Not for the woman
Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.
Bollocks. Forcing women to gestate and push out babies they don’t want is extreme torture. It’s beside the point that the bill also punishes doctors, because the whole concept of forced pregnancy is punitive.
Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.
Dead wrong. Forcing women to bear children is slavery – literal slavery. It’s hard labor, it’s not paid, it’s against their will, it’s unwanted, it’s coercive, it’s painful – it’s slavery. Olsen doesn’t care because it will never happen to him.
It also serves no societal function… We have enough people who are surplus to the requirements of an advanced civilization as it is. The 5% (or whatever) ideal unemployment that economic growth favors is gonna get smaller when we no longer need anyone to metaphorically dig ditches.
And yet most of the countries in the industrialized world are terrified of the falling birth rate. And the “woke” claim even talking about population is racist. And the pope…don’t get me started on the pope.
I had a conversation a couple of years ago with a former Nebraska legislator, a man with strong liberal cred (yeah, liberal…in Nebraska. He was from Lincoln, not from my area) who believed we needed to bring the birthrate way up because otherwise our revenues from taxes dropped. Seems to me a better solution, rather than creating unwanted children and children living in poverty, would be to properly tax corporations and enforce it, but lawmakers are afraid they would just leave. I bet, even if we required WalMart to pay their fair share of taxes, we would probably have a WalMart in town; they’re likely to have a presence in a midwestern city of 25,000…especially one surrounded by smaller towns that came here to shop. But instead of sucking resources from the town, they’d be returning at least some of it. And we wouldn’t have to worry so much about birth rates.