Lynn Paltrow has written an excellent, if unnerving, glimpse of the post-Roe world, a world we may soon find ourselves living in.
As if we needed any more reasons to call senators and insist on a filibuster!
Huffington Post (snippets):
A Post-Roe World With Criminal Penalties Our Mothers Could Not Have Imagined
by Lynn M. Paltrow
With the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade just past, many fear that it will be the last. US Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito, for example has stated that he believes that Roe, the 1973 decision recognizing a woman’s fundamental right to choose to have an abortion, has no foundation in the Constitution and many are predicting that his appointment is all but guaranteed.
Yet neither Sam Alito nor either side of the abortion debate has fully addressed is what a post-Roe America would look like. In fact, if Roe is overturned and abortion once again criminalized, the penalties for having an illegal abortion or helping someone get one will be far worse than anything our mothers could have imagined 30 years ago. . . .
Women are six times as likely to spend time in prison as they were in the early 70’s, and today more than one million are under the control of the criminal justice system. The fact that a majority of these women are mothers of young children is no deterrent to their incarceration. And, according to Amnesty International the conditions for imprisoned women are often cruel including being shackled during labor, subjected to violence, and being denied essential medical care. This is the age of retribution not rehabilitation.
Eric Sterling, President of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation notes that federal and state law enforcement agencies are twice as big as they were in 1973 and their investigative powers have been dramatically expanded. He warns that in states where abortion is re-criminalized people should expect strict enforcement with the use of stings, informants, wiretaps, computers and databases to gather evidence and obtain guilty pleas. Women who leave a state that has criminalized abortion to have one elsewhere should expect to be prosecuted upon their return. . .
In fact, since 1973 dozens of states including Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky and Illinois have passed feticide and other laws establishing independent fetal rights, with some states declaring that the unborn (from fertilization) are full legal persons for purposes of the right to life. The South Dakota Taskforce also recommends that the State Constitution to include a provision that provides “the unborn child, from the moment of conception, with the same protection of the law that the child receives after birth.” Equating the zygote, embryo and fetus with full legal persons, means that in states that do ban abortion (and six have already specifically said they would) women who have illegal abortions and the doctors, clergy members, and friends who help them, are likely to be punished as murderers.
Even with Roe still in effect, there are women who have been arrested and are serving time on murder charges for having suffered unintentional stillbirths. In South Carolina, a woman was convicted of homicide by child abuse based on the scientifically unsupported claim that her drug use during pregnancy caused her to suffer a stillbirth. In Utah, a woman was charged with murder based on the claim that she caused a stillbirth by refusing to have a c-section earlier in her pregnancy. If women are now being arrested as murderers for having suffered stillbirths, one should assume that in a post-Roe world intentional abortions would be punished just as seriously.
A tip of the feminist hat to Donkey o.d.
Filibuster Alito Alito Scalito Supreme Court Roe Bush Feminism Reproductive Rights Abortion Rights Roe v. Wade Pro Choice
