There is an infamous video of clueless anti-choice demonstrators who are asked what punishment a woman should be subjected to if abortion is made illegal. Most make lame excuses — it’s a “crime” but the “perpetrator” should go unpunished. Actually, it’s worse than that — most of them say they never thought about the issue. Planned Parenthood and the National Institute for Reproductive Health have launched a campaign to ask pols the question “How much time should she serve?”
The protestors are clearly underinformed. But what about the anti-choice establishment? Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has an even more ridiculous answer — only the doctor should be punished, because the woman who seeks out the abortion is too “impaired” to be responsible for her actions. Read the insanity the jump.
This drivel is almost painful to read:
[I]f abortion were made illegal and he were a state legislator, Land said, “I would probably charge voluntary manslaughter for the abortionist. If [a doctor] were convicted, he would lose his medical license for two years and spend a year in prison with the first offense, and with the second offense, he would lose his medical license for life. At which point it’d be very difficult to find a doctor who’d do them.”Clearly women are just too damn irrational to be able to control their own body and destiny because of those damn hormones.Such a legal stance is tantamount to “ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into ‘victims’ of their own free will,” [Anna] Quindlen wrote. “State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.”
Land doesn’t deny that women who have abortions might be addled, but he, along with Yoest, Earll, and Gans, takes exception to them being described as bystanders — or as enlightened women making free, educated choices.
“It’s not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life,” Land said.
Pastor Dan of Street Prophets says this:
Look, one either has moral agency or one doesn’t. If there’s agency, then an illegal act is a crime. If not, then not. But to write off an entire class of women as mentally ill - if only temporarily - because they make a decision you don’t approve of? That doesn’t fit any moral framework I’m aware of. Nor does the outmoded idea that estrogen makes you crazy or the risible theory that society brainwashes women into killing their children.My question — what happens to women that have multiple abortions — are these repeated delusions? Should she be forced into state-approved mandatory therapy to “correct” her thinking so she doesn’t head to the clinic again? No one is saying abortion should be encouraged; it should be safe and rare, but that’s not the point of this argument. The right already has its sights on making contraception more difficult to obtain, and continues its push for abstinence-only education. Jill at Feministe asks, where then, are the boundaries:
What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky– like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did — negligent homicide?And what about the male partner in this equation? What if he agrees with the woman in question that she should have an abortion — is he then an accessory to the crime, or is he temporarily insane as well?
All of this is madness; what it does do is pull back the curtain of the real agenda of the anti-choice crowd — controlling the sexuality of women by insinuating they are not capable of ethical, moral or practical decisions about their lives. Obviously, we need the bible-beaters to instruct us on such matters.
65 Responses to “Fundie Richard Land: women who have abortions are mentally ‘impaired’”
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“and survives off of Cheetos?”
I didn’t know Jonah Goldberg was thinking about having an abortion…
does this mean all pregnant women are incapable of making ANY decision while prego? my boss will love that excuse - “i’m pregnant so i need to be relieved of all important decision making duties…”
I think the fundies realize that by now, so many women have had abortions (and so many people, of both genders, know women who have had them) that trying to convince them all that they’re criminals would be political suicide. So this “she wasn’t in her right mind” crap is a face-saving dodge.
OT, is anyone else having a problem with overstrikes in the comments box?
Forget decision-making. Obviously, if you’re pregnant, then you shouldn’t be working in the first place. Sheesh.
Oh great. They can’t convince everyone that women are evil murders…and they’ve been caught in a logical fallacy about how doctors are evil, not women….so now they’re just going to try to call us all insane and cart us off for mental reformation.
Sounds exactly like their approach to homosexuality, and I’m not liking it.
Ohforcrappingoutsideways …
The “culture of life” facade based on being “for” rhetorical fetuses plus those six photo op snowflakes while promoting massively killing women and children in actuality is starting to crack.
If she eats tuna?
As recommended in that bible of pregnancy, What to Expect.
Just reading the suggested diet made my morning sickness well up.
This concept isn’t new. It’s been part of the pro-life groups’ rhetoric since the mid-70s. Although it used to take the slightly more sophisticated angle of “wouldn’t an unplanned pregnancy usually count as ‘emotional stress’ or ‘duress’ (if she’s being pressured into it)?”
Same idea, though: the evil abortion industry is making scads of money of those poor, poor innocent* girls by lying to them, bullying them, coercing them, etc. We must protect them!
