De-regulation and Choice

By Jayne Lyn Stahl

There is one more element in the equation that goes into the effort to roll back legal abortion in test cases like South Dakota, and that is how strange it is that an administration that prides itself on a "free market" economy, and daily pollutes the environment by deregulating greenhouse gas emissions, and allowing gross polluting trucks, under NAFTA, to pour toxic waste into California's air, now wants to regulate decisions a woman makes in the privacy of her own home, and in consultation with her physician.

In fact, these "free market" folks want to transform licensed physicians into government pitch men who function as FDA warning labels on a pack of cigarettes.

A country that has infrastructure in place to deprive women of pay equity, and equal opportunity while, simultaneously, peddling "welfare to work" programs only succeeds in creating a faux caste system from which only the most indigent suffer, and these are the women they want to deprive of choice when choice is the only thing they have.

Moreover, should Roe v. Wade be overturned, or turned over to the states to decide, there won't be fewer abortions, only fewer poor women having abortions, so this is not about ideology, after all, but about privilege.

Governmental interference in a woman's personal decision to terminate her pregnancy is no different from governmental intervention in the bedroom. It's the same principle really.
After the National Security Agency scandal, and revelations of telecom eavesdropping, any illusions we had, as citizens, to privacy have been quickly dispelled. The "war on terror" is really a war on privacy, after all, is it not?

Leave regulation for the oil companies, military contractors, banks, and credit card companies that are gouging consumers, and keep them the hell out of our private lives.