I can understand why some people are opposed to abortion. I will never agree with them, and I do not think that one group of people has the right to impose their religious beliefs regarding when life begins on me or other women, but the impulse to protect life is fair. Thus it seems a rational expectation that if a woman’s life is endangered by pregnancy, people who oppose abortion will respect her life. After all, she is breathing, thinking, feeling, and well, living. And, using their own logic, if she dies during childbirth, then the baby is a murder because he/she killed his/her mother by being born. We should charge the child immediately upon emergence from the dead woman’s body, and then sentence him/her to the death penalty. Justice will be served.

However, it seems that not all life is equal. Since a vengeful God chose to punish Eve for her sinful acts (first eating the forbidden fruit, then, worse, tempting Adam to eat it), it is OK for women to die in childbirth. Women have less of a right to life than a baby does. And if her life could be saved by terminating a pregnancy, it is morally right to let an autonomous, living person – possibly a mother to other children; a beloved daughter, sister, friend – die because it is wrong to take the life of a fetus.

Pardon my French, but that is seriously fucked up logic.

And yet, Nicaragua proudly joined the ranks of the extremely hypocritical (charter members: El Salvador; South Dakota only wishes it was in the exclusively stupid club) by banning abortions to save the lives of pregnant women. I feel like lawmakers there, who passed the ban by a unanimous measure of 52-0, were trying to outdo the misquoted Marie Antoinette, by saying “Let them eat death.”

It is not like obtaining a life-saving abortion was easy. According to IPS News:

Nicaragua's penal code allows for therapeutic abortions when they are deemed necessary on a sound scientific and medical basis, "with the involvement of at least three doctors, and consent from the woman's husband or next of kin."

Right. So if your husband wanted you dead for some reason, or you couldn’t afford three doctors, a woman was already left to die by the previous law. (You know, it is just plain wrong to allow women to decide whether or not they should live on their own. We tend to be so hysterical and irrational when it comes to making crisis decisions, you know.)

In a discussion on the issue, Digg News attracted a variety of comments, many noting that women deserved to be punished for daring to have sex, and death seemed a reasonable penalty to impose. One fine example:

Sex for pleasure still ultimately reduces to gambling. And if you want to gamble, that's great. But when you lose, pay up.

I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: why are children considered a punishment? Perhaps this explains the disturbing policies that many of our fine life-loving friends have when it comes to refusing to fund child care, health insurance, and education for the kiddies resulting from the violations of a woman who had S-E-X.

Another, more terrifying comment:

Furthermore even if the mother's life is in danger why not to the noble thing. Bring a new life into the world and sacrifice yourself.

Yes, dying and leaving a child motherless (and potentially other children as well as other people who rely on the dead woman) is the most noble thing one can do. Most mothers will willingly give their lives to save their children, but forcing them to do so is not love or compassion. (For all those New Testament aficionados out there, please note: even Mary was not required to die to bring Jesus into the world, so this seems like an awful lot to require from regular women.)

One brave soul has the audacity to insist that women have rights:

Abortion is simply giving pregnant women the same rights over their own bodies that everyone else already enjoys. If you have something in your body, growing against your will, then you should have the right to take it out even if it has human DNA - no matter how it got there. Maybe it's a tumor, maybe it's a fetus, maybe it's a famous violinist who's been implanted into your body by aliens; doesn't matter, it has no right to stay inside your body. If it can survive outside your body, then more power to it, but if not, your rights still come first.

I’d agree with her and say that this is in fact a human rights issue, but that would mean that women would need to be considered human, and clearly we are not.

Women in Nicaragua and Latin America with the misguided idea that they are human and deserve a right to life, are protesting. An article (in Spanish) at La Prensa includes a picture of a pregnant women marching against her potential death sentence, along with other second class citizens. Global Voices Online linked to Costa Rican blogger Julia Ardón who reprinted a public letter signed by the Nicaraguan Association of Writers (ANIDE) [ES] demanding that exceptions be reinstated for women whose lives are threatened by pregnancy (also in Spanish). And Juana Jimenez, an activist in Nicaragua, told IPS News that:

…the medical grounds for therapeutic abortion have been established, and that if this article were eliminated they would be in violation of the principle of saving lives -- with the particularity that it would be women who would die, because it is we who have the biological capacity to procreate…

Unfortunately, people who hate women have absolutely no problem with that.

Suzanne erroneously thinks that she is a human despite being a woman, and blogs about it at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants