Wow. I…I got nothing. Too stunned for words.

Well, it is true that women were never prosecuted in this country for having abortions. Only the doctors were prosecuted, and even that was rare—mostly, law enforcement looked the other way until a woman turned up dead. That’s why I find the “How much time should she do?” question misleading, since it’s not going to happen. Women have never “done time” in this country for abortion, and none of the current bans, like the one in SD, propose prosecuting the woman. They all target the doctors.

But you’re 100% right in saying that this is because it’s horrible PR to target the women. That’s why antis are always finding backhanded ways to prosecute pregnant women. Instead of encouraging drug-addicted women to see a doctor and get clean while pregnant, they want to prosecute them for “drug trafficking” in utero. (This has nothing to do with being pro-life. If anything, pregnant drug abusers would be more likely to get an abortion, rather than risk the baby testing positive for drugs.) That’s why they investigate women for falling down the stairs while pregnant, because they may or may not have had mixed feelings about being pregnant. They basically view pregnancy as a rich opportunity for punishment.

The real issue becomes enforcement.  It’s effectively unenforceable and just sits on the rolls until somebody gets angry at their ex for aborting the baby and then this will explode into a constitutional issue over what is rightfully allowed.  If anything the law re-enforces the concept of a proper abortion at a doctor but doesn’t want to support that angle because that is contrary to the framer’s desires.  These sorts of knee-jerk measures are strange and always warped in some respect. 

As for the question of why anti-choice people can’t figure out how to deal with women in a criminal manner, they’re really unsure of whether locking up women in prison in right.  They just want to control the vagina not lock them up because prison for white women is bad (since white women get abortions too…)  So a good portion of the argument becomes what can we do to stigmatize it further.

Is it wrong of me to say that you just rocked out with your cock out? I’m pretty sure there’s an XBox Live achievement point for this kind of eloquence.

Utah has been a dead zone for years - HBO is doing that stupid empathizing nonsense with ‘one of the good ones’ with Big Love, but SLC Punk taught me better, earlier.

To get to a good point, the weird thing for me is that all those dern mainstream media liberal types (I’m looking at you, Contessa, Shuster, and the guy not named Steve Doocy!) are letting this slide. I just listened to Jay Ackroyd’s podcast over at Virtually Speaking with Jay Rosen, the NYU prof who talked about the ‘Church of the Savvy’, where he goes over the combined self-loathing and fear of the people who own them rules their writing. I’m not surprised, thanks to you, but still bewildered at the disconnect the talking heads have at the simple mercy of providing rights to people w/o family connections. The foreclosure crisis completely going over their heads is tragic enough, but really, as this has to be a money decision, going in favor of Maury Povich’s continued existence rather than women’s rights? I missed that credit in journalism school.

The latest Fortune Magazine, c/o Steve Forbes, just arrived today. It detailed how big Corporations are hiring Special Forces people. I guess they can aim right for the kids not part of the Quiverfull movement.

Well, it is true that women were never prosecuted in this country for having abortions. Only the doctors were prosecuted, and even that was rare—mostly, law enforcement looked the other way until a woman turned up dead.

That has a lot to do with how abortion was banned.  It was banned because of the emerging profession of medical doctors were trying to establish what was and wasn’t legitimate medicine.  Therefore, enforcement efforts were aimed at doctors, not women. But I don’t think that’s necessarily what would happen if abortion was banned again.  I think it would be closer to the situation in Romania, where the natalist agenda was aimed at women. 

And even under the laws that existed in the past, there evolved a punitive approach towards women.  Women who miscarried and had to go to the hospital sometimes invoked suspicion, and often women who clearly had problems resulting from illegal abortions often had medical treatment withheld unless they gave up the name of the doctor.  Some died from this.

The fact that abortion bans like the one in SD don’t punish the women who get abortions as one of the most demeaning parts of the bill. They act like pregnant ladies are just too stupid not to get abortions and that women who seek abortions were told they were going to buy shoes or something.

