The efforts to deny even the most vulnerable victims of sex crimes the right not to bear their rapists’ babies are real.
[Editor’s Note: The article also notes republican efforts to make many forms of birth control illegal. And meanwhile republicans do everything to deny children and families the health care, schools and other support young families need. Pro Life? Bullshit.– Mark L. Taylor]
By Eric Zorn
Chicago Tribune (5/9/19)
An 11-year-old rape victim in northwestern Ohio is pregnant, according to news reports, and a highly restrictive state law on abortion signed last month says a girl in her position must carry and deliver her rapist’s baby.
In arguing the abortion issue I used to test the zealotry of my anti-choice opponents with a hypothetical question with similar facts, and was often told such a situation was too far-fetched to be probative. But now the hypothetical is real.
A barely pubescent girl has been impregnated, allegedly, by a 26-year-old man who had sex with her on multiple occasions, and the pure anti-abortion position is that the law should prevent her from terminating her pregnancy unless it’s to save her life or spare her grave bodily harm.
Ohio’s Human Rights Protection Act, signed April 11 by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, is one of those “heartbeat” laws that ban abortion as soon as doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity, which starts at about six weeks of gestation, even before some women know they’re pregnant.
Such laws, passed recently by five other states, are among the extreme measures designed to bait the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court into overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman’s right to an abortion in most circumstances.
Ohio’s new law doesn’t grant exceptions for rape and incest — exceptions favored by more than 70 percent of the population in numerous polls. …
- Georgia’s Six-Week Abortion Ban Reveals The Cruelty Of The Anti-Choice Movement — The anti-choice movement has taken a sadistic turn in Georgia, where a new abortion ban, called HB 481, has just been signed by Governor Brian Kemp. Signed into law this Tuesday and due to take effect in 2020, the bill effectively bans abortion outright, declares fetuses to be persons with full legal rights and protections, and imposes prison sentences for women found guilty of aborting or attempting to abort their pregnancies. The bill is misleadingly termed a “heartbeat” bill, and it bans abortions at any stage of pregnancy after the detection of “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity”. But “heartbeat” is a bit is a bit of a misnomer, since the cardiac activity that is first detected in an embryo is not a heartbeat by any stretch of the imagination; what is first observed is the pulsing of cells that are specializing and will eventually become a heart. At this point in the pregnancy, the fetus has no brain and no face. … Read the Rest