“What do we do if a few months from now, when mosquito season arrives, hundreds or thousands of low-income women in Texas and Florida find themselves pregnant with fetuses that show severe brain damage?”
There is nothing that binds the Republican Party together so much as its fervent opposition to safe, legal abortion. Even more than their fondness for guns, Republicans, men and women alike, will reflexively default to abortion as the rationale for their political beliefs. Ask people in red states who, from a common-sense economic perspective, would seem to belong in the Democratic camp why they continue to pull the red lever for their local Congressman even as the quality of their lives crumble all around them, with only the uber-wealthy reaping the rewards, and you will hear the same refrain: they’d vote Democratic if only it wasn’t for (guns and) abortion.
The leading Republican presidential candidates reflect this. Ted Cruz would outlaw all abortion, pure and simple. Criminalize it, throw women in jail for having one. Donald Trump, whose views change week to week, claims he’s against all abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Marco Rubio says no exceptions—if a woman is raped and impregnated, even by her father or brother, Rubio would force her to have that baby.
But that may all change in a few short months. You see, summer’s coming. For politicians it’ll be a time of barbecues and town halls and mingling with the constituents in rolled up shirt-sleeves. And we’re about to get an influx of new citizens. Millions of them, actually. They’re coming to live in the “Red States” first and they’re going to be here for quite a while:
The Aedes aegypti mosquito that is the primary vector of Zika virus infections is present in the southeast portion of the country, including Florida, though in winter the mosquito populations are low.
Last week the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Zika virus a “global health emergency,” a rare move for the W.H.O. Although the precise trajectory of the mosquito-borne virus cannot be predicted, it’s fairly clear that it is just a matter of time before it reaches the Southern U.S., and several cases in Florida have already been reported in travelers returning from South America. Mosquitos carrying Zika are expected to reach North Carolina by this summer. Current estimates vary widely as to the scope of potential exposure in the U.S., from “small outbreaks,” or “a few hundred cases at a time" nationally, to something rather more significant:
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, has fears. He recalls spending much of 2014 insisting that the Ebola outbreak would not become a significant problem in the United States. But he gives no such assurance now.
“I think we’re in for real trouble in the United States,” he said, considering how swiftly Zika can spread. He focuses on conditions throughout the Gulf Coast, where stagnant water sources — in uncollected garbage, discarded tires, untended bird baths — can be ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes much of the year.
For the record, some scientists are not quite ready to say that this creature on the right is why thousands of babies so far have been born in Brazil with underdeveloped brains and abnormally small heads. At this point I think we can take it on faith that there is such a connection. What isn’t in doubt is that microcephalic babies we’re seeing in the news reports are not the happy and smiling variety. Many of the pictures we’ve seen show them crying or screaming, or else staring blankly. They’re crying or screaming or staring blankly because they are permanently disabled. Babies born with microcephaly have a whole host of problems, many of them permanent, including seizures, convulsions, developmental delay, intellectual disabilities, hearing loss, vision problems, as well as deformed limbs and skulls.
It’s fairly horrifying, and whatever happens in terms of the overall exposure in the U.S, it’s a safe bet that this will be a prime topic of discussion this summer, with a lot of anxious and scared Americans, particularly in the South. While its means of transmission are just now beginning to be understood, the threat to pregnant women is fairly established fact at this point, although the quantum of risk is not. At some point women who are pregnant or seeking to become pregnant are going to demand testing to ensure they do not have the Zika virus. For those that do, there is an agonizing decision to make. All of that “sanctity of life” claptrap suddenly rings very hollow when you’re faced with the fact that you may be pregnant with a profoundly disabled child. (The quote at the top of this post was taken from this article by Cloe Angyal, writing for the Huffington Post, examining the implications of women’s rights versus those of the disabled which may be on a collision course because of Zika).
But there’s one more little wrinkle:
[M]icrocephaly in a fetus cannot be detected until well into the second trimester of a pregnancy. “Late in the first trimester you can see the complete absence of the brain, anencephaly, but not microcephaly,” says Davis, who is also an abortion provider who performs second-trimester abortions.