That being said, to me it always seemed like the emphasis on the doctor was that pro-lifers really truly don’t understand that women are human beings with free-will who make choices. On that thread awhile ago, I didn’t mean that your average Joe Prolifer didn’t think about abortion, but rather that he didn’t think about how it would effect women. Lots of the libertarian pro-lifers seem to think that way too, saying that the “baby” should be left alone without considering how impossible that is from the woman’s perspective. Lots of pro-life propoganda also works to imply that fetuses (fetii?) are just suspended in space and go out of their way to deemphasize that a lady is needed at all inorder to make a precious baby. However, I think that you are probably right about the maliciousness of the pro-life movement. The pro-lifers actively hate women, while its the “muchy middle” types that enable pro-life legislation that probably don’t think about the woman’s perspective, and they are the target of the floating fetus billboards.

Upon reflection, my viewpiont may be partly clouded by the fact that I am a know-it-all and sort of an ass-hole, so I tend to just assume that if only people were as smart as me…

Sorry for the typo-plagued rambling, but I wanted to say something and i have to run to class now. Be back later.

Xer, actually what’s going to happen is that women who have to seek medical attention for miscarriage, which is common, will find themselves under investigation if the staff is suspicious of her.  Or worse, if they’re so afraid of penalties for not calling it in that they are overly aggressive.  In a lot of ways, this is just codifying what’s already going on, which is that drug-addicted women are being investigated for stillbirth or other health problems with their babies.  As you can imagine, the investigations tend to happen to low income women, not middle class or wealthy women.

I didn’t mean that your average Joe Prolifer didn’t think about abortion, but rather that he didn’t think about how it would effect women.

I’m iffy on this.  They’ve had it explained to them; they’re not stupid.  They just don’t care if women die.  I think that much is obvious.  It’s something that can be abstracted away, just like the people who die because of lack of health insurance.

How the fuck can this possibly be constitutional? I don’t even know where to start on how ludicrous this kind of thing is.

What’s next, a child abuse investigation if your kid has to leave school with a cold?

Jesus Christ. Every day I think I’ve seen it all, but the anti-choicers just continue to confound even the wildest caricatures I can concoct of them in my head.

Keep in mind just how broad the category of ‘things misogynists think endangers a fetus’ can be:

Drinking a cup of tea (or herbal tea, or, well, anything really)
Exercise
Ski-jumping
Having sex
Taking any drug (prescription or OTC or illegal)
Not taking certain drugs
Not going in for prenatal care
Not sleeping enough
Working outside the home
Living in a polluted area (hah! just kidding, wingers don’t believe pollution is bad)
Eating fish
Not eating fish
Riding in a car with a seatbelt
Riding in a car without a seatbelt
Having surgery
Natural childbirth
Medically assisted childbirth
Not attending the right church

It’s nothing but a catch-all law to punish women the authorities don’t like (which is most of them, of course, except for their virginal mothers*, sisters, and daughters).

*Yeah, I know, but wingers don’t go for that whole logic thing.

The new law is in response to a case last year where a 17-year-old pregnant girl paid a man $150 to beat her in hopes of inducing a miscarriage. A judge ruled there was no law on Utah’s books allowing the mother to be charged with a crime.

So now there’s a law on the books.  Hopefully the new law gets struck down as overbroad, because it is, but at the same time I’m not sure society should condone hiring someone to beat you to induce a miscarriage.  And beyond that, why are we creating the environment (presumably through parental-notification laws?) that would lead a 17-year-old to think this was the only option for her?  This is a whole boatload of bad (presumably unintended) consequences that ought to be investigated.

“I appreciate the willingness of Representative Wimmer to re-evaluate the impact of potential unintended consequences arising from the inclusion of ‘reckless’ behavior” in the original bill, Herbert wrote in his veto letter. “[The revised bill] is more consistent with the true intent of the legislation and addresses those situations in which the termination of a pregnancy is intentional and is not conducted at a physician’s direction.”

Uh, OK Guv but it’s still overbroad.  There are still a bunch of “unintended consequences” in the rewritten language.

Xer, actually what’s going to happen is that women who have to seek medical attention for miscarriage, which is common, will find themselves under investigation if the staff is suspicious of her.  Or worse, if they’re so afraid of penalties for not calling it in that they are overly aggressive.  In a lot of ways, this is just codifying what’s already going on, which is that drug-addicted women are being investigated for stillbirth or other health problems with their babies.  As you can imagine, the investigations tend to happen to low income women, not middle class or wealthy women.

Wasting investigatory resources is probably all that will come from most cases.  Without an explicit piece of proof that the miscarriage was due to drug abuse or some other purposeful act it’s going to be very hard to prove to a jury.  At most the case would rest on circumstantial evidence.  Sure they may win a few in Utah but they’ll all be appealed to the circuit and overturned.  This is one of those things where it may be driving Utah abortions underground and that is wrong obviously but the likelihood of watching a woman get convicted by it and it actually sticking are highly unlikely. 

