December 31st 2009
Why women are treated differently
By Marie Alena Castle
Ken Herman’s Dec. 30 article questions why women aren’t treated the same as men regarding Selective Service. It’s because women are not free citizens; they are essentially social property because of their role as childbearers. Keeping them from full participation in military service preserves the availability of that property to society by reducing their exposure to combat injuries and death. Even so, for women in the military, their role as childbearing property is protected to the extent that they have no effective legal protection from rape and are denied the right to abortions.
As the sign over the desk of a former “prolife” legislator in Minnesota said, “Women weren’t meant to be free. They were meant to have babies.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal,” he meant literally all men. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified so as to prevent women from claiming autonomy in their childbearing role, especially in the right to abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court, in ruling on a challenge to the Hyde Amendment, said that, since government has a compelling interest in promoting childbirth, not funding abortions was constitutional. That essentially declared women property to serve the childbearing interests of the state.
The Roe v. Wade decision, while only affirming the way women manage problem pregnancies anyway, indirectly embedded in law that women are something of a public utility that government can regulate, and it has been doing so ever since. And now we have a health care reform bill that will probably remove even more of what little reproductive autonomy women have managed to retain. If women are going to fight to defend this nation’s freedom, they should first free themselves.
