Legally Torturing Women

Again:  restricting safe, legal abortions does not reduce the number of abortions; it increases the number of women who die from unsafe abortions.


Jessica Valenti at The Nation:

According to a recent United Nations report, North Dakota is torturing women. Seriously. Juan Méndez, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on torture, has included lack of access to abortion in his yearly report on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Considering North Dakota’s new law which bans abortion after six weeks, it stands to reason that the state is torturing its female citizens.

I’m not trying to be trite—I do believe, as Méndez does, that forcing women to carry pregnancies they don’t want is cruel:

Also Kansas.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

The dirty little secret of “personhood” initiatives is that they would proscribe not only abortions, or “abortion pills,” but IUD’s and “Plan B” contraceptives on grounds that such devices and drugs are actually “abortifacients,” identical morally to murdering an infant. And indeed, some “personhood” folk would ban the routine anti-ovulant “pill” used by many millions of Americans on grounds that it sometimes operates by interfering with the implantation of a fertilized ovum—i.e., a “person”—in the uterine wall.

If regular Republican-voting Americans had any idea of the radical vision underlying such legislation—something straight out of the Handmaid’s Tale, folks—the solons supporting it wouldn’t even last until the next election. So you’d think they’d be extra careful about supporting efforts to ensure that most of the female population of the state of child-bearing age wouldn’t have to worry about being hauled off to the hoosegow and told they needed to get their procreative groove on or put an aspirin between their legs.

But no: Kansas Republicans consider that sort of concession to the twentieth century a “little gotcha amendment” they find irritating.

Maybe it’s just that they know this package of legislation wouldn’t stand a moment of judicial scrutiny, even if Justice Kennedy goes a lot further in his drift towards second-guessing what’s good for women. Maybe they just want to erect a monument to ideology that can never be surpassed, or to distract attention from less frightening provisions (like all those boring medical licensing provisions which actually shut down abortion providers) that might survive a court test.

But I don’t mind paying some special attention to this particular development because for all their movement’s habits of deception and crocodile tears for women, Kansas’ antichoicers are giving us real insight into their idea of a good society.

Bills just as bad as those in North Dakota and Kansas sped through Kentucky's senate this year, and were stopped only by determined liberal committee chairs in the state house.

They're being drawn up in your state, too, have no doubt. Are you sure they won't succeed?