Now that abortions have been outlawed in South Dakota and with red states including Mississippi contemplating a similar move — and President Bush is just one justice short of packing the Supreme Court with anti-Roe votes — the debate about abortion must change to a serious discussion of what penalties the victorious anti-choicers want to enact against women and doctors — and maybe even the men who helped create the pregnancies — who break the law by seeking to terminate pregnancies.
10,000 Monkeys and a Camera has put together an overview of various views on the criminal sanctions, and who should suffer them, in the coming new era when state governments take control over women’s reproductive rights:
Digby asks if women should go to jail for having an illegal abortion? Why ask the question?
[B]ecause it’s clear that there is almost nobody who believes that abortion is murder in the legal sense of the word. How can there be a law against “murder” where the main perpetrator is not punished? How can it be murder if these people don’t believe that the person who planned it, hired someone to do and paid for it is not legally culpable?[...] So I think we need to have this discussion. Let’s debate it out in the open and “air both sides” because from where I sit it’s the “pro-lifers” who haven’t thought this thing through. Nobody says they can’t agitate against abortion and stand out there with their sickening pictures and try to dissuade women from doing it. I will defend their right to argue against abortion forever. But when they use the law to enforce their moral worldview they need to recognize that they can’t have it both ways. If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?I don’t know about everybody, but RSA is doing the math:
[...] [W]e can reasonably estimate that there have been 25 million first-time abortions carried out since 1972.How many of these 25 million woman are alive today? A woman who was 40 years old in 1972 would now be in her mid-70s today, so we have to imagine a very large percentage: 80%, perhaps? That makes 20 million women. Some number of these women were married at the time of their abortion. Let’s conservatively put the number at 15%, to encompass all those who talked the procedure over with their husbands: 3 million men who actively participated in the planning. We could add the number of doctors who have performed abortions over the past few decades, but let’s stop at this point: 23 million people who decided an abortion should take place.Clearly, putting all those women, and the men who aid and abet them, in prison would be a dramatic step, and we’re not really sure that’s were we want to go — even the anti-abortion folks are stumbling on this one:
If you ask most pro-lifers whether they think that women should be punished as murderers they say no. If you asked if they think women should be punished by the law at all, they say no. They don’t want to punish the father either. The proposed laws target only the doctor who performed the surgery (or dispensed the drug) and for much less time than they would receive for killing a child. Now that we are moving beyond the demagoguery of the pulpit and the sidewalk and into the legal arena I think we all have a right to know how these people made these distinctions and why.As with the arguments about rape and incest, the “pro-life” argument that abortion is murder is morally inconsistent. And if it isn’t murder, then what is it?Well, we’re not sure. Once you start asking the questions, these people become more and more unwilling to answer them. Take the question of the 2-year-old baby vs. five blastulas:
Imagine that you’re in a burning fertility clinic with a 2-year-old baby and a petri dish containing five blastulas. You can’t save both, so which do you save?
- Topic: News & Comment
- Topics: Conservative Values
Which to save, a two year old child (who, say, has kidney failure and needs a kidney) or a blastula?
No problem, we save both by making a kidney out of one of the blastula’s stem cells and transplanting said kidney into our two year old. The two year old gets to live a normal life (without the need for potentially dangerous immunosuppressive drugs, such as are used with today’s donor transplants) and the blastula gets to live on as a two year old’s kidney. There’s much more to this opposition to stem cell research and therapy, however, than equating a blastula with a two year old. There’s the fact that millions of people would benefit from such therapy and, considering the cost, if it’s a choice between saving millions of us already warm-blooded) and saving a cell in a Petri dish, most folks are going to say, “I don’t give a damn what them pro-choice nuts claim, my two year old’s got to live!” Let’s see, at a conservative one hundred thousand bucks per stem cell therapy, multipled by one million (for starters), what’s that going to do to the military budget and (without all these weapons of mass destructionm) what happens to empire-USA? And that’s what’s really behind our president’s opposition to stem cell research, not some metaphysical equation.
Your analysis stops short: in the conservative world view, shouldn’t the 23 million guilty of planning and carying out the “murder” be subject to capital punishment? How does the right life wing respond to that?