Boosting a signal

[fabrisse]

Please go and read stoney321's post for today about the bill that just passed in Utah. If I'm reading it right, and the interpretations given at Jezebel and elsewhere are correct, they are attempting to penalize women who have miscarriages -- even in the first trimester when one in five pregnancies spontaneously end. The idea is that anyone who was seen as being "reckless" -- and isn't that a BROAD term -- might have been trying to cause an abortion which is murder of an unborn child. The only hope that this won't become law is a veto by the governor.

Look. I really wish abortion didn't exist because we lived in a perfect world where rape and incest never happened, where teenaged girls weren't so frightened of their parents that they can't tell them they're pregnant, where everyone who's pregnant but isn't ready for motherhood is automatically matched up with a couple who want to adopt, but we don't.

Women have to be allowed to take care of their own health choices -- that includes the mental health choice that "I don't want to be a mother" -- and those choices need to be respected.

I've known two women who've miscarried -- I've probably known many more, but these were two where due to circumstances I knew about it -- one was devastated and one was relieved. They are both valid human emotions in the situation. What neither of them needed was the government trying to determine whether this physical, and in one case emotional, blow should be prosecuted.

Comments

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

I saw that. This is intolerable. It's also predictable, since it's technically a type of abortion. Fucking assholes.

Insanity like this crap seems to be leaking in several states lately.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

They're wrapping it in "rights of the unborn child" rhetoric, and it's chilling. What about the rights of the woman?

[thorbol.livejournal.com]

As somebody who thinks a genuinely humanist view requires at least a strong presumption that the right to life of an unborn child is equal to the right to life of anybody else, I nonetheless say that if the bill is as you describe it then it is an abominable outrage.

Can you point me to the bill itself, or to a clear analysis of it? I could not read the ACLU letter the other post linked to, because it seems to be one of those "secure" PDF documents that can't be converted into text. (I guess the ACLU doesn't think blind folks can help.) I suspect that, even if the bill is only half as bad as you say, I'll be eager to write to Utah's governor to condemn it if it's not too late by the time I know for sure what it says.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

The bill was in .pdf form. I'll see if I can find it elsewhere.

[thorbol.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I seem to have found an html copy of the bill, and did find a couple of articles related to it.

HTML

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

http://le.utah.gov/~2010/bills/hbillenr/hb0012.htm

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

If they had their way, we wouldn't have rights. We'd be treated exactly like the Hotel Street prostitutes in Honolulu during WWII.

Plus, this so-called "rights of the unborn" is a smoke screen and they know it. If they were so concerned about unborn children, they'd be rallying about the rights *after* the children are born. Since they aren't, it's proof that they're interested only in controlling women and shoving them back in the kitchen and whore house.

[daylyn.livejournal.com]

What? Wait... what??????

Um...

I imagine that there is going to be a Constitutional challenge almost immediately upon its passing (for vagueness grounds alone, if nothing else, and I'm certain that there will be lots else). This is fairly terrifying, actually.

Wow... I'm really disturbed by this.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I hope it can and will be challenged, but I'm not certain that it will be.

[wadjet-theperv.livejournal.com]

That's beyond outrageous :o(

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Stoney explains it far better than I do.