Today Don’t Let Murphy and legislators remove abortion rules and limits appeared on the op-ed page of The Press of Atlantic City. Since this title showed up in my “safe haven” google alerts I took a careful look and saw that Marie Tasy is the author.
Long-time readers of The Daily Bastardette and New jersey adoptee rights advocates might remember Crazy Tasy, forever director of New Jersey Right to Life. She spent more than a decade fighting adoptee rights folks in New Jersey over the campaign to obtain their own original birth certificates. Ungrateful adoptees to her were selfish abortion whores pimping their own self-interest over her abstract interest in the zygotes of total strangers. Birthparents were cringing in their closets. She didn’t like queers either, who menaced their way into her hit list since most of them weren’t interested in breeding other than through adoption and other abnormal means. Although New Jersey’s OBC “restoration” contains restrictions—including the default sealing of birth records of safe havened babies born to identified parents, most of the state’s adoptees can obtain their OBC. Tasy pretty much lost that one, but isn’t about to give up, Ten years later she has not surrendered her obsession with what women do with their own bodies, especially during problematic pregnancy, which demand a cloak of secrecy and shame. Once again she’s popped into the press to remind us she’s relevant.
Tasy’s pearls are currently in a big fat wad because New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and his baby murdering Demo friends are running S3030: The Reproductive Freedom Act, a bill to make the state one of the most repro rights-friendly states in the country and to bulletproof Roe. The bill is currently in the Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee. It was introduced 6 weeks ago, and Tasy’s sudden outrage suggests she wasn’t checking the state’s legislative pages regularly and got Murphy’s backdoor slammed her in the face.
To Tasy’s horror, S3030 guarantees female reproductive autonomy and the right to control one’s fertility. This legal guarantee of bodily ownership, she spouts, illogically, removes government “safety protections” for women.
The legislation “explicitly guarantees, to every individual, the fundamental right to reproductive autonomy, which includes the right to contraception, the right to abortion and the right to carry a pregnancy to term.” Noticeably absent is any language limiting abortions at any period of gestation.
To Tasy’s horror, women in fact, would not even be prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies (aka DIY abortion and self-care), outside of government supervision, which she objects to anyway. Self-care, of course, is growing due to the work of Tasy and her affiliate missionary busy-bodies across the country who have forced tight egregious restrictions on termination procedures and access while simultaneously targeting contraception and sex education. The Covid economy and the lack of state response, have made things even worse, but she’s silent on that.
Tasy continues her rant:
In addition, the bill eliminates the requirement that a medical/legal death investigation be conducted in a case where “a fetal death occurs without medical attendance.”
What? Cops won’t be required to stick their noses up skirts to check on miscarriages and stillbirths and for evidence of knitting needles, rubber hoses, and coat hangers. Years ago I worked with a woman who threw herself down a flight of stairs. Repeatedly. That method seems to only work in movies and soaps.
Then the real gripe comes out.
Lastly, the act will require all N.J. health insurance companies and policies to cover abortion and coverage for contraceptives for a 12-month supply with no deductibles, no co-insurance and no co-payments. If bill S3030 passes and becomes law, N.J. taxpayers will be footing the bill for “individuals who are incarcerated, are living in government-funded institutions or are otherwise under governmental control or supervision.
Some women,–the obviously ill-behaved–just aren’t plain worthy of bodily ownership and deserve to be pregnant against their will. Like most anti-aborts, she fails to grasp that all practical issues aside, some women just don’t want to pregnant. Tasy reeks up the editorial page with her white privilege, classism, misogyny, and prison culture (a subject for another day.) If women seek abortions (or contraception) then they’d better get a second job to pay cash cuz..well… public or private insurance (which people pay for out of the own pockets) should not be footing the bill. Better yet, don’t take off your pants! Nevermind!
Keep in mind that Tasy, without a blink, demands taxpayer support of Crisis Pregnancy Centers Compulsory Pregnancy Camps and government-mandated birth no matter the economic, health, desires, needs, and social circumstances of the women whose “safety protections” she says she is duty-bound to “protect.” Forced birth is the punishment for Tasy’s self-defined moral transgression
Women’s bodies are Marie Tasy’s battleground
Finally, I come to the lede which I seem to have unfortunately buried because Crazy Tasy is just too much fun to drop here out of context.
