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  • 2019-02-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Did an Oklahoma State Legislator Call Pregnant Women 'Hosts'? (en)
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  • In early 2019, an Oklahoma lawmaker's two-year-old comments about abortion re-emerged online and prompted skeptical inquiries from our readers. On 15 February, the Gaily Grind web site posted an article with the headline GOP Lawmaker Who Called Pregnant Women 'Hosts' Pushing Bill Requiring Men to Approve All Abortions, which reported that: The Gaily Grind's 2019 article created the impression that it was describing current events, but in reality Humphrey had made his remarks two years earlier, in February 2017, and they had generated a wave of outrage at the time. Humphrey did indeed say that he viewed a woman as a host for a fetus, although he stipulated that this view was limited to the context of pregnancy and abortion, stating that his more general view of female bodily autonomy was your body is your body. On 6 February 2017, State Representative Justice Humphrey, a Republican who represents the 19th District in southeastern Oklahoma, introduced House Bill 1441, which would have prohibited any abortion that took place without the written informed consent of the fetus' father, except in cases of rape or incest, or the father was deceased, or the woman's life was in danger. On 14 February 2017, the State Legislature's Public Health Committee voted in favor of the bill, but it never came before the general assembly and was never passed into law. In the landmark 1992 case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional a part of a Pennsylvania state law requiring that a married woman provide her husband with advance notification that she intended to undergo an abortion. As a result, any law requiring a woman to obtain the consent of her sexual partner for an abortion would almost certainly have been overturned in court on the basis that it imposed an undue burden on a woman's right of access to abortion, as set out in the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade. In an interview with the Intercept web site, published on 13 February 2017, Humphrey outlined the rationale behind his proposed legislation: So Humphrey did indeed say that once a woman has become pregnant, in his view she is a host for the fetus, and that her obligation to the fetus stems from that dynamic. However, he did also indicate that outside the context of pregnancy, his view of a woman's bodily autonomy was Hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. This nuance was not fully acknowledged in some of the initial reporting on Humphrey's remarks, such as the February 2017 article on the web site of New York magazine's The Cut, whose headline read: Oklahoma Anti-Abortion Lawmaker Says Women Are Merely 'Hosts', or an opinion column on the web site Bustle, which read: It's true that Humphrey did say he viewed a woman as a host for a fetus once she has become pregnant, but he did not reduce the entire status of women in society to that of a host, even stipulating that beyond the context of pregnancy, your body is your body. It is a matter of subjective opinion whether or not one accepts his distinction as being sincere or meaningful, but the fact remains that Humphrey did express such a viewpoint. (en)
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