Then again, I think this could go to the circuit and get overturned as a whole because there is no valid measurement to define “reckless” behavior or more specifically a situation where the act itself isn’t already covered in another way (i.e. a 2nd party would face assault, the first would be put in for mental evaluation).  Course this is from a progressive mind, so the court may not side with me.

They want the punishment for abortion to be risk to life, health, and future fertility, just like it was back in the bad old days when abortion was illegal.  Jail isn’t enough for them.  They want sexual women to be punished with unsafe abortions.

Oh, and I’m sure that making backalley abortions illegal is going to prevent them from happening, especially if abortion itself is made illegal.  Brilliant thinking, there.

They took “reckless behavior” out of the bill, Xeranar.  Amanda is right about it probably being applied more towards low-income women, because they might not be able to afford a legal abortion (no federal financing or subsidy because of the Hyde Amendment; I don’t know what the state government might provide).

I’ve suspected for a long time that the urge which propels some anti-choice people to separate out of the herd and target, not women who have wanted or who have had abortions, but women who have shown themselves to be bad at being pregnant, is basically a quality-control concern.  If you think that the human female’s mission in life is, open quote close quote, to become pregnant and to carry the child successfully to term, then a woman who (for whatever reason) happens to fail at this task is falling down on the job.  (The most important and the sole real job, in your view, which she’ll ever have.) 

I was puzzled for years at the vitriol at the vitriol antiabortionsists tend to save, not for the woman who gets an abortion early in pregnancy and who afterward does everything in her power never to get into that predicament again, but for the woman who gets an abortion late in pregnancy, often more or less involuntarily (because things occur duiring the pregnancy which pose a serious threat to either her or to the prospective baby or both) and who, afterward, does everything in her power to become pregnant again, because what she what she wants is not thrills or to devastate society or to mess with Randall Terry’s head, but a baby, just not a baby who’s going to cost her her own life or who’s going to die after a couple of years after burning up wads and wads and wads and wads of money.  Which, one would think, is a reasonable desire.  But iif you look at the matter very mechanistic terms the antabortionist vitriol makes sense.

Because it’s not a reasonable desire if you thnk that the way childbirth works is that you pour some semen into the mold, after which various gears engage, bells ring, whistles toot, and nine months later a fully baked infant slides out of the stove.  In this view, if it doesn’t happen that way, if a pregnancy doesn’t go smoothly, obviously something’s wrong with the stove.  And who wants to put up with a defective stove?  Why not just scrap the darned thing and go get a stove that works? 

Now the man who’s the most closely attached to the stove may object, because it’s the only stove he’s got, and the kids who popped out of the stove may object, for pretty much the same reason, but if you buy into the proposition that the stove’s performance is not merely the concern of particular individuals but of society as a whole, then society as a whole has a prevailing interest in the disposal of, well, defective gear.  In this view, a woman who has had a defective pregnancy poses the same danger to an infant which a defective airliner poses to a passenger.  It’s an outrage and a scandal and a matter for public action.  Darn it, darn it, there oughta be a law.

So far as I’m concerned, the murder of Dr. Tiller plays directly into this, and so does legislation of the type which has recently been passed in Utah.  This stuff just doesn’t compute unless you regard a pregnant woman who’s having trouble with her pregnancy in the same light as you regard a microwave which sets fire to the food or a plane whose landing gear goes skew-dee.  If you think of the woman as an individual (or even as an animal) with a physical condition which has gone wrong but which can, with luck, be rectified later on, you think of her loss of her baby as regrettable but not criminal.  But if you think she’s an automatic coffee-maker, her failure to make coffee is a failure overall.  It’s a conservative bromide that rewarding* failure only perpetuates failure.  (Folks, feel free to fill in the blanks.)

*tolerating

Wasting investigatory resources is probably all that will come from most cases.  Without an explicit piece of proof that the miscarriage was due to drug abuse or some other purposeful act it’s going to be very hard to prove to a jury.

