The Return of Back-Alley Abortions

[MountainLaurel]

Is this what the pro-forced birth forces want? Dead or imprisoned women? I swear they must really do.

Underground abortions have returned to the United States, just as pro-choice activists have warned for years. And women have started going to jail for the crime of ending their own pregnancies, or trying to.

This week Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, was arrested for self-inducing an abortion. According to the Associated Press, McCormack couldn’t afford a legal procedure, and so took pills that her sister had ordered online. For some reason, she kept the fetus, which police found after they were called by a disapproving acquaintance. She now faces up to five years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.

Idaho recently banned abortions after 20 weeks, and McCormack’s fetus was reportedly between five and six months old. But according to Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, under Idaho law, McCormack could have been arrested even if she’d been in her first trimester because self-induced abortion is illegal in all circumstances. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an 8- or 10- or 12-week abortion,” says Kolbi-Molinas. “If you do what you could get lawfully in a doctor’s office—what you have a constitutional right to access in a doctor’s office—they can throw you in jail and make you a convicted felon.”

While horrific, McCormack’s case is not unique. In recent years, several women have been arrested on suspicion of causing their own abortions, or attempting to. Most have come from conservative rural states with few clinics and numerous restrictions on abortion. In America’s urban centers and liberal enclaves, the idea of women being prosecuted for taking desperate measures to end their pregnancies might seem inconceivable, a never-again remnant of the era before Roe v. Wade. In fact, it’s a slowly encroaching reality.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-03/abortions-return-to-back-alleys-amid-restrictive-new-state-laws/

[saras]

1. No, it's not what they want - the woman is still in control

Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" does a fairly good job of describing what they want, even though it is fiction - she was careful to base everything in the novel on things that had already happened in reality somewhere in the world.

What they want you to do is to have the baby, even if you're 11, your stepfather raped you, and the baby will kill you. Have it anyways, obliterate your entire identity with the shame and guilt they deem appropriate, and hand future control of your body over to a male, any male, because you have obviously failed to control it, so you need to let a male control your body now.

Any questions?

[get the red out]

2. That's about it

Disgusting. I despise the religious right, they are the terrorists we need to worry about.

[MountainLaurel]

3. You've got it in one n/t