The title is basically the thesis of this article. On November 9th, the day after the election, Texas decided to go ahead with one of the most insane laws I've ever heard. They decided to impose laws that would force women who have abortions, or, heck, even miscarry, to bury or cremate the fetus and basically have a full on funeral service for it. This law is crazy and really takes their pro life anti abortion views to a whole new level.
The way I see it, there are two reasons to impose this law. The first is to shame women for having abortions. It's intended to rely on similar emotional manipulation found with the invasive ultrasound laws. It's basically sending a message that "yes, a fetus is a life, when you have an abortion, you killed a human being. You are a murderer and an awful person and now you must put this person you killed to rest." It's intended to force a certain perspective of "life" on people and abide by it, when in reality, the science is much more complex.
The second reason for this law is to raise the cost of abortion to make it even more difficult to get. It's not enough there are already insanely restrictive laws that restrict the number of abortion clinics in Texas, often forcing people to drive hundreds of miles and stay in a hotel and take time off work just to get one, now they want to impose funeral costs on people who get them in order to drive the costs up and provide a severe financial disincentive from getting one to begin with.
On a side note, one thing I expect this law to do is drive more women to seek dangerous back alley abortions in which they go back to using rusted coathangers and dangerous drugs in order to avoid dealing with a clinic. There's already demand for illegal abortion drugs in Texas due to their laws and I only expect this to get worse. This puts women at risk and exposes them to legal prosecution if they go to get help for a botched abortion procedure, which will force the women to die or go to jail. But hey, I guess that the jerks who make these laws don't care about that, do they? They couldn't care less if women die under these laws. They deserved it for being murderers from their perspective and as long as they get to maintain the moral high ground that makes it okay, right? That seems to be the impression I get from these people.
Screw Texas, and screw this law. This law is why I am so fundamentally opposed to "state's rights". The second you give states the ability to govern themselves without more tempered and rational governance by the federal government in this country they'll go and do crazy crap like this. If these guys had their way, the south would be a freaking Christian theocracy. I hope the Supreme Court shoots this down while Roe v. Wade is still law of the land. I really, really do.
No comments:
Post a Comment