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Crip Dyke's avatar

It's interesting that Ohio did not include language regarding a right to make one's own decisions with respect to sterilization. That language was included in Michigan's amendment and passed. As I pointed out in a post not long back, in my post asserting that trans rights are reproductive rights

(https://pervertjustice.substack.com/p/yes-i-am-the-asshole-saying-abortion)

sterilization has a long history of being forced on some people and withheld from others. Such forcing has been at the hands of both the state and local doctors and hospital systems (truly horrible stories exist about being given unnecessary C-sections specifically so that the doctors could sterilize someone while they were under anesthetic). The withholding has generally been done at the hands of local doctors, but even if an amendment enforceable only against the state would not immediately cure that problem, it would provide further persuasive legal grounds for follow up legislation requiring equal access to sterilization care.

But most of all, tackling this issue at the same time as other reproductive rights issues has the chance to energize and make partners of anti-racism activists, disability rights activists, and trans people, who have all been hurt by an inability to determine for themselves when and how to access sterilizing procedures.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will fold this under "contraception" but

1) I fear that they may not, and

2) I fear that repro rights organizers might have deliberately excluded the language because in Michigan the relevance to trans people was made an issue, and it's at least possible that repro rights organizers see trans people as an icky group with which they do not want to be associated in a public campaign.

I hope that last isn't the case, but ... I don't really trust cis folks on that point. You can read my linked article if you want to know why.

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You Should Ice That Burn's avatar

Santorum: "People do in fact abort healthy late term pregnancies." Oh really? Somebody carried a healthy fetus for months and just decided to end it for funsies? I call BS, this has never been true, late term abortions are tragic medical interventions that are heartbreaking, nobody is asking for these mythical recreational abortions asshole.

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