* i.e., “stupid”
So abortion is no longer “murder”, it is now manslaughter? Why is that? Murder is with intent to do the act and accomplish its outcomes. Voluntary manslaughter is defined as a an intended act that might include death, but in the “heat of passion”, which clearly a clinician does not have. Involuntary manslaughter is defined by criminal negligence: the doctor isn’t negligent if he correctly performs the intended act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter
If the fetus is indeed a person with full rights, there can be no manslaughter for its destruction through a voluntary abortion, only murder. And the woman in hiring the doctor is hiring an assassin, both first degree murder (with special circumstances in states that have the death penalty). This isn’t particularly difficult logic if you start at the point that a fetus has full rights or is a person.
The fact is that these people don’t consider fetuses to be people, they don’t want to punish the women at all for what their signs have for years called “murder” and they want to sentence the doctors to an outrageously small penalty for “murder”.
While there may very well be sincere anti-choicers out there, these people are clearly more concerned in controlling the behavior of women and doctors than preventing murder.
I like the doctrine that doing something immoral necessarily implies impairment! Let’s apply that to the justice system in general!
Anybody who commits a crime does so either because of the crisis of their situation or because they were influenced by society. So, by the same logic, our response to any crime shouldn’t be to punish the victim, but to resolve the crisis or undo the societal influence. If somebody steals a loaf of bread to feed their starving family…give her the means to feed the family. If somebody commits a white-collar crime, make her live on a commune for a while until she rediscovers her moral center.
Melly & Cowboy Diva, It wasn’t so long ago women were routinely PERMANENTLY fired from their jobs for getting pregnant. IIRC, this wasn’t outlawed until sometime in the 70’s.
But to write off an entire class of women as mentally ill - if only temporarily - because they make a decision you don’t approve of? That doesn’t fit any moral framework I’m aware of.
Actually, if you think about it, it seems to neatly fit the moral framework that fundamentalists apply when they themselves have sinned.
Consider the view taken of the actions of Ted Haggard– that the whole meth-with-gay-prostitutes thing doesn’t really matter, as he is not guilty of sin for reason of temporary insanity. The moral insanity came and went with the sin itself, of course– when he was getting up on stage and preaching during this same period, of course, then he was completely sane, it was only when he went off stage that the Gay took over. The Gay here, as the desire to have an abortion apparently is as well, is not a part of the person who commits it, but some kind of floating affliction that infects hosts and lasts only as long as the act itself– Haggard’s homosexuality, for example, was later removed through a brief stint in therapy fixing this problem, as if it were a wart or something that just had to be lasered off.
Note, meanwhile, the means by which you get infected with such things– the second given potential reason for the Temporary Abortion Madness is “because of societal demeaning of human life”. The society is an organism, and if it is not kept healthy, you will catch moral diseases from it. Sin here is not the fault of the sinner, but the fault of the society that infected the sinner with it. If you take meth with gay prostitutes, or have an abortion, well that’s okay, everyone makes mistakes, think nothing more of it. But the society that allowed you to have an abortion or gay prostitute? That’s got to go.
Thus we wind up with a standard where it’s forgivable to be gay or have an abortion but it’s not forgiveable to think it’s okay to be gay or have an abortion…
hmm, it looks like the only logical conclusion is strapping pregger women to gourneys and force feeding them appropriate foods! I just blogged on a study about how pregnant women are responsible for fat kids by eating unhealthy foods while pregnant. They have “re-wired” their childs brain. ridiculous.
Lock her up for liife. Thus, we get to fulfill Tom Coburn’s fantasy, and there will be plenty of new men for me to choose from
…yeah, they’ll get desperate.
Wait… didn’t the ancient Greeks think that the only time women were rational was during pregnancy, when their womb was properly anchored instead of floating free? Seems like our modern misogynists would appreciate that (bullshit, needless to say) theory.
Under this theory, that poor mentally-ill woman in Texas, Andrea Something, should never have been brought to trial for the drowning deaths of her 5 (6?) children.
I think Coin has it right. Don’t forget that the overlap between the fundies and women who have had abortions themselves is not insignificant. If they can spin themselves as victims, they don’t have to judge their own choices by the principles they claim to espouse.
My own unplanned pregnancy did make me briefly a little bit crazy, until I decided to have an abortion. That decision was such a relief for me that it made me feel much more sane.
was she pregnant at the time?
