Anna Quindlen of Newsweek has an interesting piece that will be published in the next issue: How Much Jail Time?
The piece starts with a look at an individual who goes to anti-abortion protests and asks the people what kind of punishment the women who have abortions should be subjected to as a result. It is a logical question – if abortion is illegal, there has to be a penalty for breaking the law.
Worth reading, but the people who really need to read and discuss it won’t.
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why has no one raised this logical issue before ? she asks. because it’s a truly stupid approach.
colombia
chile
nepal
el salvador
they all put women in jail for getting an abortion, and suffer no qualms for doing so.
think it can’t happen here?
utah [and some other unnamed states], where the man gets off scot-free, unless, well, maybe, if he helps pay for the abortion, he might need to be punished
what else she leaves out: kennedy’s very paternalistic opinion on that very stupid “partial birth” abortion ban clearly leaves open the door for criminalizing abortion, jailing doctors [and possibly anybody else involved], but only requiring counseling or probation for the poor, helpless, and weak-minded little women who were so cruelly led astray by the evil abortion providers.
ps. how am i supposed to froth at the mouth effectively if you don’t up your limit on links?
Interesting piece. Thanks for the “heads up”.
oh… wait… we’re already jailing women for having [self-induced] abortions and also just for wanting to have an abortion.
Hipparchia, the link limit just kicks it into moderation, it doesn’t delete the comment or mark it as spam. You just have to wait until I can look at it and see it’s you. Froth away, but you won’t see it immediately.
Jill. I’ve had this conversation with people, and they really don’t like it when you try to pin them down. The old law for New York was still in some of the Penal Law books at the department where I worked and the charge was the equivalent of Manslaughter. It was a heavy prison sentence. They need to commit on this issue so people can decide.
Hipparchia, the point is that people don’t think about it, and if they do many tend to back off, and that is among the minority that still want to ban abortion in the country. Ohio is crazy, and so is Louisiana, but most of the country is sane. They are hiding what they are really doing, and it needs to be exposed.
The Catholic Church is responsible for the laws in most of Latin America, but that strangle hold is loosening. Nepal has too many problems to mention.
They keep pushing for a ban in Florida, but it isn’t going to happen, because talking about it is worth more than doing it. If they really try to do it, the pols know their terms are over. That’s why the freaks have gone into the assassination business – to do by terror what they could not accomplish by ballots.
oh, i knew all that, about the moderation, although i’d forgotten it up until the moment after hitting “post”. i just like immediacy when i’m being rabid and since i was already wound up anyway, i just vented about that too. 😈
we’re not living in liberal times right now. this conversation might have worked back in the [bill] clinton era, but there are still too many religious zealots [prison good, yay] and too many conservatives-who-think-they-are-centrists [ok, we’ll jail just the abortion providers] who are in power and likely to be for some time.
it’s unikely that the heads of all the catholics on the supreme court will explode in the near future. [no, i don’t wish him ill, either, and it could just have been a bout of hypoglycemia.]
you must not be talking to the same people that i’m talking to, which possibly bodes good for the state of florida, suggesting maybe the demarcation between sane and batshit crazy follows the blackwater river. thank goodness for all the new yorkers who moved down south to get out of the cold.
i think it’s very possible that old laws on the books like those equating abortion with manslaughter might get rolled back, but even if only a few rogue states outlaw abortion, it will be a huge setback for the idea that women are their own persons. there are plenty of otherwise good-hearted and smart people out there who would gladly shoulder the mantle of protecting women from making the terrible decision of having to kill their babies.
but i’ll agree with you that we need to hold lots of conversations and expose all the tactics of the opposition.
I tried pointing out to people on those lines that their religious views were not, in fact, supported in the Bible, while ham, shrimp, and cheeseburgers were condemned. They weren’t very happy about being told they would be more religiously righteous parading around Heavenly Ham, Captain D’s, and McDonalds than a women’s health clinic, but I sowed doubt and was annoying enough to be asked by my friends, who were clinic escorts to stop it.
so, this would be your doing?
my parents wanted to become clinic escorts as soon as they heard about the paul hill shooting. i did just barely manage to talk them out of it, pointing out that it would be safer to volunteer for habitat for humanity and play with nail guns instead.
No, it’s the fault of taking the core freshman curriculum at Colgate University, founded by an ancestor in 1819 to produce Baptist ministers, and having a philosophy course taught by the Harry Emerson Fosdick chair, Charles Adams, who loved the inconsistencies between text and practice. Now if Charley hadn’t died some years back he would have certainly done something like that. “One slice of a pepperoni pizza and you’re bound for HELL!” was his first statement to the class. As he had an endowed chair he could do that kind of thing, even at a school where you had to attend chapel three times a week.
my very baptist grandfather probably actually believed that about pizza, but he was positively satanic compared to the holy rollers and the snake handlers in the family tree. i really liked all these people, btw, even if they were a bit… odd.
i would never have lasted at a school that required attending chapel even once, let alone 3 times a week. it’s a coin toss whether i’d have stormed off first or they’d have tossed me out first. very large, very secular state university with lots of science courses for me.
I left after two years when it become obvious that my small rural draft board was running out of people to send to the military. A student deferment wasn’t as binding as an agricultural deferment in their eyes, so I joined the Air Force and told Colgate to sod off. I found out later about the ancestor, and should have requested a refund of a portion of my tuition based on the original agreement among the founders, but I wasn’t a direct descendant and the rules get complicated.
I went to state universities after that. Less expensive, and fewer hassles.