This is serious but did we have to get the news from The Guardian in the UK?
"Last week, Utah governor Gary Herbert signed into law Utah HB 462, known ignominiously as "the miscarriage bill". It was a reworked version of the original bill, introduced by Republican State Representative Carl D Wimmer, adjusted to address criticisms that the initial language "could have got women sent away for lifelong prison terms for falling down stairs or staying in an abusive relationship". The revised version "designates the 'intentional or knowing' miscarriage as criminal homicide" and "stipulates that a woman can be charged with homicide for 'the death of her unborn child', unless the death qualifies as legal abortion". Thus are the women of Utah left with a new law that criminalises illegal abortion in a state that increasingly discourages legal abortions. Utah already requires parental notification and consent for minors seeking abortions, mandates a 24-hour waiting period to terminate a pregnancy, subjects women seeking abortions to state-directed counselling which overtly discourages abortion, and allows public funding for terminations only in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormality, or threat to the women's life or physical health. (Don't think you can get away with claiming your psychological health is at risk, ladies! Everyone knows that women would just lie about that to get an abortion because there's nothing conceivably traumatising about being forced to carry a pregnancy you don't want to term.)” Click here for the rest.
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4 comments:
You didn't have to wait for the Grauniad; I ran the story a week ago in ye old blogge.
I think the commentariat at the paper is missing the point. To some small extent this is about criminalizing illegal abortions (which are illegal anyway, whatever we think about that).
The major shift, to me, is that this law will make women who have miscarriages subject to criminal charges.
Since a large proportion of pregnancies end in miscarriage, this will mean that women who really wanted to have a baby and are in hysterics over the loss of their foetus will be assumed to be murderers, and the police will investigate the end of their pregnancy, pursuing a murder conviction.
I'm sure a lot of grieving ex-mothers will be just totally happy to be subjects of crimimal investigation at the same time they are mourning the baby they wanted so much.
Criminalizing miscarriage is like like criminalizing skin cancer.
Was that poster put out by the government or by some group as a warning? 'cause if the authoritarians are getting that fucking arrogant I may consider the possibility of indulging in a bit of worry.
It's from The Pro-Choice Education Project.
Whew! I didn't think the System was ready to be quite so obvious...yet.
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