If it’s manslaughter, a wide variety of activities that would result in spontaneous abortion could land women in the clink for committing ovicular homicide (until proven innocent). These would include such menacing activities as:
simply losing or gaining weight,
participating in a sport
becoming ill
becoming better after being ill
experiencing a change of environment (such as moving into an air-conditioned home, or the opposite)
having an allergy activated by a [food or airborne] substance
… the reasons this may occur, individually or in tandem, are just too many to count.
But just to be on the safe side, women who’ve had a period that’s too early, too late, too heavy, too light, too crampy, too easy or that felt jusssssst a little too bang on RIGHT should contact local law enforcement and have one of those big old boys check out the “possible scene of the crime” for themselves.
I still say the battle cry should be arrest us and charge us, or leave us the fuck alone.
I’m sick of society indulgine every drooling whackjob and his halfwit followers with this overreverent pretense that waving around extremist dogma or mouthing nonsense phrases like moral values is a defacto Open Sesame into anyone’s private and personal decisions.
Jeez, I wish these obsessive extremists would consider being pro-LIVES. Get one of their own, improve the lives of those struggling to support themselves and young families, and leave me the hell to mine.
A while back, I looked up my state’s caselaw from the period when abortion was illegal. The aborted fetus was not regarded as a human being, so of course there was no question of murder charges, unless the pregnant woman died from a badly performed abortion. The abortionist was instead charged with the distinct crime of performing an abortion.
The woman herself was regarded as the victim of the crime–the statute criminalized performing an abortion, not getting one–and the caselaw concluded that the nature of the crime was such that the woman could not be charged as an aider and abettor.
Richard Land, of course, has to take the position that the fetus is, in fact, a live human being–something no one thought before the antichoicers had to start formulating arguments against Roe v Wade. Allowing for that, however, his proposal is not very different from what was in place before Roe
To make the wingnut logic truly consistent (!) you’d have to exempt from prosecution any female doctor who performed an abortion, because she, too, would obviously have to be so thoroughly impaired as to be beyond the reach of the law. So what the Fundies really want is to spur the growth of all-women health co-operatives….
Isn’t it much more likely that women who tend to eat unhealthily during pregnancy also tend to eat unhealthily at other times, such as when raising their children, and that the children of people with unhealthy eating habits learn unhealthy eating habits themselves?
Does Land also believe that Mafia hitmen should be charged with voluntary manslaughter? That a doctor who kills a child should not be convicted of murder if, you know, the kid is crippled or something?
More evidence that faux-lifers couldn’t care less about TEH BAYBEEEZ. They’re just woman-hating dicks.
“It’s not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life,” Land said.
Oh, someone’s definitely getting visited by the Floating Uterus of Doom tonight.
The thing that worries me about the “How much time should she do?” campaign, is I feel like it’s only a matter of time before the anti-choice nut jobs start shouting back “Death Penalty.” And then I’m really going to have to move to Canada.
Ellie, when the NYT Magazine did that article on abortion in El Salvador there was alot of scary stuff in it. The part that scared me the most was the fact, that women can indeed be jailed after mis-carriage and essentially their uterus becomes states evidence.
“It’s not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life,” Land said.
But then how can we let a psychologically impaired woman keep custody of her baby? Aren’t pregnant women gonna be crazy whether they have an abortion or not? Or is he basically arguing that deciding to get an abortion is legally evidence of being crazy?
Wow, can’t wait until the defense lawyers get a hold of that precedent. (”Your honor, no sane person would commit this act. The fact that my client did commit the act is proof she was mentally impaired.”)
This is all about the First Amendment. Let’s not follow the gov’t down the path of censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America’s favorite past-time. The US gov’t (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like America Deceived (book) from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (even for whacked-out pro-lifers).
Actually, somegirls, that’s the absolute best possible thing that we can hope for. As far as I can tell, the majority of the anti-choice rank and file is made up of dupes, not villains. They’ve been caught up in the rhetoric that eliminates women from the equation entirely, and they just want to SAVE TEH BAYBEEZ from the evil abortionists. That’s why the “how much time should she do?” campaign is so effective: it forces them to think about the women, which is exactly what the anti-choice leaders and hardliners don’t want.