I think you’re being overly optimistic.  Without any explicit laws on the books, women have been convicted of all sorts of crimes for giving birth to stillborns after using drugs during a pregnancy.  Even when there’s no science to back up the theory that the drug caused the stillbirth.  Given a chance to expand the parameters, there’s a whole lot of misogynists out there that will enjoy it.  A woman in Utah who can be shown to be insufficiently happy about pregnancy could easily get convicted by a malicious jury.

Knute, you personally are too stupid to breathe.  Because I didn’t say they were “stupid”.  I’m firmly on the side of “evil”, and your inability to read fucked you.  But I will accept that you are both stupid and evil.  Because that’s the only explanation for your comments here.

That you showed up to gloat over the fact that women will be thrown in jail for miscarriages demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that antis like yourself a moral monsters, evil for the hell of it.

beka, I think that’s all true, but I’m even more cynical.  Look at someone like our commenter Knute.  He’s clearly a sadistic misogynist who not only wants to scrap “defective” women, but enjoys the idea of doing it.  It’s like the way the Catholic church glamorizes women who die in childbirth.  They get off on the idea of women suffering and dying.  It’s like a horror show, but real.

Anti abortionists are evil geniuses who are, when confronted, stupid!

Not geniuses; just cunning, slippery, wily, and willfully ignorant.

They get off on the idea of women suffering and dying.

They get off on everyone suffering and dying.  Suffering and dying is their stock in trade, their raison d’etre.  That, and ritual cannibalism.  And talk about patriarchy, there’s your prime example.

Beka, I think you’re right in a lot of ways. A lot of society is invested in making sure that women understand that they control pregnancy. If a woman just follows the rules (don’t eat sushi! don’t drink coffee! don’t even look at alcohol!) everything will be fine because pregnancy is natural and women have been doing it for millenia. That we do this at the exact same time we tell them they have to trust their doctor to make all the decisions because pregnancy is dangerous and only a medical doctor can possibly keep the baby safe is just a bonus Catch-22.

This is a whole boatload of bad (presumably unintended) consequences that ought to be investigated.

No, the consequences are intended. This is Utah. The powers that be and the legislature set up the horrific conditions that led a 17-year-old to think that hiring someone to batter her was a good idea. And now they’re making things worse.

I’m no legal scholar, so I’m wondering whether this is even worse than it looks. Does defining something as homicide automatically mean that deliberate attempts to do it are the crime of attempted homicide, and discussions about how it might be done are conspiracies to commit homicide? Because at that point this law becomes a weapon for control of pretty much all women of childbearing age in Utah. Trying to leave your abusive husband when pregnant? That stress might cause a miscarriage; off to the pokey with you.

And especially in a state without a good legal aid system, the investigation (or the threat to trigger an investigation) is punishment enough.

Ugh—Amanda, I invoke stick rule on Knut. It’s overdue.

“If only it were realistic for all women to move away from Utah. “

If only we could work out a new age Jane Network.  Smuggle them out of rabidly misogynist states and as far away from psychotic misogynists like knute as possible.

So Utah is turning into Ceaucescu’s Romania.  How long until they start monitoring menstruation?

I think one point you’re all missing is that many pro-lifers seem to think that the baby actually shoots out of the male’s penis in a microscopic form and just grows in the woman’s uterus without any assistance from her body.  Hence, if something goes wrong during the pregnancy, it’s obviously the woman’s fault because she screwed up the perfectly and completely formed, healthy baby that the man put there and she should be punished.

This belief leads to their insistence that they contribute equally to a pregnancy and should therefor have equal* say in whether or not the woman can have an abortion. 

*because they consider men more equal than women, they really think men should have the final say in the decision but they like to say “equal” because it makes them look like nice guy

They just don’t care if women die.  I think that much is obvious.

That’s the big deal, but I honestly don’t think that most pro-lifers are anywhere near examined enough to grasp this about themselves.

It’s like that NYT article about the Teabagger gal who was asked about reducing the deficit without touching Medicare or Medicaid:

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/politics/28keli.html

One does genuinely have to be stupid to be a conservative in this day and age, either organically or because one has decided that thinking takes you bad places.

They DO care if women die.  They think those women deserve to die.

Wasting investigatory resources is probably all that will come from most cases.  Without an explicit piece of proof that the miscarriage was due to drug abuse or some other purposeful act it’s going to be very hard to prove to a jury.

