Georgia’s anti-abortion law dubbed the “heartbeat” bill will criminalize abortions after six weeks of gestation, before many women even know they are pregnant – effectively banning 90 percent of abortions. The bill classifies unborn children as “distinct, living persons,” which would mean that any woman who terminates a pregnancy would be subject to prosecution for murder, punishable by life imprisonment or death in Georgia. Furthermore, if a woman travels outside Georgia for an abortion, she could be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, a potential 10-year sentence.
Alabama’s law deliberately goes even further, making abortion a felony at all stages of pregnancy, allowing no exceptions for rape or incest, only tacitly allowing the procedure if the mother’s life is at risk. That means a child who is raped will be forced to carry that pregnancy by her rapist to term and the rapist will forever have a basis to control her. A mother who knows the fetus is not viable or that the child would suffer or even die soon after being born will be forced to go through the trauma of a life-threatening pregnancy anyway. (America has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized world). With a maximum penalty of 99 years in jail, Alabama would punish the doctor more harshly than the rapist.
Those who backed the new law said they don’t expect it to take effect, instead intending its passage to be part of a broader strategy to have the radical right Supreme Court majority overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion nationwide.
They see Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, as sure bets to breezily erase women’s reproductive rights. This certainty flies in face of their perjurious promises made during their confirmations to respect stare decisis (settled law). A women’s right to choose is very definitely settled law over the past 50 years, with multiple decisions
Some 250 anti-abortion bills have already been introduced in the eight months since Kavanaugh was confirmed and 15 states have attempted to pass so-called “heartbeat” bills.
And if the Supreme Court gives a fetus personhood, that would jeopardize even New York’s protections for a woman’s reproductive rights.
I agree that Roe v. Wade was decided wrongly, based on a nebulous “right to privacy.” It should have been decided based on Equal Protection – that a woman has the same right to self-determination and freedom from government control as a man. But these laws mean that an adult woman does not even have the same rights as the embryo she is carrying. (Wonder how many of these men would vote for abortion bans if they required the father to be 100 percent financially responsible from womb to voting age, or prosecuted men for not using a condom or required men to get a woman’s permission to have a vasectomy).
Let’s consider what giving personhood to non-sentient embryos means. If a woman miscarries, she can be prosecuted for murder. Will Georgia track women who travel outside the state based on the possibility they might seek an abortion? If a woman drinks wine, has a cigarette or heaven forbid uses drugs, even prescription drugs or cancer treatments, she can be prosecuted. If a woman continues to work in a job that might pose some physical risk, she can be prosecuted. Yet her employer doesn’t have to give her less strenuous work but can fire her for not doing her job, is not required to give her parental leave or even pay her what he pays a man. And any doctor who fulfills the Hippocratic Oath to treat a woman’s medical condition can be sent to jail for 99 years.
Bans have already set up discrimination – a violation of Equal Protection – among women based upon geography and income because they basically deny access to health services for those in some states and women who don’t have the means to spend on travel, days off work, and so forth. But it also sets up discretionary prosecution – you can bet no congressman’s mistress or white suburban 16-year-old will be prosecuted, but black and brown, poor women will certainly be prosecuted, even after suffering a miscarriage because of inadequate access to health care.
But it doesn’t actually stop there. The anti-women factions also want to bar the use of birth control based on “life begins at conception,” replace family planning with “abstinence education,” shut down clinics that have helped keep down the rate of unwanted pregnancies and improved the health of mother and fetus. The rate of abortions fell dramatically during the Obama administration precisely because of the mandated availability of birth control and improved access to health care. This isn’t about life.
If it were about the sanctity of life, these same anti-abortion activists would be on the march to stop gun violence; to expand, not strip away, access to health care for mother and child and coverage for maternity, vaccinations, wellness care; would be opening up more access to family planning, parental leave, day-care and pre-K. But they are not.
Anti-abortion laws have nothing to do with the sanctity of life. They have everything to do with the desire to control women – put them in their place, as it were, as second-class citizens, with fewer rights than even an embryo.
Choice v. Life is a false flag in this war on women. It casts a woman who is forced to make the most critical decision of her life as a vain, selfish Jezebel who somehow “asked for it.”
And if women don’t have the judgment, the rational thinking process to make a decision in this most critical instance, what else don’t women have judgment to do? Run companies? Vote? Be president?