That’s why they keep coming up with such weak-ass answers to the question: it’s easy to hate mad-scientist caricatures of abortionists, and want to see them incarcerated/executed, but the women that they haven’t even been thinking about? Women that they may know? Women that they may be in some cases? There’s no statute of limitations for murder. It doesn’t matter if you’ve given your life to Christ since your days as a sinner, that’s still twenty-to-life, or even Death. Sure, the strawslut that they probably picture when they picture the woman at all may deserve to “face the consequences of her actions” in the form of an unwanted child, but does she deserve that?
So I repeat: the best possible thing that could happen is for the anti-choice nut jobs to start shouting “death penalty”. It may finally force their fellow anti-choicers to recognize what psychopaths they’re really dealing with, and what the logical conclusion of their own arguments is.
It’s not censorship to criticize what they’re saying, Wallace.
“It’s not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life,” Land said.
So, since pregnancy causes a woman to be psychologically impaired and, thus, unable to consent, I take it I won’t be needing the patient’s consent for anything during those 9 months. I get to probe and prod her, and operate on her at my discretion, right?
Also, if I happen to be pregnant when I perform the termination, we’re all set, no? No penalties for me, what with all the psycho impairment and what not.
Last, but not least, notice how, when it comes to discussing female reproductive health, any and all deranged assumptions and musings are given consideration.
Dupes not villains…I really hope you’re right.
Maybe I’m just cynical.
You know, this line of pro-choice argument is appealing, but weak. I don’t think we should pursue it any longer.
Analogy:
If someone things suicide is immoral and ought to be illegal so as to deter it, what then should be the punishment?
Just because someone can’t think of a good answer to the question doesn’t make the first part untrue.
We really should be arguing that women’s bodies are their own, period. We’re not pro-choice because anti-choice is unfeasible. We aren’t pro-choice because anti-choicers are stupid or ignorant. We aren’t pro-choice because the anti-choice leaders are insane. We’re pro-choice because women’s bodies are their own. Period.
We shouldn’t have to resort to cheap tricks like the anti-choicers do.
This point about “how much time should she serve” isn’t as powerful as the pro-choice people think. A good case can be made for punishing a provider of abortion more than the woman not because of mental capacity or other nonsense, but because pro-choicers actually make good arguments about why women may want to have abortions. They feel the pregnancy would impair their financial security, their liberty, or even their safety if, say, their parents find out. Many who seek abortions are poor, young, or under a great deal of pressure.
Treating them like cold-blooded Charles Manson murderes makes no sense, and you’re all being deliberately obtuse by saying pro-lifers have to treat them that way in order to be consistent.
The key point for pro-lifers is that all those arguments pro-choicers give are excellent mitigating factors–not justifications. They are perfectly legitimate reasons to lighten the sentence or the charged crime, even to the point of probation. But they’re not reason to keep abortion legal. Pro-lifers want states to be able to ban abortion and then see if that sentencing scheme will work–the same way states treat any other criminal issue.
“Wallace” is a bot advertising some book. Haven’t you seen “him” before?
Elaine, since suicide should not be illegal, I don’t know where you’re going with this.
My personal feeling is that this line of argument is so popular among right-to-lifers because it lets those among them who have had abortions dodge responsability for their own actions. “I would never have done such an evil thing, but that terrible doctor pressured me into it. I was just out of my mind with stress over being pregnant!”
Wallace:
Huh?
You know, I’m always amazed at how many people are patently incapable of telling the difference between “you’re full of crap” and “you’re not allowed to talk anymore.”
“Wallace” is a bot advertising some book. Haven’t you seen “him” before?
So the reason why his comments seem to have nothing to do with this thread is that, in fact, they actually aren’t in response to anything in this thread?
Using a simple, powerful, memorable rhetorical strategy that forces anti-choicers and undecideds to think about the woman instead of just TEH BAYBEEZ is a cheap trick?
I think your standards might be a bit too high.
If a woman is pregnant but doesn’t want to be, then she’s a mother in the biological sense only. I don’t see how the existence of an unwanted connection could make a woman identify herself by that relationship, especially when the identity in question is generally characterized (as the person I quoted associated it) with love, acceptance, and nurturing.
I didn’t get the impression that suddenly the pro-choice camp was going to abandon our perfectly reasonable arguments and instead base pro-choice thought on the “How much time should she do?” argument; but rather that it’s another way to get the other side to really think about what they are spouting. I think there’s a big difference there.
