Girls Don't Know Nothin' Bout Birthin' Babies

TBOGG kindly links to the bright and shiny new anti-choice law and notes a particularly wierd passage:

`(c)(1) The father, if married to the mother at the time she receives a partial-birth abortion procedure, and if the mother has not attained the age of 18 years at the time of the abortion, the maternal grandparents of the fetus, may in a civil action obtain appropriate relief, unless the pregnancy resulted from the plaintiff's criminal conduct or the plaintiff consented to the abortion.


TBOGG points out:

… the maternal parents or the husband may sue the doctor for damages, not the wife. Thanks to an alert reader who pointed that out. Nonetheless, I still find it amazing that the legislators think less of the psychological damage of the mother than they do of the psychological damage of the sperm provider who made his contribution weeks or months before.


Well, at least a husband can't sue if he gave his permission. (All you girls say, "thank you, Daddy.")

So, it's only if his wife gave permission for the procedure, which she must have done, and he would rather she had died or ruined her chances for another child than have it, that he gets to sue the doctor. This must be what "respecting the sanctity of marriage" is all about. Husbands suing their wives' doctors for doing procedures their wives want. It's quite beautiful, really.

It's interesting that this law ignores the woman involved pretty much across the board. She, apparently, is some infantile pet who cannot be held responsible for what they claim is a brutal, inhumane act, despite the fact that she must have given her permission to do it. The doctor alone is responsible. And then, after the fact, her parents or her husband are given standing to sue the doctor who performed this act with her consent.

Poor, stupid women. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a good thing President George W. Bush and Denny Hastert and Rick Santorum are there to protect them from themselves.

Someday the purveyors of “the culture of life” are going to have to face the fact that they are morally incoherent when they fail to hold women responsible for committing an act they call murder. And, when that happens the law is going to have to decide whether it is reasonable to hold a woman liable for murdering something that is literally part of her own body.

The only way they can make these criminal abortion laws work is to completely strip women from the equation, as if they are children who can’t be expected to know right from wrong. If women were held criminally and civilly liable for an abortion, the law would have to recognize a pregnant woman as some kind of lesser citizen whose bodily integrity is subject to the state. Not that there isn't precedent for such a thing. Ye Olde Constitution itself proclaimed that African slaves could be counted as 3/5th of a human being for electoral purposes, so I suppose it wouldn't be too hard for someone to argue that a woman is only 1/2 of a full citizen when she carries a fetus inside of her. Should be an interesting legal argument and we can be sure that our favorite justice Nino would find comfort in the fact that the original intent of the framers was for women and slaves to be counted as less than full citizens in numerous ways.

And then there's the little problem that the vast, vast majority of the citizens of this country would never stand for women being jailed for having an abortion.

This is why you cannot take these pro-life people seriously. Their rigid morality, even on this, their most passionately held belief, is quite flexible when it suits them.


slightly edited for spelling, clarity and snarkiness.