The organization Liberty Counsel has its own amicus brief in support of Alabama’s drive to criminally prosecute pregnant women who use substances.
Why? On the grounds that the unborn child is a full-fledged human being.
Liberty Counsel amasses historical evidence that the law has treated unborn children as human beings like any other.
But its brief does nothing to assess whether in the real world, the criminal prosecutions in Alabama actually foster the treatment of unborn children–not to mention their mothers!–as full-fledged human beings.
Liberty Counsel thus takes an enormous and unwarranted leap from the claim of fetal humanity to a position that *threatens* fetal and female lives, health, wellbeing, and rights.
Any such claim needs to have advocacy of robust, generous, nonpunitive assistance with abortion alternatives written right into it, or it has no validity whatsoever.
In the case of pregnant women who abuse substances and their fetuses, that means immediately accessible, free/affordable, specialized, high quality drug treatment programs.
Liberty Counsel mentions nothing of the sort in the brief, or anywhere else.
It also invokes nineteenth century physicians and academics who opposed abortion, without mentioning or discussing the fair amount of misogyny mixed into their views.
The brief does quote the antiabortion views of one feminist doctor, Mary Dixon Jones. But it omits her connections to the women’s rights movement.
It says nothing of early feminists’ consensus on abortion. They defined it as unjust prenatal lifetaking that could not be opposed without simultaneously and throughly challenging its root causes, such as the denial of women’s sex education and family planning rights, and the criminalization of single mothers as sex offenders.
Small wonder that All Our Lives got behind the opposing brief, not Liberty Counsel’s!