Upwards of 95% of criminal charges are resolved by a plea deal. These women won’t see juries. Besides, it’s sick to arrest a woman and put her through the ordeal of criminal prosecution for failing to maintain a pregnancy even if she isn’t convicted. Arrest can be both painful and terrifying. And what’s the likelihood that she’d make bail, given that these laws are pretty sure to end up disproportionately affecting the poor? [Women who are better off will either get that legal abortion (which they can afford) or will have excellent legal counsel and a willingness to push the government to prove their case.]

They just don’t care if women die.

Yes they do.  They think it’s super-ultra cool to die while pregnant.  It’s the most noble thing to die while trying to birth a baby, or while carrying a baby, or even while carrying a dead fetus that they won’t let you abort.

Women should have to carry all feti until they’re expelled b/c that’s their role in life.  Should it kill them?  Well, that’s just part of the sacrifice all mother’s WANT to experience.

They fucking think you get sainted if you die while pregnant.  It’s just the bestest thing ever!

Your sadistic misogyny is making you tone deaf to humor, Knute.  But very clever of you to quote mine, without noting that I immediately point out that the flaw in their faux concern over women, once detected, was covered up. 

Keep it up.  With the practice you’re giving your brain, you may learn to tie your shoes any day now.

Punditus, I don’t think that woman was stupid so much as casually admitting that actual policy isn’t what interests her, and that teabaggery is just straight up haterade.

“The reason that anti-choicers get all bundled up when ....”

‘Bundled up’??  Never heard it used that way before.

++++
Knute, Born Asshole®, injected the word “genius” in his ‘comeback’ (the way he prefers to come).  I think Amanda’s feelings are more that even the sub-par forced birthers can, given time, figure out yet another weaselly stratagem to confuse the issue among the semi-willing.  Like a golden retriever, even these dim-bulbs can create havoc if unsupervised.  Bad Knute!  Off the carpet!

If you’re gonna let that thing in here, Amanda, you should really house-break it first.

The new law is in response to a case last year where a 17-year-old pregnant girl paid a man $150 to beat her in hopes of inducing a miscarriage. A judge ruled there was no law on Utah’s books allowing the mother to be charged with a crime.

Wonderful.

I’d bet you’d get more jail time in Utah for passing a dose of RU 486 to some scared teenager than you’d get for beating her up in a domestic.

They just don’t care if women die.  I think that much is obvious.  It’s something that can be abstracted away, just like the people who die because of lack of health insurance.

IMO, they think that some women must die so that a few fetuses live, and eventually all women are so terrified of pregnancy that they never, ever enjoy sex again.  It is sex-negative and aimed at women, of course, but it’s less that they want large numbers of dead women than they require a limited number in order to better control the survivors.

Going by the comments made by some OBs at a conference on vaginal birth after c-section (VBAC) yesterday, the idea that women shouldn’t have ultimate say over their own bodies while pregnant is restricted to idiot anti-choicers:

http://www.theunnecesarean.com/blog/2010/3/10/nih-vbac-consensus-development-conference-gift-horse-or-troj.html

All part of the same continuum; pregnancy or the likelihood of pregnancy means women = not quite human enough for full rights.

I moved away from Utah. I sometimes feel like I’m in exile because there are times when I feel homesick—it’s a really beautiful state, and I miss my mountains, my red rocks, and my desert. But yeah, I could never deal with the culture there. Well, not any longer than the 22 years I did deal with it.

SLC itself isn’t too bad—has a large non-Mormon population and just elected its first openly gay councilman. But the surrounding culture is pretty damn oppressive. Everybody works off the assumption that you must be Mormon—unless you don’t look Mormon. (Piercings, tats, hair colour.) And a lot of social cues rise and fall from that single assumption. I grew up in Utah County, just south of SLC, and it was….um….very much a monoculture. And as unhealthy as any monoculture can be, in terms of what happens when somebody who doesn’t fit the monoculture either shows up or evolves.

One of the things that doesn’t seem to be said in Mormonland: The women that attempt to harm their fetii deliberately wouldn’t feel like they had to do so if there wasn’t a fucking huge stigma on abortion. It’s still legal to have an abortion in Utah, but access is really restricted and if you try looking this stuff up online, you are immediately deluged with links to LDS services (adoption only, will counsel against abortion) and the regular calvacade of “pregnancy crisis” centers. (How to tell? Check the services. They will tell you they provide information on abortion but they will not perform or refer you to an abortion provider. If they aren’t willing to tell you where to get safe, legal procedures performed, they generally have an ulterior axe to grind.) There’s one clinic in all of Utah. (Fortunately there is also one in Vegas for the southern Utahn women, but can you imagine being a teen and pregnant there? Hoo boy.)

