These bills punish women
Ohio is super excited about our new Trump future.
Ohio lawmakers passed a bill late Tuesday that would prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — at around six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant.
If Gov. John Kasich (R) signs the bill, it would pose a direct challenge to Supreme Court decisions that have found that women have a constitutional right to abortion at least until the point of viability, which is typically pegged around 24 weeks. Similar bills have been blocked by the courts. Because of this, even many antiabortion advocates have opposed such measures.
But some Ohio Republicans said they were empowered to support the bill because of President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 high court decision that legalized abortion nationally.
Yay! Return women to bondage! Women aren’t people anyway, they’re just conduits.
Abortion rights groups immediately condemned the measure, including how it was passed: As a last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill. They said it contains no exceptions for rape or incest. And they noted that the Ohio legislature is set to vote on another abortion restriction today, one that would ban the procedure at 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“Make no mistake — these bills punish women,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement. “We call on Governor John Kasich to veto these unconstitutional abortion bans.”
But punishing women is what makes it so much fun.
I was unaware that I was pregnant until 13 weeks, for a variety of reasons, including fear. That meant I had trouble getting my abortion locally, and had to drive for three hours to do it in a clinic that would do a 14-week abortion. If this bill had been in place where I lived then, how much more difficult would it have been for me? (Disclaimer: I have never lived in Ohio, but my experience is that if one state passes one of these, others quickly follow).
Are they planning to do compulsory ultrasound scans of every fertile woman in the country, every couple of weeks, to find out if they are pregnant?
Will they modify the archways in every building entrance, the ones that currently detect shoplifters?
Will they have an army of people to arrest anyone who is pregnant and lock them up until delivery?
How do they expect to police and enforce such a law?
tiggerthewing – you’ve just outlined a feature of the plot of the dystopian novel I wrote last year. I had a dread fear it wasn’t going to stay fiction for long.