Watch this short documentary on YouTube and you’ll see anti-abortion protesters struggle with the question: Assuming abortion is illegal, should there be a penalty for women who get abortions illegally? None of them seem to have thought of this before. When pressed, many of the anti-abortion protesters want to leave the women’s responsibility for taking a human life between the woman and god. Some thought counseling was the way to go. Only one, clearly wracked by conflict, proposed jail time. Yet even that person couldn’t come up with an amount of jail time to pin on the hypothetical illegal abortion receiving women.
Anna Quindlen, writing for NewsWeek, reports (via Broadsheet) :
A new public-policy group called the National Institute for Reproductive Health wants to take this contradiction and make it the centerpiece of a national conversation, along with a slogan that stops people in their tracks: how much time should she do? If the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal. But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.
“They never connect the dots,” says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. “We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion,” June recalled. Chet Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts. “How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?” June says.
As much as I love to see the anti-abortion protesters squirm and applaud efforts to highlight the ramifications of making abortion illegal, I wonder if highlighting this contradiction will be effective. Quindlen supposes the escape for anti-abortionists is to ignore or infantilize “women, turning them into ‘victims’ of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.” The history of contraception and abortion illustrates that people who have anti-abortion and anti-contraception sentiments are often quite comfortable with the paternalism required to take the escape route Quindlen envisions.