Guilty, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld
April 1, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment
Goddess help me, but I almost sort of kinda agreed with Donald Trump for a short time this week.
He was asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (whom I consider to be the epitome of Inside-the-Beltway conventional thinking) about his position on abortion. Like any Republican running for President, Trump insisted he was against legal abortion. Matthews asked him if abortion was illegal, would Trump support prosecuting and jailing women who have them.
Trump said that he would.
And then all hell broke loose. Apparently, even the most anti-choice advocate doesn’t think women should be jailed for having abortions.
This is the part I don’t get. If you think abortion is murder, then it seems only logical (to me) that you would think the person who gets an abortion is a murderer. The doctor who performs the procedure is, under this logic, nothing more than a hired killer. This is a (somewhat) parallel situation to prosecuting customers who patronize prostitutes. If there was no one willing to pay for sex, there would be no prostitution. If there were no women who wanted abortions, there would be no doctors performing them.
Apparently, it is the conventional thinking among the anti-choice crowd that women should not face criminal charges if abortion becomes illegal. Who knew? You certainly can’t tell it from the insults and assaults that protesters lob at women trying to get health care at clinics.
I don’t understand this thinking. Are women too stupid or flighty to appreciate the importance of their decisions? Are we nothing more than victims?
I find both of those assumptions to be offensive.
No sane person wants to have an abortion, if for no other reason than they hurt. I read a quote from Frederica Mathewes-Green that says, “No woman wants an abortion like she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Here is an example of how this plays out emotionally in the real world.
As long as our country doesn’t support affordable contraception, science-based sex education and health-care for everyone, there will be abortions. Some estimate that as many as three in ten American women will have abortions. I think it’s better that these procedures are performed by competent medical professionals in the appropriate settings, instead of by criminals in back alleys
Are we all murderers? Should we all be charged? I say, let’s fill the jails. If nothing else, it will make Mothers Day ever so much more entertaining.
Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, is normally thrilled about being female, but this election is challenging her.
Wendy Schwartz
April 2, 2016 - 6:22 am
Less than 100 years ago having an abortion was an ordinary part of a woman’s life. My grandmother, who lived in a very Catholic neighborhood, said it was common for every neighborhood to be served by a woman trained in doing abortions. My grandmother, by the way, had two, and she never understood the fuss in the 1960s about legalization.
HowardCruse
April 2, 2016 - 7:06 am
For me, one of the really chilling moments (among many) in that Trump interview was represented by his casual acknowledgment that, were abortion to become illegal again, women would have to return to the back-alley procedures that were once the only option. Not that women would stop having abortions if abortions became illegal, but that they would be condemned to having dangerous, life-threatening ones. Trump seemed to feel that that was an OK development. I guess he saw it as appropriate punishment for making life choices that Republicans don’t like.
Mindy Newell
April 2, 2016 - 11:28 am
Personally, I think what Trump said is what many on the right-wing think. The shock is that he said it, and all the hub-bub from the pro-lifers is nothing but crocodile tears.
I agree with Howard and Wendy.
Rene
April 16, 2016 - 3:25 pm
I am opposed to abortions and consider them to be analoguous to murder, but I genuinely don’t think women should face criminal charges for it. And here is why:
Martha, you said it yourself that having a abortion is like a trapped animal gnawing off its own leg. I agree. Abortion is one of those transgressions that are their own punishment. Kinda like drug addiction or alcoholism. I don’t think drug addicts should go to jail either, because their own actions are punishing them enough. It seems unnecessary, not to say evil, to inflict further punishments on top of that.
Those are decisions that I think are horribly mistaken: taking hard drugs, committing suicide, having an abortion. But I think the individuals who make those decisions deserve compassion, not scorn.
Another reason why I’m against punishments is that it reminds me of that horrible hipocrisy of Victorian morality: “It’s different for a man, he is supposed to sow his wild oats.”
I am against any criminal punishment for abortion, but if there are punishments, the man who got that woman pregnant should be punished equally or even more. Double the penalty for the man, because the woman already got punished by going through the experience of the abortion.