If Utah’s government really thought there was a wave of women who wanted to intentionally harm their fetus with the result of being not pregnant, why not run PSAs on the safe and legal way to not be pregnant any more? Why not work on a campaign to destigmatize a legal option?

Of course, they will never do that. Because they all have their heads stuck up their collective asses, and despite the legality of abortion are determined to keep women from exercising it.

I’m not sure society should condone hiring someone to beat you to induce a miscarriage

I’m pretty sure that’s considered “practicing medicine without a license.”  I’m relatively certain most states prosecute you criminally for that.

Maureen:  In fact it’s not even “practicing medicine” at all, I would think; it’s more akin to assault for hire, if that’s even a real crime (I know murder for hire is).  I don’t know if it’s strictly illegal to hire someone to beat the tar out of yourself in all circumstances (what about martial arts training?) but this was pretty clearly something that should not have happened.  This law was an overreaction and opportunism to legislate morality under cover of preventing this kind of thing.

“Condone” was in retrospect probably not the best word.  Maybe “turn a blind eye” or “excuse” would be better; I don’t want to blame (or excuse) the girl without knowing why she did what she did, while the law in question seems to be intended to do just that.  The point is that it is not a good thing, and whatever led to it happening needs to be understood and steps taken to prevent it happening again.  And that law needs to go, pronto.

Hopefully the new law gets struck down as overbroad, because it is, but at the same time I’m not sure society should condone hiring someone to beat you to induce a miscarriage.  And beyond that, why are we creating the environment (presumably through parental-notification laws?) that would lead a 17-year-old to think this was the only option for her?  This is a whole boatload of bad (presumably unintended) consequences that ought to be investigated.

Any society that obstructs access to abortion condones women hiring someone to beat them to induce miscarriage; the only variable is their degree of hypocrisy about it. A society that doesn’t want them having to do that would just make it possible for them to go have an abortion.

IIRC Utah has one of those abominable parental-consent laws, right? And this was a 17 year old girl doing this? Yeah, not even slightly hard to guess what led up to this girl thinking paying to be beaten was the only realistic way out of her pregnancy.

The guy who took her money and beat her up should be prosecuted.  That’s a clear WTF thing.  But the law does allow for circumstances to be taken into consideration, and the girl herself seems guilty only of utter desperation.

No, I’m pretty sure there are a number of anti-choice people who are too stupid to have considered the consequences of making abortion criminal.  One I was recently arguing with sincerely believed that making abortion illegal would actually stop women from having them.  He was under the impression that abortions could only happen in hospitals, and if they were banned from hospitals, problem solved.  That’s definitely in the “too stupid” category.

So what would they do to a woman who has one of these allegedly suspicious miscarriages, then by the time her case makes it to court she is pregnant again but miscarries due to the stress of being arrested/charged/arraigned, etc.?

DC Fem—charge her twice for engendering the situation, a la Felony Murder.

So what would they do to a woman who has one of these allegedly suspicious miscarriages, then by the time her case makes it to court she is pregnant again but miscarries due to the stress of being arrested/charged/arraigned, etc.?

Well obviously she’d be charged with a second “wrongful miscarriage” for getting herself into that situation in the first place.

Seriously though, does stress actually cause miscarriages?  I thought that the vast majority of them were just caused by genetic defects in the embryo/fetus.

Seriously though, does stress actually cause miscarriages?

I’m not a doctor, but that seems unlikely (at least, I doubt it’s sufficient.) If stress caused miscarriages with any reliability I can’t imagine any pregnancies would ever come to term.

The new law is in response to a case last year where a 17-year-old pregnant girl paid a man $150 to beat her in hopes of inducing a miscarriage. A judge ruled there was no law on Utah’s books allowing the mother to be charged with a crime.

What I simply cannot wrap my head around is that people looked at this situation and decided the girl was a criminal, and that since there wasn’t a law to send her to jail, they ought to make one. Like Amanda said, she’s guilty of nothing but utter desperation.

If a woman just follows the rules (don’t eat sushi! don’t drink coffee! don’t even look at alcohol!) everything will be fine because pregnancy is natural and women have been doing it for millenia. That we do this at the exact same time we tell them they have to trust their doctor to make all the decisions because pregnancy is dangerous and only a medical doctor can possibly keep the baby safe is just a bonus Catch-22.