I mean, I’m an atheist for a ton of reasons, but when I’d argue with some born-again who wants to show me THE LIGHT, I tend to use his own bible against him because it’s something he thinks he knows. I don’t believe 99% of it (nothing beyond what can be shown through rigorous archeology to be likely true), but I’ll use it against him because he thinks it proves his point, even when it clearly doesn’t. I’m not tossing my own reasons; I’m just giving him something to consider.
They are perfectly legitimate reasons to lighten the sentence or the charged crime
No, they’re not. Poverty, parental displeasure or loss of income would not get a woman off the hook if, say, she paid her boyfriend to murder her six-year-old in cold blood.
Much as you would like us to STFU about this because it’s uncomfortable for you, 87, “how much time should she serve” makes it perfectly clear how little anti-choicers think of woman, and how much bullshit their “fetus = baby” rhetoric is.
(Although you could have gotten that latter from the “except in cases of rape or incest” nonsense.)
They are perfectly legitimate reasons to lighten the sentence or the charged crime
No, they’re not. Poverty, parental displeasure or loss of income would not get a woman off the hook if, say, she paid her boyfriend to murder her six-year-old in cold blood.
Much as you would like us to STFU about this because it’s uncomfortable for you, 87, “how much time should she serve” makes it perfectly clear how little anti-choicers think of woman, and how much bullshit their “fetus = baby” rhetoric is.
(Although you could have gotten that latter from the “except in cases of rape or incest” nonsense.)
It’s official — the Bible-beaters are far worse than hip-hop artists when it comes to misogyny. When you have that lousy motherfucker Richard Land telling doctors to just sit there and let innocent women die from their pregnancy-related complications, then you know that Land and the Southern Baptist group is just like the Taliban in every sense of the word.
And forcing a woman/girl to have a child against her will is aggravated first-degree rape and religious leaders and doctors should be charged with a felony and doctors lose their medical license permanently, and hospitals should have legal action taken against them for unauthorized medical procedures (i.e. giving birth against a woman’s will).
This next point I will keep beating on again and again until the lousy motherfuckers finally understand that they have no right sticking their nose into women’s private medical rooms. If the lousy motherfucking religious wingnuts are so damn concerned about children, then why won’t they step up to the plate and pay for EVERY last unwanted child for the next 21 years???
Only one can imagine what the response would be if all men were ordered to have a vasectomy or go to jail for the rest of their lives.
What we pro-choicers need to do is call for a Women’s Bill of Rights and the Freedom of Choice Amendment in our Constitution to ensure that women have the absolute right to control their own body. Those two things are the only sure ways to make sure that women’s bodies are their own and not the property of the government.
As for murder vs. (in)voluntary manslaughter, what about how plea deals can act as a reduction from the former to the latter– that’s not technically wrong, is it?
I guess the reasoning behind the “punishing the doctor” argument is that abortions will simply “stop,” i.e. go underground, because the doctors simply won’t perform them and no one will be criminally punished (except the underground ones who are caught.)
Although the fundies might violate ex post facto (meh, been done plenty of times in our legal system, even if it’s unconstitutional) and instill retroactive punishments on doctors who’ve done it before.
The Tiller/Morrison/Kline case in Kansas shows how the fundies are willing to go after the doctors through legal channels; of course they also embellish it here in “WE’RE HELPING TEH RAPE VICTIMZ AND HELPLESS CHILDREN!!!1111!!!”
Women utilizing the right to vote, exceling in academia and the workplace notwithstanding, these anti-choicers are fully committed to the concept that women are really just children who need to be protected from their own decision-making. They have never thought that a woman could be capable of sound thinking. It’s pathetic and prehistoric but there it is.
Stitch: It wasn’t so long ago women were routinely PERMANENTLY fired from their jobs for getting pregnant. IIRC, this wasn’t outlawed until sometime in the 70’s.
It was only a couple of years ago that a Catholic school in the US fired one of its teachers for getting pregnant. Sending the very public message to all other unmarried women teaching at Catholic schools that, to keep their jobs, early abortion is absolutely required.
I wouldn’t be too worried about “death penalty.” You might get a few extremist nutjobs who yell it, but it would really sober up the 99.9% of the rest of the population who suddenly imagine their daughter or their neice or their best friend being executed for a exercising a right that many of them secretly enjoy. How Much Time Should She Do makes them incredibly uncomfortable because as it is now, when anti-choicers picket clinics, go in the next day for an abortion, then come back and start picketing again, there is absolutely no consequences for them–only the doctors and nurses and staff that work at the clinic. So they like framing the argument as “we should jail the doctors” because it keeps them nice and safe. When you say “no, if abortion is murder than the woman who seeks the abortion has contracted a murderer, which is still punishable by law–how much time should she do?” Suddenly they aren’t so safe, they can’t discretely duck in for their own abortion and go back to being one of the Righteous afterwards.