Back when Tasy was trashing adopted people on a weekly basis in the New Jersey legislature and press she groaned that adoption could not exist without birthmothers, who, of course, would dry up if nosy little bastards got their OBCs. It doesn’t’ take much to extrapolate that if women enjoy the right of bodily autonomy, then adoption will cease—a ridiculous extrapolation since there will always be mothers who for whatever reason carry to term and utilize adoption as an alternative to personal motherhood. And, it is here that Tasy drags in “legalized abandonment” via safe haven laws:
Whether it was the sponsors’ intentions or not, the language in the act is so sweeping that it can be interpreted to prevent prosecution for the infanticide of a newborn infant. This will negate the effectiveness of the state’s Safe Haven Infant Protection Law, which has saved the lives of 77 newborns since its enactment.
And safe haven babies are the prize
So, according to Crazy Tasy New Jersey’s safe haven law will become totally useless if the bill is passed since all those there-but-for-the-grace-of-safe-haven go neonaticiders will just march off to the abortorium instead of the ER or corner firehouse. Tasy really doesn’t like women much.
This is the exact lunatic argument that the (Texas) Justice Foundation makes– that safe haven laws make abortion obsolete since now women can legally relinquish their children for adoption as if adoption, until recently, has been illegal. Seriously!
I’ve followed that argument, which has the traction of a beater in the Sahara, for nearly 20 years. It keeps getting petitioned, and judges keep laughing it out of court. I last wrote about this back in June when Justice Foundation founder Allan Parker attempted to recruit abortion-minded women during Covid lock-down to hold on to their pregnancies, apparently give birth at home alone in the bathtub, and then high-tail it off to the nearest safe haven drop-off station. Parker’s press-release was issued concurrently with JF’s latest Roe-attack amicus in the US Supreme Course. As usual, JF was booted:
…Most recently Allan Parker on behalf of the Justice Foundation filed an amicus with the US Supreme Court regarding hospital admittance privileges in Louisiana. In June Medical Services v Gee Parker argues that Safe Haven laws are a “safety net” that eliminates the need for abortion (and the subsequent trauma he claims all women who get abortions experience) since “all burden of unwanted child care has been transferred to society” and “constitutional under Gonzales v Carhart and Planned Parenthood. ” Absurdly Parker infers that previous to Safe Haven laws, women had no alternative but to keep and rear “unwanted” children. He not only trivializes motherhood by referring to it as “child care,” but he argues that Safe Haven is an alternative for women who want to become lawyers! Seriously!
This same silly argument is found in Safe Haven Baby Box propaganda, where founder Monica Kelsey and others claim that if Roe is overturned (and they are sure it will) baby boxes need to be available in quantity to take up the slack of “unwanted babies” since well…women will be forced to give birth to “children they don’t want.” Why this is considered good is never addressed.
The kicker is, of course, that SHBB bills itself as an anti-abortion ministry, while at the same time promotes the women who used baby boxes as brave women so in love with their babies that they “save” them by stuffing them anonymously in a box in a wall. Save them from what? Are newly pregnant women expected to shuffle through the internet looking for a secret solution to their secret shame 9 months later?
There may be 77 safe haven cases over the years in New Jersey as Tasy says, but no evidence exists to suggest that those babies were “saved” from anything other than their own names, families and histories except in Crazy Tasy’s fever dreams. The women who safe haven are not abortion-minded, despite what some pushers argue. They are afraid, ashamed, broke, and can lack legal residence status, They often cannot access medical and counseling services, which just about any other decent country offers.
I don’t have any current data in New Jersey cases, but in the past, it has been clear that most safe havened babies are born in hospitals to identified parents. Back in the early 2000s, New Jersey suffered a border baby crisis that caused staffing and bed shortages in maternity wards. That is, newborns were abandoned at the hospitals in which they were born, after their scheduled date of discharge, by parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t take responsibility for them. Back then, reports indicated that most were born with alcohol or drugs in their systems, HIV status, or disabilities. New Jersey ran an extensive and expensive education and media campaign to discourage the practice, but at the same time ran another campaign urging parents to use the safe haven option. In effect, New Jersey’s border baby population was switched out for safe haven drops. It now appears that both populations have decreased drastically.
Since the New Jersey safe haven law defaults sealing for all safe haven “relinquishment” no matter the circumstances, at least for now parents will remain anonymous, and Crazy Tasy should at least give us a sigh of relief for that cohort. But there’s a little thing called cheap DNA tests now, and that won’t last.