Most of the more serious criticisms of the unintended consequences of this law have been explained and dealt with in this thread, but your criticism is more of a general one. With every single law passed by any legislative body, a lawyer can sit down and pull together a possible absurd consequence of it.
With any criminal law, a creative and overzealous prosecutor can use aiding and abetting, conspiracy, and other common law doctrines to bring improper prosecutions. The problem is not this law, but the nearly unfettered discretion of prosecutors in this country and the willingness of the legal system to largely “let the jury decide.”
Case in point: In my state a guy has a domestic violence protection order against him which specifies that he is not to be at his marital home. He goes to the home when his wife is at work, unlocks the door with his key, walks in and gets his clothes and takes his Ipad from the downstairs man cave.
He has violated the DVP, a minor misdemeanor under state law. But the prosecutor who wants to hang him charges him with burglary, being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm, and grand larceny, all of which are serious felonies and carry significant prison time.
Burglary because even though it is his house, the law says it was not his house at the time of the DVP, and larceny because the property was not his to have (even though it was unquestionably personal to him) during the DVP. His guns were in the gun cabinet in the house and he constructively possessed them when he was in the house.
Had he shown up at her workplace and called her every vile name in the book: minor misdemeanor. Because he attempted to collect some items in a non-violent way: three major felonies.
I am with you on not applying creative interpretations of the criminal law, but this phenomenon is not the fault of this particular law.
And do you think the assholes behind these new draconian laws will accept a note like that as evidence enough? This is why I want to know what the new procedure for determining whether the procedure is medically necessary actually is.
I’ve found that deeply religious folks tend to throw reasoning out the window when it comes to medical issues -
Baby born without a brain? “The Lord can work miracles!”
Kid is brain dead after a swimming accident? “Keep praying…something is better than nothing!”
A cancer patient lives for a year instead of the two months predicted by the doctor? “Doctors don’t know anything, it’s all in The Father’s hands!”
No surprise that the logistics of a full-term baby emerging from a nine-year-old don’t occur to these people. One would hope that doctors would be the authority on who could survive what, but given the wording of Alabama’s law, it’s very likely that a doctor would be afraid to declare that a mother’s life is in danger.
Neither do laws that require abortion clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center requirements, or laws that require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. But the result of those laws is that abortion clinics do close, and the people who pass those laws know that. In fact, it can be argued that that is actually the purpose of thos laws, despite claims that they are to protect women’s health.
Related; where a rape exception still exists, I’m curious what happens if a woman walks into a police station and says “I just learned I am pregnant. I have no memory of having consenting sex in the last few months, but I have a vague recollection of going to a bar a while back. I may have been roofied and raped but I can’t remember any details.”
Do the police take her word for it? Do they try to prove she is lying by finding someone she may have had consenting sex with? Is this enough of a “police report” to clear her for an abortion? Does this encourage women to report that they were raped in such a way that the rape itself cannot actually be investigated or prosecuted? Will women shop around for an accommodating police detective who is willing to take their report at face value, give them whatever documentation the clinic requires, and then dump the report in the files never to be looked at again?
Since the rape exception has been eliminated in the latest bills or laws by the Republicans, it is really hard to not conclude that many leaders of the party still belong to the pro-rape one.
Thank you for sharing this. The Georgia law specifically rules out possible suicide as a threat to the mother’s life. Does that make sense? No. You’d still end up with a dead woman and, ironically, a dead embryo/fetus, but by golly, they’re going to keep women from using potential suicide as an out.
So anyway, getting down to brass tacks, who on SCOTUS other than Thomas and Gorsuch would vote to overturn Roe? Alito and Roberts all seem to be more prone to stare decisis and Kavanaugh is harder to predict - and even if he voted to overturn, that’s still just 3 justices.
I saw a clip of Jeffrery Toobin on CNN saying Roe is gone and congratulating Santorum on winning this issue. What a maroon. Roe is far from dead, I just don’t see Roberts upholding this, if it even gets to the Court. Is it possible this could be a good thing, if it gets to the Court and is struck down, would that further strenghen Roe?
In any case, Sweet Home Alabama is now banned from my playlists, as much as I love Skynyrd
There is much talk of how women would get illegal back-alley abortions if abortion were banned, but is it worth the risk? Assuming that it is not a situation where the pregnancy itself would cause greater physical harm than the abortion, the back-alley abortion carries the risk of infection, perforation, and a variety of other dangers - along with the legal issues. There are strong social incentives for abortion in some instances (such as a pregnant teenager in a community that strongly frowns upon that sort of thing), but overall the risk seems to outweigh the benefit.
If we want to see what happens to women when abortion is banned, we can look at the many countries that ban abortions. In my understanding, women who miscarry in these countries can be imprisoned. Salvadorean woman jailed over baby’s death is freed - BBC News
“The Central American country bans abortion in all circumstances, and dozens of women have been imprisoned for the deaths of their foetuses in cases where they said they had suffered miscarriages or stillbirths.”
The 21st century version of a back alley abortion is ordering drugs online—possibly from sketchy suppliers, often outside the window for when medical abortions can safely be performed—and taking them in secret. I don’t know what happens when you take misoprostol after the first trimester…I guess we’re gonna find out.