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#  Whose Child is it Now?

September 09 2021

Written by Liz Amsden.

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COMMENTARY-Due to the dead-of-night shenanigans of the regressive Supreme Court, the recent victory of the misogynists in Texas over women’s and girls’ rights to their own bodies will certainly be echoed in other states until and unless Congress can return our rights at the national level.

Not only have these cretins condemned pregnant women to suffer the limited competency of back-alley abortionists, but they have also put them far more at risk for pain and suffering and death by imposing penalties so onerous that only the most desperate of doctors, those who have lost their licenses due to ineptitude or malfeasance, will offer such services to those who can’t afford to or are restricted from traveling out of state.

Not to mention the penalties the woman and her facilitators face if, as a result, she has to decide between going to a state-sanctioned doctor or dying.

In addition to the human cost to parents and siblings and children, we must look at the financial impact to all concerned.

Assuming the purpose of the legislation is to allow all Texan fetuses to be born, the question then becomes: who should be responsible for the raising and feeding of this unwanted child? Who should protect him or her from abuse, take care of them when they are sick or injured, who pays to educate them and provides an example of how to live their lives as responsible Texans?

Traditionally, this has been the obligation of the parents who chose to have a child. But many upcoming births will be due to the Supreme Court 5 and their Texas bully boys.

Should then the Texas legislators who pushed through this ban pay into a fund to provide 100% of the cost of raising each child, including related medical care for the mother and a lifetime of lost wages? The price of bailing that unwanted child out of prison, the reparations necessary for crimes committed against them by a failed foster care system, the years on death row if that child kills?

What should be self-evident is that none of these costs should be paid through taxation because that would be patently unfair to the 62% of the state that supported legal abortion in 2018.

Or should these children be gifted to the individuals responsible for their births? The individuals whose vote led to the much-touted number that 54% of Texans oppose abortion because it’s now illegal.

Should these unwanted children be divided equally among Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to have and to hold as long as they all shall live?

With this in mind, perhaps the Supreme Court might want to reconsider its ill-advised ruling.

*(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.) Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.*

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