Did N.Y. just put pregnant women at greater risk? The Reproductive Health Act is a dangerous step back

     Did N.Y. just put pregnant women at greater risk?
The Reproductive Health Act is a dangerous step back ...

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ny-just-put-pregnant-women-at-greater-risk-20190128-story.html

By Charles Camosy

Jan 28, 2019 | 12:26 PM

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Cuomo, right, signs Reproductive Health Act Legislation during a ceremony, Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019. (Darren McGee / AP)

Despite current trends of abortion being more restricted and dramatically declining in the country at large, New York state has doubled down on the procedure by finally passing the Reproductive Health Act (RHA). This Gov. Cuomo-led abortion expansion takes place in a state which already had the highest abortion rate in the county. New York City, remarkably, ends one out three prenatal human lives via abortion.

Much has been made of the new law’s controversial expansion of late-term abortion access — controversial because, as Secular Pro-Life has shown, abortions in the second and third trimester, though rare, are most often elective and generally not medically necessary.

Less attention, however, has been given to fact that the RHA takes concern for the prenatal child completely out of the criminal code.

It has always been difficult for abortion activists to explain how they can consider a fetus a mere object to be killed and discarded in an abortion context — while in other legal contexts she can be considered a human being who is killed via homicide. Indeed, many U.S. states have explicit laws against fetal homicide.

New York no longer has this contradiction in its own law, but the RHA has removed it at the cost of common sense. Intellectually honest people know that when a pregnant woman is killed, something different has happened than when a woman who is not pregnant is killed. Both situations are incredibly tragic, but in the former situation, two human beings are killed, not one.

According to CNN.com, California faced a similar lack of common sense back in 1969. An eight-months pregnant Teresa Keeler saw her ex-husband block her car on a narrow mountain road and ask if she was pregnant by a new partner. When she refused to answer, he forcibly took her out of her car and literally stomped the baby to death. Prosecutors charged him with the murder of her baby girl, but the state Supreme Court threw out the charge, claiming that she was not a human being and only someone born alive could be killed.

The public simply wouldn’t have it. Common sense told them what this man had done and they forced the state legislature to change California law to reflect this common sense. This change would pave the way for a 2003 case in which Scott Peterson killed his pregnant wife Laci. 

He was charged with double homicide, a charge which made him eligible for the death penalty. As a pro-lifer, I do not support capital punishment for him or anyone else, but Peterson is on death row today only because California had the common sense to call his act what it was: the killing of two human beings.

The disturbing relationship between pregnancy and violence is persistent, and one of many reasons both pro-life feminists and reproductive justice activists believe it is often a mistake to speak as if women are genuinely “choosing” abortion at all. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between women who seek abortions and those who are facing violence from an intimate partner.

Even more disturbingly, a study in the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health found that 43% of deaths of pregnant women over eight years in Washington, D.C. were homicides. As reported in Women’s Health magazine, pregnant women are more likely to suffer violent trauma — and are twice as likely to die after trauma — than are women who are not pregnant. And these terrible numbers may even be higher given irregular reporting requirements and the fact that 77% of maternal deaths take place before 20 weeks gestation, a time when a fetal death certificate is not required.

Overall, homicide is now the second-leading cause of injury-related death for pregnant women in the United States. Punishing assailants in such cases for attacking two human beings is the least we can do to protect these vulnerable women.

But when confronted with a choice between refusing to punish illegal abortion in the criminal code and giving women this added protection from violence, the governor of New York chose to the former. Given his history on these issues, this should not be surprising. Back in 2013, Cuomo let the Women’s Equality Act fail because pro-lifers in the state Senate would not support its abortion expansion — though they were happy to pass the other parts of the legislation.

The governor revealed much about his motives and priorities when he let wonderful things like pay equity and reduced pregnancy discrimination fail because he didn’t get expansion of late-term abortion. Indeed, during the last several years he has had something close to an obsession with expanding abortion — even telling those who disagree with him on the issue that they are not welcome in New York.

Men often get criticized for being publicly skeptical of abortion rights — the implication being that they ought to stay out of the debate and leave it to women. Interestingly, however, men like Cuomo get almost no criticism for being publicly in favor of abortion rights — even when significantly more women than men support legal restrictions on late-term abortion.

A powerful man (aided by some women and facing the opposition of others) has finally pushed through his preferred views on what abortion law should be in New York. Like Roe v. Wade before it, the RHA actually serves the interests of men, not women. 

Tragically, New York women are less safe from violence now than they were before the passage of the Reproductive Health Act.

Camosy is author of “Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation.”