Damn!  I was hoping this would pass.  I was planning to move there with 30 of my snowflake babies and my new SubZero.  Think of the tax deductions, now that’s a real stimulus plan!

So, wait—a Republican had to point out the consequences of this stupidity?

sounds like the senate has a brain vacuum and has sucked up all the legislative and legal intelligence in the legislature in North Dakota.

Maybe they just have far more important hassles to deal with right now than massive lawsuits over stupidity.

This is one of the places where a bicameral legislature actually encourages irresponsibility. Either chamber can pass bills that are complete horsepucky, comfortable in the knowledge that their constitutents won’t notice the other chamber didn’t go along with it.

So now the flood waters can recede!

Meanwhile, Oklahoma is considering a bill called The Use of Force for the Protection of the Unborn Act. Which is totally just so that pregnant women can use lethal force against someone attacking them, and they pinky-swear up and down that it won’t be used so that misogynist crackerfactories can gun down women’s health workers in the name of saving the unborn.

Mighty Ponygirl:

Wouldn’t that law pretty much create a hole in the space-time continuum whenever Operation Rescue pickets a clinic? Until such time as they’re not pregnant, it would seem that clients have every right to mow down anyone who makes them feel unsafe…

Yeah, they didn’t think that one through very well, did they?

Mighty Ponygirl: The OK act only provides for a pregnant woman HERSELF to use self-defense to protect her pregnancy, and only when the person she’s using the force against is doing an unlawful act, such as assaulting her (NOT an abortion that she’s agreed to).  It’s actually a pretty good law, IMHO, because many pregnant women WOULD use deadly force against an assailant trying to “stomp the fetus out” where her own life wasn’t in danger, but her pregnancy was at risk, and this law allows these women to use necessity as a defense in a manslaughter or murder case.  Furthermore, the bill doesn’t give fetuses legal personhood or civil rights.  Jezebel has the full text of the bill, with annotations and analysis, if you’re interested.

It isn’t covered because of the presumption is that a man’s gotta right to stomp his pregnant wife, Dan.

I’m glad that my state did this!
Unfortuately, the ND House just recently rejected an anti-discrimination bill :(. That combined with the possibility of more flooding in Fargo made for a bad day yesterday for me, so this good news at least brightens things up a little.

I guess one conclusion to be drawn is that our state senate is better than the state house for some reason.

Maureen says: many pregnant women WOULD use deadly force against an assailant trying to “stomp the fetus out” where her own life wasn’t in danger, but her pregnancy was at risk…

It would seem that someone attempting to “stomp the fetus out” is very likely putting the woman’s life in danger.  Seems like a clear case of self defense to me.

There are cases where juries are being assholes and don’t think that stomping a fetus out could endanger a woman’s life.  Why, I don’t know.

Maureen,

I think this is a terrible piece of legislation. And here’s why:

1. 8. Violence against a pregnant woman puts the life and bodily integrity of both the pregnant woman and the unborn child at risk.

Allow me rephrase this to highlight the absurdity of assigning a separate life and bodily integrity to that most beloved of propaganda terms, the unborn child: Violence against a pregnant woman puts the life and bodily integrity of both the pregnant woman and that of her bladder/colon/spleen at risk. The 1/3 of a pregnancy consisting of the fetal compartment does not exist independent of the other 2/3 of the pregnancy, nor, for that matter, of the rest of the pregnant woman.

2. 5. “Pregnant” means the female reproductive condition of having an unborn child in the woman’s body;
6. “Unborn child” means the offspring of human beings from conception until birth;

This law defines fertilized eggs, blighted ovum, incomplete abortion POC, ectopic and fetal demise in utero as “unborn child”. 

Since the life and bodily integrity of a pregnant woman are distinct from (and, apparently, less than) that of her “unborn child”, why exactly should the woman be permitted the use of force or deadly force to protect some fertilized eggs roaming about or an ectopic?

3. (as noted at Jezebel) The law was inspired by a case in Michigan where a woman killed her partner after he began punching her belly to try to force a miscarriage. She was charged with and convicted of manslaughter, and she miscarried the quadruplets she was carrying. Prosecutors in that case argued successfully that since the woman was herself in no immediate physical danger, the right to self-defense did not extend to her unborn children.

The fact that a prosecutor managed to successfully argue that unlawful force being used against a person (being punched in the belly) means that person is in no immediate physical danger does not mean that parts of a pregnant woman’s organs have distinct life and bodily integrity and should be given separate legal rights.

One more thing:

[M]any pregnant women WOULD use deadly force against an assailant trying to “stomp the fetus out” where her own life wasn’t in danger, but her pregnancy was at risk….

The uterus is a very sturdy organ, and the amniotic fluid is pretty good at absorbing shock and protecting the fetus. So make no mistake, if an assailant is trying to “stomp the fetus out” and the pregnancy is at risk, the woman is in grave danger. In other words, the fetus doesn’t die because it’s been punched. It dies because the placenta sheers off, or the uterus ruptures, or there’s not enough blood reaching the placenta, etc.

I think ema’s right. Those definitional bits are definitely intended to open a door we want to keep closed. And if you’re going to have an asshole prosecutor and jury, they’ll simply decide that the woman didn’t reasonably believe that an unlawful act threatened her or her fetus, or that she should have known that she could safely run away.

In line with the “deadly danger to the fetus is also reasonable-to-believe deadly danger to the woman” reasoning, about the only situation I can think of where the text of this law would let a pregnant woman kill someone lawfully when she currently may not is a violent attempt to force her to eat listeria-contaminated cheese.

By the way, that bullshit conviction in Michigan was overturned by a far more sane panel of judges than the trial judge.

A fetus, even an embryo, is not independent of the mother. Our current individualistic philosophy, used to throw all responsibility on individuals and rescue collections of assholes (a.k.a. society) from said responsibility, known for its awesomely craptacular effect on environmental policy, happens to also be complete fucking fail on this score. Whether or not a fetus is human is quite irrelevant (and actually unknowable; sane minds should be debating likelihood of humaness). What matters is that the mother and that fetus are, pratically speaking, one organism until birth, and our species has no problem with her granting anything in her womb human status. In effect, barring any responsibility of the state to trump her notions (which are not granted here), her offspring is as human as she says it is.

The judges didn’t see it quite my way, but they got the answer right. She offed an abusive boyfriend and is free. Too bad she had to suffer any jail time at all, but at least the outcome is better now.

I agree with you, ema and paul.  If someone is punching my pregnant belly enough to cause me to fear a miscarriage… well then I am fearing serious bodily harm, period.  In many states, that is sufficient to warrant deadly force in self-defense.  There is no need to add anything, which is why I’m worried that this is an attempt to give a fetus “value”, on the road to making it a legal “person”, and that’s scary.

Additionally, one could also argue “battered wife syndrome”, which is an increasing recognized syndrome in which battered women have a flashback during a beating (to the many beatings they had in the past, or to a particularly bad one), which causes them to fear for their life and defend themselves, usually with deadly force.  I’m guessing that the man who was beating this woman probably did it in the past.  There are several defenses this woman could use, there is NO need to add this strange statute to the mix.

Additionally, one could also argue “battered wife syndrome”, which is an increasing recognized syndrome in which battered women have a flashback during a beating (to the many beatings they had in the past, or to a particularly bad one), which causes them to fear for their life and defend themselves, usually with deadly force.

One of the things that’s been evolving in the law over the past 20 years or so is a shift from the “reasonable man” standard to a “reasonable person” or even (where appropriate) a “reasonable woman” standard. This goes both to physical threats and things like hostile environments.

Wow, I did not expect that the Sen would read this. Amazing!