More women die from childbirth than they do from having an abortion every single year. That’s a fact. Abortion is the single safest surgical procedure a woman can have. That is also a fact. Abortion poses an infinitesimal risk of short- or long-term complications. That is yet another fact.
Enacting laws that make abortion a criminal act does not stop abortion from happening, but it does help kill more women via increased back alley abortions and increased unplanned childbirths. Still another fact.
Science backs up each of the above abortion facts, and no amount of GOP or religious right meddling will change that.
Science and facts will no longer matter, though, if the GOP, evangelicals, and other extreme right factions get their way. Only their facts will matter, and their facts will kill women and teen girls.
Turning Abortion Regulations Into Murder
SCOTUS will announce whether it will hear an abortion-related case from Texas and another from Mississippi – whether one, both, or neither – potentially by Friday, according to Think Progress.
That SCOTUS is contemplating hearing the cases at all is shocking.
Disguised as regulatory measures, the so called “Targeted Restriction of Abortion Providers,” or TRAP laws, at the heart of both cases seek to outright criminalize abortion providers and legislate the clinics to death.
The Mississippi case, Currier v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization seeks to impose outrageous and nearly impossible credentialing requirements on abortion doctors and force abortion clinics to obtain privileges at hospitals, despite none being available within the stated radius.
If SCOTUS hears and rules on this case in favor of the Mississippi requirements, the state’s only abortion clinic will close, effectively banning abortion access in Mississippi entirely.
The Texas case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, would impose the same severe credentialing and privilege requirements that Mississippi wants to impose. If SCOTUS hears this case and rules in favor of Texas’ laws, more than 80 percent of Texas’ abortion clinics will close, according to Think Progress.
Make no mistake. Closing these clinics is exactly what the extreme right wing governments of Mississippi and Texas designed the credentialing laws. Nothing more, nothing less.
How Is This Helping Women?
It’s not supposed to help. Simple, right? Right wing extremists, evangelicals, and the general Republican party understands that SCOTUS will not simply overturn Roe v. Wade, as they proved in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, during which time they were forced to consider making abortion illegal.
Anyone who follows the war on women knows by now that any GOP, evangelical, or other right wing attempt to change laws to supposedly “make abortion safer” is simply another attack on a woman’s constitutional right to choose to have an abortion.
That’s exactly why the right concocts crazily impossible-to-follow TRAP laws that disguise their true intentions.
Fortunately, when pro-life lawmakers package laws to look “helpful,” or look like “safety” regulations that make abortion “better,” most women know what they are really saying is, “Screw you.”
Guilty Of Murder
Taking one from the GOP playbook, the “floodgates will open” if SCOTUS hears and then favors the respective states in these cases. The right will hurriedly enact similar legislation nationwide. We could then expect a wider challenge to Roe v. Wade within a year, and a complete overturn in two, maybe three years.
SCOTUS can surely see through the charade can’t they?
If not, women will have to hold the right and, more specifically, the religious right responsible for every single girl or woman who feels that shoving a coat hanger in her vagina to abort a fetus is in some way preferable to the choice given her – none.
Women will hold the extreme right responsible for every death that comes with increased numbers of women forced into childbirth or back alley abortions, along with every headline that reads “another teen killed in back alley abortion” that would soon to follow.
The religious right and its feelings of moral and religious superiority will eventually kill women and girls – maybe one day it’ll be your mom, your daughter, your sister, your niece or your aunt.
The only “good” that could come from this is that they’d all have to admit they’d prefer that women die from having back alley coat hanger abortions instead of letting them have a safe abortion.
Is murdering women by forcing them into childbirth – or into a back alley with a coat hanger – preferable to allowing access to safe, legal abortion?
Is this really what “pro-life” means?
Featured Image by Anthony Easton via Flickr/Creative Commons License CC BY 2.0
