COMMENTARY: "Donald Trump’s Abortion Logic Is Totally 100% Right" by lawyer and writer Jill Filipovic, published by Time Magazine on March 31, 2016.
SUB-HEADING: "If abortion is murder, then women who have them are criminals—right?"
GIST: "The success of Donald Trump stems from one major factor: the perception that he tells it like it is because he’s beholden to no one. Whether Trump actually does tell the truth is a different question—one more often answered in the negative—but Wednesday, he did something rare for a Republican politician: he told the truth, saying that if abortion were illegal, women should be punished. (He later walked back his comments)........The argument that women would not or should not go to jail for abortion is absurd when one notes that there are women in the United States who have, in fact, gone to jail for abortion; some are sitting in jail right now. Jennifer Whalen, a mother in Pennsylvania, was prosecuted for getting abortion-inducing drugs for her daughter. Purvi Patel is currently sitting in an Indiana prison for allegedly self-inducing her own abortion. And it’s not just abortion. Prosecutors have charged dozens of women with serious crimes including drug trafficking and murder for using drugs while pregnant. When South Carolina passed a law in 1997 qualifying fetuses as persons and harm to them as child abuse, the Attorney General’s Office announced it would prosecute women who had post-viability abortions for any reason, and that it would charge them with murder and potentially seek the death penalty. If a woman takes drugs and has a miscarriage or her child dies soon after birth, she faces jail time in many parts of the U.S. Do we really believe that a woman who pays someone to end her pregnancy won’t be treated the same way? When you make something illegal, it comes with penalties—this is how criminal law works. It’s certainly how it works in El Salvador, where women are in jail, some for having miscarriages the state believes were abortions. It’s how it works in Rwanda, where rape survivors sit in prison for ending their pregnancies. It’s how it works in Ecuador, Malaysia, Mexico, Bolivia, the Philippines—the list of where ending a pregnancy can land you behind bars goes on. ........American anti-abortion advocates say they would target abortion providers instead of women, because it’s apparently more acceptable to throw doctors in prison for providing care that saves women’s lives every single day. Even if you think that sounds OK, it belies an ignorance of how illegal abortion often works. Trained clinicians able to provide safe and legal abortions, like we have at women’s health clinics across America, are luxuries unimaginable to many women worldwide. Today, in places where abortion is outlawed, there are still some illicit providers who offer surgical abortions. But more often there’s no trained doctor at all: There’s a sister, a mother, a friend, a classmate, a friendly pharmacist, who helps to get misoprostol or other abortion-inducing pills into the hands of a pregnant woman. When these pills are legit and the woman adheres to protocols for misoprostol use approved by the World Health Organization, these clandestine abortions are often very safe and effective, which is why far fewer women die of unsafe abortions today than they did two decades ago. Other times, though, there’s the woman who throws herself down the stairs, or asks her boyfriend to punch her in the stomach, or takes a tincture or tea her auntie says will make her period come, or inserts a stick or a knitting needle or a fireplace poker into her vagina. In other words, it's often the woman herself who is the abortion provider. When it’s not her, it’s often her friends and her family and her loved ones. Jail abortion providers and you are jailing women and the people who love them. It’s also worth noting that when you make abortion illegal, any death of a fetus or embryo becomes suspect. Just as the death of an infant may lead doctors and law enforcement to suspect child abuse and engage in an investigation, so, too, would miscarriages have to cue scrutiny into the woman’s actions. Anti-abortion activists are also not satisfied to simply outlaw abortion; they want to enshrine into law that personhood exists at the moment of fertilization (they’ve tried to pass such laws in a handful of states, and they’ve failed miserably). That certainly fits with their narrative that life not only begins at conception, but that a fertilized egg is a human being deserving of life and respect and legal protection. It’s an ideologically tidy argument, but it gets messy when confronted with real life. Most fertilized eggs never make it to birth. About half never implant in the uterine wall and are naturally flushed out of a woman’s body, which is why actual medical doctors define pregnancy at the point of implantation, not fertilization. Others do implant, but are lost in early miscarriages, many of which go unnoticed. Still others implant outside of the uterus, often in the fallopian tubes, where they can never grow into a baby but can rupture and kill the woman carrying them. And others develop further, turning into fetuses that are lost in later miscarriages. Establish personhood at the moment of fertilization, and you’ve got an astronomical death rate on your hands.
