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Man, those people are coming across as dumb, but come to think about it, I havent ever considered the punishment either.
Of course, Im pro-choice so what the do I care?
How Much Jail Time?
Quindlen: How Much Jail Time for Women Who Have Abortions?
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-do entary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It's as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: "I've never really thought about it." "I don't have an answer for that." "I don't know." "Just pray for them."
You have to hand it to the questioner; he struggles manfully. "Usually when things are illegal there's a penalty attached," he explains patiently. But he can't get a single person to be decisive about the crux of a matter they have been approaching with absolute certainty.
A new public-policy group called the National Ins ute for Reproductive Health wants to take this contradiction and make it the centerpiece of a national conversation, along with a slogan that stops people in their tracks: how much time should she do? If the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a cons utional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal. But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.
"They never connect the dots," says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. "We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion," June recalled. Chet Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts. "How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?" June says
Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into "victims" of their own free will. 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. Such a view seemed to be a vestige of the past until the Supreme Court handed down its most recent abortion decision upholding a federal prohibition on a specific procedure. Justice Anthony Kennedy, obviously feeling excessively paternal, argued that the ban protected women from themselves. "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon," he wrote, "it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."
Even with "no reliable data," he went on to conclude that "severe depression and loss of esteem can follow." (Apparently, no one has told Justice Kennedy about the severe depression and loss of esteem that can follow bearing and raising a baby you can't afford and didn't want.) Luckily, there still remains one justice on the court who has actually been pregnant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg roared back with a dissent that called Kennedy's caveat about regret an "anti-abortion shibboleth" and his opinion a reflection of "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Cons ution—ideas that have long since been discredited."
Those ancient notions undergird the refusal to confront the logical endpoint of criminalization. Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It's murder, but she'll get her punishment from God. It's murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It's murder, but the penalty should be ... counseling?
The great thing about video is that you can see the mental wheels turning as these people realize that they somehow have overlooked something central while they were slinging certainties. Nearly 20 years ago, in a presidential debate, George Bush the elder was asked this very question, whether in making abortion illegal he would punish the woman who had one. "I haven't sorted out the penalties," he said lamely. Neither, it turns out, has anyone else. But there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can't countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can't have it both ways.
I would like all anti choice folks to tell us how long a woman should be jailed if she has an abortion if and when they are outlawed?
Last edited by George Gervin's Afro; 07-30-2007 at 09:56 AM.
Man, those people are coming across as dumb, but come to think about it, I havent ever considered the punishment either.
Of course, Im pro-choice so what the do I care?
Death Penalty! Its All About The Death Penalty!
God Approves Of This!
According to the Church, yes, yes He does.
I always assumed people who wanted to criminalize abortion were looking at fines for the woman and fines/disaccrediting the doctor. At least that's what the anti-abortion crowd I've seen said.
Also, a big reason a lot of the recent conditional laws focus on the Dr is because the Supreme Court's ruling of a cons utional right to privacy combined with Dr-Patient protections means it's almost impossible to enforce against the woman. You'd basically ending up needing someone the woman had discussed details with to voluntarily turn her in. It's significantly easier to prove a doctor has performed/agreed to perform abortions without violating those protections.
Fixed.
Seriously though, why cant people just stay out of other folks lives...i mean why the do you care if i am gay and i marry, or if i have an abortion. You don't know me or my life, or any situations i encounter...leave me out of your ing moral crusades republicans...not everyone has to be like you, that is why this country is supposedly so much better than the rest, because we tolerate the differences.... n ...
Just to clarify i really dont like a lot of things democrats have to say or do either...i just find the moral crusaders in the republican party 10000% more de able than anything the demo's could pull off.
Usually what I've heard is that the doctor who performs the abortion bears the brunt of the punishment, while the woman gets little or nothing.
Are abortions in the US legal at any time?
8th month abortions are legal too?
The general principle in the US is that abortions are legal until the fetus is viable. There are exceptions and caveats to that principle.
Actually yeah, but few doctors will even consider it that late unless it's an emergency.
A type of abortion procedure or two is illegal (based on they are too "cruel" and "barbaric"), but no one has created a successful law putting a restrictive time frame on abortions. Mainly because SCOTUS declared there's no way to enforce anti-abortion laws without violating inferred Cons utional rights to privacy.
In almost all cases, abortions are inmoral. I guess that is not enough to make them illegal.
See, I disagree with you. I think the behaviour that led to the need for the abortion in most cases is immoral and/or irresponsible, and later term abortions are immoral as well for me.
But in general the abortion itself is not. We do not need more children being raised as wards of the state. We do not need more children being raised in poverty because the parents couldn't afford to take care of themselves, let alone a child. There are a lot of valid reasons as to why to have an abortion.
Heck, my friend's gf had an abortion. The Dr told her there was a significantly better than 50% chance she'd miscarraige or stillbirth, and that even if she didn't she herself could be seriously harmed. There's nothing wrong with an abortion in that situation, either.
But since it's morality, I have my morals and you have yours, and we can disagree just fine. The beauty of the US is the fact that other than general human laws that have been around in some form for centuries if not millenia, one can not force their morals onto anyone else.
I certainly wouldn't want a Hindi trying to pass laws saying I wasn't allowed to eat beef.
I wouldn't ever pretend even want to possess the audacity it takes to tell a woman what to do with her own body...there are a lot of other immoral things in this world among those walking the earth....
But just the audacity to tell americans what to do with their money.
What about telling a woman what to do with the body of an unborn child completely at her mercy?
It's her body..end of story
Even if the kid inside her is 8 and 1/2 old, she is still en led to do with it whatever she choses?
Okie dokie . . .
'completely at her mercy' - why should possible life be more important than life itself? ...and do human clones, never having been in-womb, have rights like the rest of us? Trying to define 'life' can get very sticky...
So, you'd favor a woman's right to an abortion up to the point of birth?
A chid inside her is not entirely her's.
Possible life? So, in your infinite wisdom, at what point does an unborn child go from mere potentiality to reality?
And you make a good argument against cloning.
Killing an unborn child is immoral any way you look at it.
Pretty sure if that was the "end of story", then this debate wouldn't still be going on in America now would it?
Or is it that George Gervin's Afro, a made up name on an internet message board dedicated to the San Antonio Spurs has decided that it is indeed the "end of story" and now we must all obey? If so, let me know and I'll be sure to follow you blindly no matter what decision you've made in order to better America and the rest of the world.
Arrogance: See George Gervin's Afro.
never said that. I am opposed to to late term abortions.. I am pro 1st trimester abortions..
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