Major drift: Last night we were listening to NPR and we heard that a NY law enforcement office (I think it was the PD) announced that the greatest threat to America was “home grown terrorism” instead of outsiders. At first I was nodding on this one, but then they start talking about how ‘they’ aren’t recruited at mosques but hooka bars, and it burst my bubble because they were still talking about Arabs, and I mentioned to angrymob that Christian extremists are still attacking women’s clinics quite regularly. If they were Muslim extremists driving their trucks into women’s clinics and trying to set them on fire, it would be all over the news and everyone would be on the air explaining how much Muslims hated women — but since these are white Christian guys it’s just dismissed as “oh, he was just insane” or “oh, he just cared about the babies soooo much.” Grrrrr. (end drift)
Oh, I totally disagree, especially in this case. I think it’s GREAT that pro-choice groups are finally effecting what I believe is the most effective strategy for winning the rhetorical war in this country over the abortion debate. This new campaign does not negate the main reason for abortion rights-personal reproductive liberty-but forces people to think about the consequences of opposing abortion rights in terms of emotions they understand which, like it or not, is the way you have to appeal to the masses. Anti-choice groups also don’t have a good answer to it that doesn’t undercut their argument that a fetus is the same as a life, so it makes them look stupid and extremist, which is what we need to maintain abortion rights.
I would also argue that it wouldn’t necessarily be bad to go a bit farther on this line of thinking-insinuate that anti-choice groups actually would jail 1 in 5 women (i think this is the statistic?), including mothers with children, for having an abortion, so people empathize more with the women getting abortions as being a relative not a strawslut.Liberals, i think, need to do more of realizing why the right has been so much more successful as of late despite little to go on rationally, by appealing more to people’s emotions.
It was only a couple of years ago that a Catholic school in the US fired one of its teachers for getting pregnant. Sending the very public message to all other unmarried women teaching at Catholic schools that, to keep their jobs, early abortion is absolutely required
The difference back in the 70’s and before was that married women who got pregnant were often fired, on the theory that mothers ought to stay home and raise their kids rather than work. Sort of involuntary unpaid maternity leave . . .
Abortion should be safe and what? Am I really reading this tripe at Pandagon? Seriously? There should be some kind of threshold-level rate of abortions above which abortion is wrong? So who gets to decide how many abortions per year is acceptable? The Southern Baptist ethics guy? Anna Quindlen? Operation Save America? You?
I’ve got a better idea. How about we stop trying to kiss ass to the antis, quit counting abortion procedures, and stick with keeping them safe and LEGAL.
I should add here that the reasoning behind “pregnant women have to be nuts to want to kill their own babies” may indeed have to do with the idea that estrogen makes us crazy (and testosterone doesn’t make men nuts?), but I think there is another idea at work here.
At bottom it’s just radical thinking that a woman would possibly ever have the power to choose between life and death for someone besides herself. This is why conservative Christians have such a problem with the idea of a female President. It also explains why they have a problem with abortion. Not only is the pregnant woman deciding between life and death for someone, she’s doing it for her own “child,” thereby violating all kinds of stereotypes about what a mother is and what a mother should want and do.
(I believe an embryo or a fetus is human and I’ll even make the leap that it IS a woman’s child, but I also believe abortion is about bodily autonomy, and I DON’T believe in making someone continue to be life support if they don’t want to be. The fact that anti-choicers refuse to argue within that framework and dismiss it as ridiculous should tell you something.)
Hardly restricted to Catholic schools either, remember Jim DeMint’s campaign?
http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/1727.html
Of course, he never comes out and says that the live-in boyfriend shouldn’t be allowed to teach either.
He had no business even being elected in SC, let alone states with more moderate/liberal values; and if word on the street is true about Lindsey Graham I’m not sure why he’s comfortable serving alongside DeMint.
I think everyone knows at this point that the reason the pro-life movement says that women shouldn’t be punished for abortion because of (fill in the blank reason) is because they are perfectly aware that the American public would not buy and would not be down with a bunch of women going to prison over abortion, right?
