It's Anti-Choice, and it is Wrong

The GOP-lead House of Representatives is pretty pleased with itself over having made a command decision over the intentions of the District of Columbia regarding whether employers may discriminate against employees over their employees'--or their employees' immediate family's--reproductive choices. Leaving aside that I've never held with the House having the right to overrule the DC, the law they've voted to overturn was thoroughly sensible--

What right is it of an employer to mine the reproductive health decisions of other people? What bearing does that deeply personal activity have on the ability of an employee to do his or her job? If an employee, their spouse, or their child, opts for some method of birth control up to and including an abortion--that knowledge and the details of it are not an employer's place to litigate.

It's disturbing to me that here, in 2015, there are people with such a basic ignorance of the human body and the reproductive systems thereof, that they can't grasp that "baby-making" is not a cut and dried moral issue where "saving babies" is our only concern. There are definitely situations in which the ability to conceive and carry a child is contraindicative to a pre-existing condition. There are situations in which a given fetus may not be viable. There are reasons why medical interventions might be taken with respects to one's conceiving or carrying a child. And those reasons are simply not anyone else's business but the patient's, and especially not their employer's. And the reason why should be patently obvious--because it is discriminatory. It provides the employer with a leverage against that employee that should not exist.

Calling this a "religious freedom" issue is placing a fig leaf over discrimination. The ability of an employer to whinge about the fear of "damnation cooties" because their employee is taking birth control pills to manage fibroids or their employee's spouse had a D&E to remove a dead fetus is to give that employer the right to terminate an employee for reasons simply beyond their control. And I find that to be an actually deeply immoral stance.

And this is all of a piece with where the alleged "pro-life" movement is basically not displaying anything like a bias towards life where the health of parents are concerned. Kansas has banned the D&E procedure except where the life and health of the mother is at stake although you know that will be litigated to no end. And Governor Brownback, who has hardly any good achievement to his name in that state where the budget or employment are concerned, is so pleased with this development that he has made a show of signing this bill that he has taken on the road.

It's simply the case that sometimes procedures need to be done in the second trimester. He's celebrating a law that can be a life or death issue for living, breathing women.

He isn't alone, though. In Texas, a proposal actually exists that would have had women carry their dead, dying, or nonviable fetuses. As if there was a virtue in having one's womb be a graveyard--just because. Would someone celebrate the carrying of a hydrocephalic fetus to seven or eight months to suffer a cesarean to cut out a dead baby for a family to mourn for the days it hangs on? It's beastly.

These laws are about a false premise regarding fertility and the idea that bodies are machines that work well at spitting out healthy lives. They don't always. But how they don't, why they don't, and the medical interventions to help people get through those issues, are by no means related in any respects to fitness for employment.