Waiting until the second trimester to determine whether your baby is going to be severely disabled both physically and mentally is an experience most women are understandably going to want to avoid. And then there’s the cost factor:
Abortion at this point in a pregnancy is rare and hard to come by. It’s expensive -- often well over $1,000 -- and that’s before you factor in the cost of traveling and accommodation to see the few providers who perform the procedure, skipping days of work for travel and recovery (and waiting periods in between appointments, which some states require), securing childcare for any kids you might already have, and so on. “Once you detect [a fetal abnormality], it’s not like you have an ultrasound and right that second they say ‘OK, if it’s the right choice for you, you can have your abortion,’” Davis says. The longer a woman waits -- to make her choice, or to raise the money to exercise it -- the more expensive the procedure becomes.
Waiting also brings with it a whole host of anguishing decisions to be made as microcephaly is not uniform, across the board. There are different degrees which depending on the diagnosis, might impact a woman’s desire to have the baby:
Pregnant women who choose to have an abortion when microcephaly shows up in fetal testing have an enormously difficult decision to make, Davis said. She does her best to explain to expecting families what they can expect their child’s life to be like. “It depends on the severity of the microcephaly,” she said. “There’s a range, and you do have some information about that from ultrasounds.
Meanwhile, against what could very well become a severe public health emergency, Republicans from state legislatures to the U.S. Congress to the United States Supreme Court have done their damnedest to make a woman’s legal choice to terminate her pregnancy as difficult as possible. In Texas and other states, women have to drive hundreds of miles and make repeat visits, only to hear some right-wing doctor try to guilt them into a forced birth against their will. In some states they are forced to endure “waiting periods.” In some states they are forced to look at ultrasounds they don’t wish to view, or forced to read literature they don’t want to read, or provided with pictures they don’t want to look at. In some states they are screamed at and threatened by protesters as they walk into a clinic. Some states, such as Ohio, have even passed laws forcing women to carry babies to term with known birth defects. This was all fine and dandy with the Republican men who run the Republican Party, and very popular with its so-called Christian “base.”
But when our winged friends from South America arrive here this summer or early fall—and there’s no reason to suspect they won’t—any woman who gets a mosquito bite and becomes pregnant is going to be getting a test for Zika. And if that test is positive, for the reasons explained above, most women are not going to sit around and wait until the “second trimester” to determine whether they want to terminate their pregnancy. This is particularly the case if the media is hyperventilating about the risk, which is bound to happen (see Ebola). Many may choose to terminate their pregnancy as soon as they find out they’re pregnant and carrying the virus. Anyone who stands in their way is going to earn their undying wrath, and deservedly so. They’re not going to tolerate “waiting periods.” They’re not going to tolerate “counseling,” or being forced to look at ultrasounds or read right-wing literature. But those are the laws that govern a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions, courtesy the Republican Party. And guess what? There’s no exception for Zika.
There are already parallels being drawn between Zika and rubella:
Doctors say the rampant spread of Zika virus in the Americas evokes parallels to the rubella epidemic in the 1960s that disabled thousands of children in the U.S. and worldwide, prompting many women to seek illegal abortions…
"The fear that people have in these countries is similar to the fear we experienced in the early 1960s when rubella was king," says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Mothers were scared to death about contracting rubella in the first trimester of pregnancy, because their child would have an 85 percent chance of developing severe permanent defects of the ears, eyes and heart."
The issue is already roiling Brazilian society, the epicenter of what is now being characterized as the Zika epidemic. Brazil has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, and these laws are now being challenged. In Brazil, there is fierce opposition to changing the laws from Catholic bishops.
But we are not Brazil, and abortion is legal here, at least theoretically. What are Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or the entire Republican Party going to say when faced with potentially hundreds or thousands of people, from all economic strata, demanding the right to legally terminate their pregnancies quickly and efficiently? Are they going to make an “exception” to their rabid forced birth positions for Zika? How exactly would that work? As pointed out by Sara Seltzer, writing for Jezebel, are they going to look women in the eye and say that they must carry these microcephalic fetuses to term? What possible justification under Republican dogma would exist for such an exception? How about women who can’t afford the procedure? Are they going to be consigned to have babies with horrific birth defects, simply because they’re not rich enough to pay? Or is Medicaid going to pay for the procedure? Who is going to perform it? And how do you expect women to react when they come up against the barriers you have imposed?
These are all questions Republicans can fairly expect when they go out to meet the voters this fall. It will be interesting to hear their answers.