This is an interesting way to put it. I’ve always seen these as flip sides of the same coin, which is the tendency, very strongly embedded in American middle-class culture, to think that if you just do the right things, nothing bad will happen to you. And its corollary - if something bad happens to you, you did something wrong.

And really, all the “rules” don’t have that much to do with “natural” pregnancy. Sure, our early hominid foremothers didn’t have caffeine and alcohol, but they also didn’t have folic acid supplementation and I bet they ate a fair amount of their meat raw or rare.

The guy who took her money and beat her up should be prosecuted.  That’s a clear WTF thing.  But the law does allow for circumstances to be taken into consideration, and the girl herself seems guilty only of utter desperation.
Comment #44: Amanda Marcotte on 03/11 at 03:54 PM

I’m not sure what she did wrong.  If I burn down someone else’s house, I’m an arsonist.  If I burn down my own, and I’m careful not to hurt anyone else by doing so, I’m just burning down my own goddamn house.

Not to say she’s not messed up, but clearly she’s only harming herself.  The error here is making her fetus the “victim.”

Or worse, if they’re so afraid of penalties for not calling it in that they are overly aggressive.  In a lot of ways, this is just codifying what’s already going on, which is that drug-addicted women are being investigated for stillbirth or other health problems with their babies.  As you can imagine, the investigations tend to happen to low income women, not middle class or wealthy women.
Comment #9: Amanda Marcotte on 03/11 at 12:30 PM

One thing that will happen is that pregnant women will spend a lot more time in the hospital and end up with HUGE medical bills and now the hospital will have another tool at their disposal to force her to stay (hmmm… look up the trend of homebirths in tah and see if hospital OB units are now losing patients or at least if that is the perception). 

e.g. pregnant woman goes to hosp or doc with some minor bleeding -
DOC: “well we’d better admit you”. 
PW: Won’t that be expensive?  Can’t I just go home and be on bedrest there?
DOC: If you aren’t in the hospital, there will be no proof that your miscarriage wasn’t caused by your reckless behavior and going home when I suggest the hospital is reckless behavior”

Yep, incarcerated gestation.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13651599

The 7-month-old fetus survived, Harrison was charged, and on Tuesday 8th District Judge A. Lynn Payne ordered him to serve up to five years in prison for the beating.

So he did get some time in the slammer.  Justice was served at least a little bit.

The girl told police she solicited Harrison to assault her after her boyfriend threatened a breakup if she didn’t terminate her pregnancy.

I don’t know if I buy that.  But maybe it’s true.

The girl, who gave birth in August, pleaded no contest to second-degree felony criminal solicitation to commit murder. Eighth District Juvenile Court Judge Larry Steele ordered her placed in secure confinement until she is 21.

But earlier this month, Steele reversed himself and released the girl after an attorney argued she did not commit a crime. Utah law states that a woman cannot be held criminally liable for seeking to obtain an abortion for herself.

So they passed a law to do just that.  Nice.

The guy who took her money and beat her up should be prosecuted.  That’s a clear WTF thing.  But the law does allow for circumstances to be taken into consideration, and the girl herself seems guilty only of utter desperation.

In this case, where it is a stranger, sure. But there are other cases:

In Michigan, the young man, with his girlfriend’s approval, hit her abdomen repeatedly with a baseball bat until she miscarried; in Texas, again with the girlfriend’s consent, the male stomped on his girlfriend’s belly, producing a stillbirth of twins. Both young men were arrested, and the Texan, Geraldo Flores, is now serving a life sentence for fetal homicide

Assuming they were not coercing their gf’s into the abortion, it seems more heartbreaking than anything else. That people decide that they have no other option.

The recent case where the woman fell down the stairs ended up with her in a jail cell . And my guess this law will be used mostly against the poor, uneducated, non-white, (and definitely) non-Mormon.

The pro-lifers actively hate women, while its the “muchy middle” types that enable pro-life legislation that probably don’t think about the woman’s perspective, and they are the target of the floating fetus billboards.

And I think the mushy middle would be more likely to sympathize with specific women - they are pro-life only in a hypothetical sense. In Mexico, women do go to jail for having abortions.