This, too, points to a fundamental inconsistency in the
mainstream anti-abortion view: If a fertilized egg really is a human
being, imbued with as much of a right to life as you or I, where are the
efforts to curb such a high death rate? Why the focus on abortion,
which ends the lives of far fewer embryos and fetuses than Mother Nature
herself? American anti-abortion advocates say they would target
abortion providers instead of women, because it’s apparently more
acceptable to throw doctors in prison for providing care that saves
women’s lives every single day. Even if you think that sounds OK, it
belies an ignorance of how illegal abortion often works. Trained
clinicians able to provide safe and legal abortions, like we have at
women’s health clinics across America, are luxuries unimaginable to many
women worldwide. Today, in places where abortion is outlawed, there are
still some illicit providers who offer surgical abortions. But more
often there’s no trained doctor at all: There’s a sister, a mother, a
friend, a classmate, a friendly pharmacist, who helps to get misoprostol
or other abortion-inducing pills into the hands of a pregnant woman.
When these pills are legit and the woman adheres to protocols for
misoprostol use approved by the World Health Organization, these
clandestine abortions are often very safe and effective, which is why
far fewer women die of unsafe abortions today than they did two decades
ago. Other times, though, there’s the woman who throws herself down the
stairs, or asks her boyfriend to punch her in the stomach, or takes a
tincture or tea her auntie says will make her period come, or inserts a
stick or a knitting needle or a fireplace poker into her vagina. In other words, it’s often the woman herself who is the abortion
provider. When it’s not her, it’s often her friends and her family and
her loved ones. Jail abortion providers and you are jailing women and
the people who love them. It’s also worth noting that when you make abortion
illegal, any death of a fetus or embryo becomes suspect. Just as the
death of an infant may lead doctors and law enforcement to suspect child
abuse and engage in an investigation, so, too, would miscarriages have
to cue scrutiny into the woman’s actions. Anti-abortion activists are
also not satisfied to simply outlaw abortion; they want to enshrine into
law that personhood exists at the moment of fertilization (they’ve
tried to pass such laws in a handful of states, and they’ve failed miserably).
That certainly fits with their narrative that life not only begins at
conception, but that a fertilized egg is a human being deserving of life
and respect and legal protection. It’s an ideologically tidy argument, but it gets messy
when confronted with real life. Most fertilized eggs never make it to
birth. About half never implant in the uterine wall and are naturally
flushed out of a woman’s body, which is why actual medical doctors
define pregnancy at the point of implantation, not fertilization. Others
do implant, but are lost in early miscarriages, many of which go
unnoticed. Still others implant outside of the uterus, often in the
fallopian tubes, where they can never grow into a baby but can rupture
and kill the woman carrying them. And others develop further, turning
into fetuses that are lost in later miscarriages. Establish personhood
at the moment of fertilization, and you’ve got an astronomical death
rate on your hands. This, too, points to a fundamental inconsistency in the
mainstream anti-abortion view: If a fertilized egg really is a human
being, imbued with as much of a right to life as you or I, where are the
efforts to curb such a high death rate? Why the focus on abortion,
which ends the lives of far fewer embryos and fetuses than Mother Nature
herself?.........If anti-abortion advocates sincerely believe abortion is
murder, they should also say that women have to be punished for it. If a
fetus is the same as a 5-year-old, then a woman who ends a pregnancy
should be just as guilty of murder as a woman who pays a hit man to kill
her kindergartener. Claiming ignorance that murder was murder wouldn’t
work. It’s an ugly thought, and it’s electorally and socially
unpopular, and that’s why some of them don’t say it out loud; others
realize that while they may find abortion morally wrong, they don’t in
their heart of hearts believe removing an embryo from a woman’s body is
the same as slaughtering a 5-year-old. But start making those kinds of
distinctions and the whole case against abortion falls apart. The outrageous thing isn’t Donald Trump’s original
comment. It’s that so few in the mainstream political establishment have
bothered to interrogate the reality of the anti-abortion position and
its stranglehold on Republican Party policies. When you do, you see that
punishing women for making their own reproductive choices isn’t a
defective, offensive answer. It’s the entire plan."
The entire commentary can be found at:
http://time.com/4278462/donald-trump-abortion-filipovic/
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