in the first trimester, others permit it only when there is a threat to the woman’s health, and some allow it under most circumstances. The variability in prison abortion policies, along with differences in how they play out on the ground, tells a deeper story about the way incarcerated women’s reproductive bodies are put in the service of those in power—prison wardens and others—to exercise their moral claims on human reproduction.
• Separate prison wings allow women who have given birth while in custody to take their babies back to prison with them. The idea is that having the time and space to cultivate their maternal identity will help them refocus away from a life of crime and toward one of normativity. 
• But we need only look to the ways that pregnant incarcerated women are mistreated to find a more sinister punitive logic at play. 
• Furthermore, my ethnographic research with jail guards shows how they often demonize incarcerated women as bad mothers for allegedly committing a crime or for using drugs while pregnant. SERIOUS MEDICAL NEEDS
• The second judicial principle applied to incarcerated women’s ability to obtain abortions is that, -institutions of incarceration are constitutionally required to provide health care to the people it incarcerates-- instead of making them pay for it. It is considered an elective procedureAn elective procedure is one that can be deferred to a later time without significantly impacting a patient’s health or well-being. If an abortion is delayed or not done at all, then the woman will likely carry a pregnancy and give birth. That hardly describes the absence of an impact on her physical or social world. 
• Speaking in the language of “a woman’s right to choose” proves incongruous in the prison’s local world. Reproductive justice is a framework emerging from and centering the experiences of women of color that places reproduction in a broader context of structural inequalities.

Infanticide & Anthropology

There is no easy answer here.  No anthropologist would tell you definitively what to do in this situation.  But by framing the story as one of civilization vs. primitives, as the New York Times authors have done here through their loaded terminology and use of quotations, they make an end run around decades of anthropological understanding and come out with a biased and extremely problematic article.

• chinese sex selection
• infanticide in hunters and gatherers
• etc.

Backlash and Continuity

1. poor and minority women continue to have their rights restricted in abortion.
2. also have less access to quality contraception
3. fetal rights have changed how women can behave during pregnancy, especially for POC
1. entire period of pregnancy has come under political scrutiny
2. abortion was based on agreement for sterilization
3. or ...skilled illegal abortions went unchecked
4. right are given to fetus' in a vast array of contexts
5. husbands have sexual rights over wives
6. Books which discipline women (Foucault) to behave in certain ways during pregnancy
1. limit freedom over her body
2. subordinated to expert opinions of doctors, etc.
3. women libel for all that goes wrong in a pregnancy. creates fear of preganancy.