Jill’s on fire today, asking pro-lifers some very pointed questions. In fact, the same questions that were asked in this video [now located here, because YouTube took down the one I’d embedded], which inspired the Anna Quindlen column Jill’s responding to:
I know there are at least a few regular readers who self-identify as “pro-life.” So here’s a question for you: How much time should she do?
One goal of the anti-choice movement is to outlaw abortion. But, as Anna Quindlen points out, anti-choice activists are almost never able to identify what the legal consequences should be for women who terminate their pregnancies. So, pro-lifers, tell me: What should the penalty be? How much time in jail should a woman face for abortion? . . .If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?
How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?
Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?
On cue, a pro-lifer responds pretty much as you might expect, by dodging the question and wondering why pro-choicers see hypocrisy in calling abortion murder on the one hand and yet refusing to call for punishment of women seeking abortion on the other:
Hi Jill,
To answer your first question - I’d say none. . .What I wonder about is after seeing the video and knowing that people who protest at abortion clinics (obviously some of the most adamant people opposed to abortion) don’t want women thrown in jail - do you still think one of the goals of the prolife movement is to punish women for having premarital sex? If so, why?
Why, yes, Jivin, I do. The whole point is that they’re protesting abortion, calling it murder, calling for the punishment of doctors — yet somehow, they’re willing to handwave any sort of normal penalties for murder when it comes to the women themselves.*
I mean, if I hired a contract killer to off my husband, I’d be every bit as guilty as the hitman. Why does that principle not hold for hiring a contract killer (i.e., a doctor) to off my fetus — a fetus that, so the pro-lifers would have it, has just as many rights as my husband?
What this tells me is that many** pro-lifers believe one of two things. Either they do believe abortion is murder, but women’s fluffy little heads do not equip them to form the requisite intent or awareness of the wrongness of their actions to merit punishment — or, more likely, they don’t really believe a fetus has full rights, but they want women to bear the consequences of having sex.
Which, if you’ve ever gotten a pro-lifer riled during an argument, you’ve heard slip out before. It’s also why they tend to be okay with exceptions for rape or incest — because then the sex wasn’t enjoyable. Though why the fetus’s rights should change depending on whether the mother had an orgasm is beyond me.
________
* Lindsay has a post today about a woman who’s being charged with fetal murder even though it turns out that the 26.5-week-old fetus they found in her Winnebago (along with three other fetuses) was stillborn. What’s interesting is that the law they’ve charged her under has an exception for self-induced abortions, so that even if she could somehow be prosecuted for killing an already-dead fetus, because it was in her own body, she has a defense.
* *There are some who’d happily toss the woman in jail. I actually respect these people, just because they are consistent. Don’t agree with them one bit, but at least they’re willing to hold a harsh and unpopular view with no weaseling about exceptions.
Wait, there’s an abortion clinic in my tiny hometown in Illinois? Why didn’t I know about this when I was living there?
Well, probably because I was an ultra-nerd who was afraid of sex when I was in high school. But still!
Oh, and the reason why most of the forced-birthers said things like, “Oh, we’ll pray for her,” is because Libertyville is a very Roman Catholic town, and the RC church still pushes the whole thing of how women who have abortions are sinners, but they can repent and be forgiven by God. They slut-shame you out of love, don’t'cha know.
Shorter response: “We don’t support throwing women in the hoosegow because then our numbers would shrink back to the blackhearted Randall Terry core that informs our rhetoric.”