Sunday, January 30, 2005

MedPol: Bill to Curb Out-of-State Abortions

The article is a little too full of details for me to even try to summarize it, so I suggest you give it a quick read.

Basically, the bill is designed to make it illegal for 43-year-old Jim Bob to take his 14-year-old lover Peggy Sue across the border to get an abortion so her parents won't know that he's committing statuatory rape with their daughter. And that makes some sense. Jim Bob would now get a year in prison for transporting Peggy Sue to Ohio. And sure, that scenario isn't so nuts.

But, let's say 15-year-old Lucy Mae gets raped by 17-year-old Billy Ray, but is too embarrassed to go to the police about it. She tells Aunt Sally that she wants to head to Ohio for an abortion, but doesn't want her crazy shit parents to know about it. Now Aunt Sally can go to jail too!

The crux of the matter: abortions are HEALTH CARE! I don't see any bans on getting flu shots out of state. And minors are more than qualified to make most of their own health care decisions, and are legally allowed to do so.

It's this sort of total bullshit that makes me not be able to understand non-neanderthal Republicans. Plenty of Bush voters and fiscally-uber-conservative people have their heads out of their asses enough to realize that this sort of appeasing-the-religious-right-voting-bloc legislation is inexcusable. And yet, for the sake of "smaller government," for the sake of pro-business policy, for the sake of keeping the right to own an AK-47, for the sake of lower taxes, for the sake of pre-emptive strikes to make sure that the stock market and oil prices aren't destabilized by a terrorist attack, conservatives that know better sell women, minorities, poor folk, and the BLGT community down the river. And that's disgusting.

The Democratic party doesn't really stand for anything now anyway. So quit the Republican party, join the Democrats, and there you can work for your lower taxes and your hacking of the environment and your guns. Nobody's going to stop you unless you're from like California or Vermont or something. You can still act like a Republican on all the saner-Republican issues (it certainly works for the DLC, after all), but you won't have to vote to screw people like Aunt Sally.

I'm going to go take a cold shower now. Sorry for the rant.

1 comment:

Garrett said...

Steve, I definitely didn't mean to imply that everyone who is anti-abortion at all automatically have their heads up their asses. As a society we most certainly cannot agree when "life" begins, because it is fundamentally a cultural-dependent process, and not something that even biology has done a very good job of defining. I see the declaration of the beginning of life to be almost completely arbitrary, and I'm not convinced that, other than a few revisions during the Second Vatican Council of church doctrine, that the pro-life argument necessarily coincides with any sort of classical Christian theology. Culturally, of course, a majority of the Christian faith have decided that life begins at conception. And the pope says it, sure, which might be sufficient for Catholics. But for Protestants, there's really nothing that demands that life begin at conception. Except culture.

And while I am adamantly pro-life, that would not have been true until maybe two or three years ago, given my insanely conservative upbringing.

This bill, however, isn't even particularly a matter of a pro-life argument. It is about making abortions more difficult to obtain for minors. And as it does nothing to address the fundamental social conditions that lead minors to need abortions, I see that it's merely anti-young woman. And that, I'm sure we agree, is despicable.

And believe me, I think we're both loving the new Hilary Clinton rhetoric, the "keep them legal but make them unnecessary" rhetoric. I don't like abortion. For every woman who has to make that choice, you've got a woman who has been compromised. She's having to undo something that's been done, something that, in our culture, is pretty damn difficult. It takes a brave woman to have an abortion. It also takes a brave woman not to have an abortion. It takes a brave woman to deal with an unplanned pregnancy period. And I think we both agree, THAT is the issue: reducing unplanned pregnancy through pragmatic, effective means devoid of dependence on arbitrary ideology.