Those who want to ban abortion claim that they want to defend the sanctity of life. But recent moves by abortion opponents prove that claim is a transparent lie. Recently, members of the supposed “mainstream” of the anti-abortion movement have suggested that allowing sexual assault victims to end their pregnancies isn’t an act of basic decency. No, no. It’s merely a “political judgment” necessary to get restrictions on abortion passed into law.
Deep down, they believe that you can’t be a true supporter of the “sanctity of human life” and support abortion in any circumstances–even when it has the effect of victimizing a rape or incest victim all over again. Let there no longer be any doubt–these people aren’t really “pro-life.” As some of my old friends on Daily Kos put it, they’re really “forced-birth.”
If there was any doubt this was the case, it should have been erased late last week in Alabama. A pair of veteran forced-birth activists went as far as to claim that if a girl is allowed to end a pregnancy that was the product of a rape, she’d be a murderer.
Earlier this summer, a 12-year-old girl was raped repeatedly by a male relative. Under Alabama law, minors can’t get an abortion without parental consent, unless they get a waiver from a judge. The girl petitioned a juvenile judge in her county for a waiver, which was granted on June 27.
However, the local district attorney appealed the waiver to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals. On July 13, the all-Republican court issued a ruling siding with the girl. The court noted that the girl had just been removed from her mother’s custody for a fifth time due to abuse and neglect, and that the rape occurred while the girl was in her mother’s custody.
But those facts didn’t matter to forced-birth activists Win Johnson and Lorie Mullens. Johnson headed the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts under then-Chief Justice Roy Moore, while Mullens is executive director of COPE Pregnancy Center, a crisis pregnancy facility in Montgomery. They held a press conference outside the state judicial building on Wednesday in which they blasted the decision. Watch here.
Johnson was appalled that the Court of Civil Appeals would suggest that a 12-year-old girl could be “mature enough–and I’m going to put this in its starkest terms–to decide to murder her own child in her womb.” Abortion, he said, ran counter to “the very basis of our society.”
Mullens noted that a girl who probably couldn’t decide what to wear to school, and who is legally incapable of drinking and driving, now has “the responsibility of life and death”–and faces a decision that she will have to “live with forever.” While acknowledging her outrageously abusive environment, Mullens claimed that abortion was not the answer.
Mullens claimed that if this girl went through with an abortion, all she would do would become “a perpetrator of this newest violence”–and she is going to have to live with it forever. She then delivered a maudlin message to the girl.
“I don’t know what the perfect answer is, but I know this is not it. If I could actually speak to this child, the only thing I could say to her is, ‘You’ve been robbed of your childhood. Don’t rob yourself of your future.'”
This has to stand as one of the most outrageous and degrading things I’ve ever heard from a religious right figure. And I’ve heard some pretty outrageous and degrading things over the years. You mean to tell me that a girl who was raped in her own home could be branded a “murderer” and a “perpetrator of violence” if she ends her pregnancy? Are you willing to say that to this little girl’s face, Win and Lorie? You might as well admit it–you’re degrading and victimizing this little girl all over again.
And that’s before we discuss the fact that from a medical perspective, the only responsible option would be to advise an abortion. Medical opinion is almost unanimous that it is far too dangerous to allow girls 13 and younger to let a pregnancy go full term, and that girls younger than 15 risk severe complications if they are forced to keep their pregnancies. If Mullens is so worried about that little girl’s future, perhaps she could take that into consideration.
You may recall that two years ago, a 10-year-old Paraguayan girl was forced to continue her pregnancy after being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. However, in Paraguay, abortion is banned except to protect the mother’s life, and Paraguayan authorities refused to bend. When Mike Huckabee declared this was perfectly fine, I hoped this was an outlier. Apparently it isn’t.
But then again, this is to be expected from the forced-birth movement. We are, after all, talking about a movement that gives succor to crisis pregnancy centers like COPE that give dangerously inaccurate information to women. We’re talking about a movement that allowed Cheryl Sullenger to get a job at Operation Rescue despite being a convicted clinic bomber, and allowed her to keep her job even though she gave George Tiller’s number to Scott Roeder. And we’re talking about a movement that would force a brain-dead woman to stay on life support if she’s pregnant.
As many of my longtime readers from Daily Kos know, I briefly flirted with being an anti-abortion liberal for a time in my late 20s and early 30s. But degrading claptrap like this made me realize I could no longer identify as such–a realization that gradually pushed me back to being pro-choice, as I had been for the better part of my life. I used to believe the anti-abortion movement left me. Things like this make me wonder if I was ever part of that movement in the first place.
If it is even remotely possible for little girls who have been raped to be branded as murderers, let there no longer be any doubt–people like Johnson and Mullens don’t give a damn for the sanctity of life. They want to destroy the right to privacy and further victimize women.
(featured image courtesy Debrah Sweet, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
