Friday, February 09, 2007

Dispatches from the Uterus Wars



This is from f-words on the new proposal in Idaho to make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion:

Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d'Alene, persuaded the committee to introduce his bill to outlaw the use of threats or physical force to dissuade a pregnant woman from giving birth. The measure also prohibits threatening to do "anything that the person does not have the legal right to do against the pregnant woman." That could include employers threatening to withhold a job or promotion or "a school counselor maybe describing to a young person that by having this baby you have no future, those kinds of acts," Nonini told the panel, Howell reported. Under the measure, it does not matter if the woman has the abortion.

As f-words points out, this is oddly one-sided as there are laws which make it quite legal for some people to coerce a woman or a girl into having either an abortion or a birth:

Thinking about it, I wonder how this kind of legislation would interact with parental consent laws - another issue on which Idaho politicians aren't concerned with abiding by the Constitution. If this bill were written with actual freedom of choice in mind - where it would be a crime to forcibly keep a woman from aborting a pregnancy as well as when forcing her to abort - I think it might work nicely in tandem with parental consent legislation.

But that's not what this is about. This is the same women-can't-make-decisions claptrap that the Feminists for Life keep trying to sell, which conveniently wastes the time of pregnant women interested in abortion - who are working to a deadline, after all.

Indeed. The proposal is not intended to benefit women, in any case.