Yet another cheap trick to shut up someone who disagrees with you.
I’m just saying that this whole “then what should the penalty be” line of argument is:
a) Not new. Just because it’s the first time you saw it on YouTube, doesn’t make it new. It doesn’t work. It’s been tried before. Really, are any of YOU persuaded by this argument?
b) Doesn’t get to the root of the issue: the woman’s human rights. It’s focussed on the application of law, not the morality of law. Using this reasoning, we shouldn’t have any laws where the penalty doesn’t fit the crime or when the law can’t be enforced well. It ignores the other reasons for laws, that they are guiding principles for a community, a reflection of the community values.
c) Too open ended: the first time someone comes up with an answer, say, community service teaching pregnancy prevention to high school students, you’ve lost the argument.
I’m talking about the logical structure of the argument. You don’t have to agree with the premises to see that the conclusion does not follow.
I chose suicide because it is already illegal yet cannot be enforced because obviously, if you’re successful committing this crime, you’re dead and can’t be punished. Also, many people have strong moral beliefs about suicide, so that comes into play.
Ace, I remember NBC talking about DeMint. He is even further to the right than Iran and equally as far right as the Taliban.
Like I said to Wallace, criticism (rather mild criticism, really) is not censorship. Nor is it a cheap trick. That’s what this blog is for.
We don’t need to be. We already agree with it. Besides, just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean it can’t be effective if it’s used and promulgated in a new way. There were space operas before Star Wars, after all.
All true, but…well, I think Leandra said it perfectly:
Wrong. That’s when we say: “Wow, that’s an awfully light penalty for what you’ve been calling murder. And you say liberals are soft on crime! Or are you admitting that an embryo/fetus is different than a baby?”
This is an article about mothers eating junk food ‘condemning’ their children to do the same, not sure if it is the same one referred to above:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6940852.stm
I love that the recommendation not to ‘eat for two’ comes from a veterinarian… SIGH.
I always liked the rare part of “Safe Legal and Rare.” Because to me it refocuses the anti-choice arguement to addressing the reasons women have abortions: Lack of accesible birth control, lack of financial support, lack of employers who respect and support mothers etc etc.
I’d like to see more of these pro-lifers working for women’s health and well-being. Women who want abortions aren’t crazy. Infact for the most part they’re quite smart in realizing that having a baby is a big f’n deal and you’re on your own dealing with it.
But of course “Safe Legal and Rare” is also a part of the whole Clinton “triangulation” politics…so maybe in someways your right that it’s pandering.
“the first time someone comes up with an answer, say, community service teaching pregnancy prevention to high school students, you’ve lost the argument.”
You obviously missed the week-long Feministe thread where this answer was given sveral times, and rebutted.
We do not let convicted murderers serve their time by doing community service, or teaching high school students. I think you would see a great uproar from parents, that a murderer would come to their school to talk about how bad murder is.
So, obviously, abortion =/= murder, if they are willing to let them off with community service.
So the obvious answer is that abortions should only be performed by pregnant woman doctors.
Or something.
Ah, the old “wimmenz gots to be crazeee to want to kill th3 baybeez” argument. Of course, if the pregnant woman decides to carry the fetus to term, then she’s not crazy.
Just like pregnant teens: The ones who want to have abortions are too immature to make that decision, while teens of the same age who decide to keep teh baybee are automatically emancipated from their parents and free to make all medical decisions regarding their bodies, their pregnancies, and the results. You don’t need a judge’s order to allow you to continue a pregnancy without your parents’ permission, just to end one privately.
As long as a woman chooses the “right” answer, they’ll pretend she had a right to make that choice, b/c choosing abortion is just craaaaazeeeee. It’s just pretending b/c there’s only one allowable choice, and no matter what the reasoning, any other choice is crazy. Well, unless you feel like fulfilling fundy rape fantasies and are willing to go into graphic detail of how violently violated you were, ya know, cause then even Bill Napoli will say it’s not crazy to terminate. But that decision certainly can’t be left up to a pregnant rape victim and her doctor! The doctor just wants the huge abortion fee and the woman is crazy unless she wants to carry even a life-threatening pregnancy to term.