Jalisco’s penal code lists the punishment for induced abortion as follows: four to 12 months in prison for the mother provided she does not have a bad reputation; became pregnant through an illegitimate union; has managed to hide her pregnancy; and conducted her abortion during the first five months. Failing one of those requirements, her term doubles; failing two or more, it triples. Recently updated, the code also says a judge can decide whether the woman deserves medical treatment instead of jail time, in which case government doctors will guide her through counseling to help her reaffirm her family values.

“It’s nothing but a catch-all law to punish women the authorities don’t like”

Bears repeating. This is Utah…and it is a foregone conclusion that enforcement of this law will target the poor, minorities, and any woman who does not fit the LDS mold of true womanhood.

If I lived in Utah, and was willing to be childless (or not have additional children if I was already a mother), this would be a very good reason for me to take an out-of-state trip the moment I wondered if I could be pregnant, and get an abortion if the test was positive, rather than risk having a miscarriage on record while trying to have a child.
I mean, a lot of women are slightly ambivalent about pregnancy, and this law could be the tipping point towards secret abortion.

And it’s not the 17 y.o. girl who needed to be punished for seeking abortion-by-beating. IMO, it’s the whole fucking oppressor environment that’s at fault.

Hmmm ... it seems like they are looking for ways to extend the felony disenfranchisement of minorities to women.

A few notes after a quick read of the bill (.pdf):

1) The criteria used to determine if a pregnant woman commits criminal homicide are…I’m searching for the appropriate word…nebulous (emphasis mine) [p3]:

(1) (a) <strike>[A]</strike> Except as provided in Subsections (3) and (4), a person commits criminal homicide if <strike>[he]</strike> the person ,intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, with criminal negligence, or acting with a mental state otherwise specified in the statute defining the offense, causes the death of another human being, including an unborn child at any stage of its development.

(3) A person is not guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child if the sole reason for the death of the unborn child is that the person:
(a) refused to consent to:
(i) medical treatment; or
(ii) a cesarean section; or
(b) failed to follow medical advice.
(4) A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of her unborn child:
(a) is caused by a criminally negligent act or reckless act of the woman; and
(b) is not caused by an intentional or knowing act of the woman.

How will the police determine if a pregnant woman’s reckless/criminal negligence act was intentional or knowing and where’s the evidence that that methodology is valid?

2) The definition of “abortion” excludes all spontaneous abortions and ectopic removals. [p8, 9]

So women who intentionally and knowingly seek treatment for a spontaneous abx or an ectopic are, by definition, guilty of criminal homicide.

3) Prohibits abortion in cases of rape and incest with a “viable” fetus unless the physician who performs the abortion verifies that the [rape/incest] has been reported to law enforcement. [p11]

Name any other instance in the practice of medicine where a) a police report, and b) a physician playing law enforcement are a prerequisite for being allowed access to a safe, effective, and legal treatment.

4) Performing abortions outside a hospital setting is no longer allowed [p10]:

(b) a clinic or other medical facility to the extent that such clinic or other medical facility <strike>[provides]</strike> is certified by the Department of Health as providing equipment and personnel sufficient in quantity and quality to provide the same degree of safety to the pregnant woman and the unborn child as would be provided for the particular medical procedures undertaken by a general hospital licensed by the Department of Health.

@ ema ... who decides if a woman who is pregnant and took large amounts of drugs, then miscarried, did so because she was a drug addict and couldn’t help herself, did so because she was depressed (maybe about being a drug-addicted pregnant woman who had passed the time for a legal abortion?) and was hoping to take her own life (with the death of fetus merely incidental), or was intentionally trying to provoke a miscarriage?

Also, the way the law is worded is going to exclude most simple miscarriages from prosecution, but that doesn’t mean that women won’t be arrested or subject to interrogation, and I have very little faith that decisions about who had an innocent miscarriage and who is a child-murderer will strongly track with class, race and marital status.

Also religion, or lack of…chingona.

Arizona’s pre-Roe statute regarding abortion:

A woman who solicits from any person any medicine, drug or substance whatever, and takes it, or who submits to an operation, or to the use of any means whatever, with intent thereby to procure a miscarriage, unless it is necessary to preserve her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than one nor more than five years.

Still on the books.

Whenever anyone tries to play the disingenuous “we just don’t want women to have regrets later” card, I ask them what legislation they’re supporting to make sure that no woman ever experiences regrets about the pregnancies she DID carry to term.