|
Do Abortion Advocates
Want Women To Go To Jail For Abortion?
New Article Raises Old
Abortion Scare Tactic.
Abortion advocates are at it again trying to scare
Americans into believing that pro-lifers want to throw
women into jail for abortions after Roe is
overturned. Earlier this month, Newsweek columnist
Anna Quindlen wrote a column “How Much Jail Time?”
That is, if Roe were overturned and abortion became
illegal, “how much jail time” will women receive
for their abortions?
The answer is
simple-and the same answer every time this scare tactic is
raised. Women will not go to jail for an abortion in
the event Roe is overturned. There were laws against
abortion long before Roe overturned those laws and if
women were prosecuted along with abortionists, Quindlen
and abortion supporters would be citing instances
today. Justice Blackmun, the
author of Roe, noted that many states’
anti-abortion laws did not impose penalties on women.
In National
Review Online’s Symposium,
One Untrue Thing, Life After Roe,
Dorinda Bordlee says that the current pro-life legal
efforts to stop abortion like those in South Dakota and
other states “explicitly state: ‘Nothing in this
section may be construed to subject the pregnant mother
upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any
criminal conviction and penalty.’” The Partial
Birth Abortion Ban targets abortionists, not aborting
women.
It is true
that some people advocated prosecution of aborting women
prior to Roe. In the same NRO article, Clark Forsythe
of
Americans United For Life, the nation’s largest
pro-life public interest law firm, says “the irony is that
in nearly all of the reported court cases explicitly
addressing the issue of whether a woman was an
accomplice to her abortion, it was the
abortionist (not the prosecutor) who pushed the
courts to treat the woman as an accomplice, for the
obvious purpose of undermining the state’s criminal case
against the abortionist (including the abortionist Ruth
Barnett when Oregon last prosecuted her in 1968).”
Forsythe also
says “Leslie Reagan, in her 1997 book When Abortion
Was a Crime, admits that states did not prosecute
women for their abortions and concedes that the purpose
behind that law was not to degrade women but to protect
them.”
Pro-lifers
would not support laws to send women to jail because we
often see the woman as a secondary victim of abortion.
There’s a difference between the abortionist and the woman
seeking an abortion. Amherst Professor Hadley Arkes says,
“On the one hand there may
(be) a young, unmarried woman, who finds herself pregnant,
with the father of the child not standing with her.
Abandoned by the man, and detached from her family, she
may feel the burden of the crisis bearing on her alone,
with the prospect of life-altering changes. On the other
hand, there is the man trained in surgery, the
professional who knows exactly what he is doing — he knows
that he is destroying a human life, either by poisoning a
child or dismembering it. And in perfect coolness and
detachment, and at a nice price, he makes the killing of
the innocent his office-work.”`
The best way
to stop abortion-then and now-is to charge the
abortionist. Most women who have abortions will have
a single abortion (almost half are repeats- second, third
and fourth abortions). But many abortion providers have
performed over 30,000 abortions-almost as many abortions
as there are people in Elko, Fallon and Winnemucca.
Then there are organizations like Planned Parenthood who
have performed and cashed in on over 3 million abortions.
That’s like aborting the entire population of Nevada.
The goal of laws
against abortion is to stop abortion and the best way to
do accomplish that is to stop those who perform them.
This tradition of pursuing the abortionist will be
continued after Roe.
Kristen Hansen, a
Vice President at
Care Net, the largest Crisis Pregnancy Network in
America says “The question that should be asked
is, ‘Will there be help for women facing these decisions
if abortion is illegal?’ The answer is yes. The network of
2,300 pregnancy centers will continue to exist in a post-
Roe society.” While Planned Parenthood charges
over
$370 for every abortion and makes a
$20 profit on every pack of abortifacient “morning
after” pills that they give to our daughters
behind our backs, those dedicated pro-lifers will help
women in crisis for free, long after Planned Parenthood
has gone out of business.
Family Research
Council’s Tom McClusky is right. The only people who
“seem to be talking about jailing women are
pro-abortionists and/or smug New York City based
columnists.” After Roe is overturned, abortion
laws will again pursue abortionists, not women. The
pro-life movement will continue to help women with crisis
pregnancies as well as those who have been victimized by
abortion. If anyone calls for the prosecution of aborting
women, it is likely to be from those performing and
profiting from abortion.
|
