Nikki Haley stumbled when addressing the Alabama Supreme Court decision about in vitro fertilization. In an interview with NPR, she said that people do not need government getting in the way when it comes to this difficult decision and “that’s between the patients and their doctor.” I heard echoes. Everyone should hear echoes. That is exactly the stance prochoice advocates have been taking for decades. The phrasing is half a step removed from support for personal choice across the board.
In one way, this is a perfect example of tone deafness. Because it is something of which Haley approves—IVF, which she herself used—then the rules are one way, to the benefit of wanna-be mothers who have difficulty conceiving. But when it goes the other way? “Embryos are babies.”
No. And this is why this issue is biting them in the ass, because it’s an ethical shell game. She has made it, along with every other Republican who has scrambled to deny the implications of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, clear that the issue, while in part about abortion, is really a much larger agenda, which can loosely be described as pro-pregnancy. Again, it comes down to trying to fix a social definition of what is allowable and desirable in one direction that has nothing to do with an individual’s rights of personal autonomy. Mixed in is all the usual hypocrisy of having one’s cake and eating it, too, because it has been understood for some time that certain people who would deny a broad access to reproductive choice would want those choices for themselves.
The lack of compensating programs on offer by this cadre of social engineers underscores the reality that they really don’t care that much about the children once they are born—from childcare, schooling, poverty programs, and a whole raft of assistance programs that are consistently rejected by the political prolife movement—points to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with protecting children. It has to do with controlling women. And by extension men as well. The fact that a good deal of the prolife movement is now admitting that it wants to limit access to birth control as well makes this even more obvious.
And doubtless many of them would read that and look at you and say, “Yes, so?”
Haley went on to modify her initial support of the ruling by saying that for her, an embryo is a baby, but that is my personal belief.
Well and good. And my personal belief is that no one should be denied the benefits of living in society based on biology. The fact that I am a male means that I will never have to live restricted by my sex. I cannot become pregnant, therefore all the questions and burdens of that condition will never impede me.
A woman should have the same right to live her life in the same way. Her biology should not determine her status as a citizen and participant in the zeitgeist and the public sphere and most especially not in private.
Reproductive rights—all of them—are between a woman and her doctor. Nikki Haley pretty much said so.
This issue has clung to our political life for as long as it has simply because no one wanted it settled. It was too good an issue to give up during campaigns. The nature of politics is such that even those politicians who allied themselves to the prochoice side likely did not want to see it settled, either, because it was something they could use to strike back at their opponents. A settled issue does no one any good on the stump.
Obviously, this is not the only issue that is so treated, but it is far more personal than the others. And now that it has been pushed toward being settled by one side, the mess has now stripped away the homilies and façades of homegrown Norman Rockwell “decency” that masks all the thorny vicissitudes of trying to live ones life as one chooses.
This is a question between patient and doctor. Not between a woman and the police, the state, or the pompous moralizing busybody down the street.
Finally, as has been true for decades, this has never been about whether reproductive choice is available, but about who will have access. IVF is obscenely expensive. But if you can pay, by Nikki Haley’s thinking, you should get to play. That has always been true. No money? Well, too bad. You should get access to neither IVF or birth control.
That’s the world they’re trying to achieve.