Fundy logic makes my head swim. For example, Kate Gosselin deciding to carry 7 fetuses to term instead of selective reduction was a perfectly sane choice. Fill that quiver with one go! But since one died in utero, should she be charged with negligence? Cause if she’d reduced, the miscarried one might have lived. But if she’d reduced, then she’d be crazy and incapable of making such a decision for protecting her health and insuring healthier outcomes for the remaining feti. And she’d be a murderer. So, instead, she miscarries one that might have survived a normal pregnancy. Is that manslaughter? Or murder since she decided to carry all of them? How long should she go to jail?
Ah…the insane would be running the asylum!!!
I suppose we’d just have to “pray for them,” then, as the little old lady in the YouTube video says.
Or would it only work if the pregnant doctors performing the abortions intended to abort their pregnancies as well? B/c if they were carrying the baby to term, they’d be sane, right? So to be legally insane, they have to intend to get an abortion at some point after they perform the abortions.
Talk about restrictive! Those damn fundies.
“No, they’re not. Poverty, parental displeasure or loss of income would not get a woman off the hook if, say, she paid her boyfriend to murder her six-year-old in cold blood.
Much as you would like us to STFU about this because it’s uncomfortable for you, 87, “how much time should she serve” makes it perfectly clear how little anti-choicers think of woman, and how much bullshit their “fetus = baby” rhetoric is.”
Well first, maybe it would get her mostly off the hook. After all, a woman did just get released from jail for voluntary manslaughter after a few months after shooting her husband in the back, if we’re to believe some recent media reports. So shortening sentences for murder-like crimes is not exactly unheard of, if the mitigating factors fit.
But in any case, pro-choicers themselves argue very forcefully that it’s not the same thing for a woman to kill her six-year-old in cold blood. Abortion doesn’t reach the same level of callousness, mostly because of the woman’s accepted obligation to care for the six-year old and her personal, subjective view of the six-year-old’s moral worth. Abortion also involves issues of bodily autonomy, and is often not done “in cold blood” and stoic calculation.
Pro-lifers could agree that there’s a difference in gravity between killing a fetus and killing a six-year-old and still not think that killing a fetus should be legally practiced. Again, it’s the difference between a justification and a mitigating factor.
Of course I don’t want you to “STFU,” I just don’t think it opens and shuts the issue as decisively as some people think.
Could you please link to some of those media reports? I’m curious as to just what those mitigating factors were. If we’re talking about “battered wife syndrome”, I think (although I’m no criminal lawyer) that that may be considered a mitigating factor because it has some relation to self-defense. However, since it’s self-defense against a general situation instead of an immediate threat, the killing is still a crime, albeit a lesser one.
A woman is in no danger from her six-year-old child (although, ironically, she may indeed be endangered by a fetus), and I’m pretty confident in saying that poverty or parental displeasure would not be accepted as mitigating factors.
Why, yes. Very good. That is, in fact, a summary of the pro-choice position.
However, I’d like to point out that legal definitions of things like “in cold blood” can be very different from the commonly-used meaning. It doesn’t matter how upset you are, if you can think clearly enough to hire someone ahead of time to kill the person you want dead, that’s murder 1.
Maybe, but that’s not what they do. Their rhetoric is that having an abortion = killing a baby, and that’s the rhetoric that has gained them so much support. It’s simple, it’s clear, and it’s powerful. They don’t want the issue to become more complex than that. Complex issues with gray areas make it difficult to rally people’s emotions. Look at how carefully their rhetoric removes even the woman from the equation, making it completely about the fetus: “It’s a child not a choice”, “Abortion stops a beating heart”.
“How much time should she do?” forces the woman back into the equation, which is something that the anti-choicers don’t want. It muddies the waters. More importantly, it forces non-hardliners to think about the logical conclusion of their rhetoric: if it is, in fact, a child, then having an abortion is the same as hiring someone to kill your baby. That’s first-degree murder, with some conspiracy charges thrown it. In some states, that’s the death penalty. And since there’s no statute of limitations on murder, the fact that you’ve Found Jesus since you had your abortion twenty years ago and that you now protest outside women’s-health clinics to atone for that sin means nothing.
You said: “No one is saying abortion should be encouraged; it should be safe and rare”
This puzzles me, if abortion isn’t morally wrong why should it be rare?
Do we say removing tumors should be rare?
Unless you are insinuating that abortion is killing something? If it is killing something. What is it that you are killing? If it’s a parasite, we should kill it. Why make killing parasites rare?
Aren’t you being disingenuous when you say that. Abortion should be safe and as frequent as you need it. What’s this rare nonsense?