It’s deliberate on the part of these so-called moral warriors. They don’t want to be clear. They want to terrorize the people they see as opposing their righteous agenda. They want health-care providers, scientists (studying e.g. stem cells), activists (who would circulate information on how to get around the law), etc. specifically to be fearful of the ambiguity, uncertain of the boundaries, wary of the powers and intentions of those charged with enforcement. If the line were drawn clearly — up to this point is legal, beyond this point is not — then that’s where activities would be carried out. But if the line is moveable and unfocused, then everyone will steer entirely clear of it, lest they fall afoul.
This is why you’re seeing the hospitals etc. denying care and staying far away from anything that has even the possibility of being judged illegal under some squishy, ill-defined standard as applied by whichever activist authority wants to carry the torch. This is not seen as a problem to be cleared up. This is exactly what the anti-choice assholes want to happen.
My son-in-law is a doctor. A friend of his works/worked at a Texas Hospital ER. He originally looked into his insurance coverage and was disappointed with his coverage in potential cases involving a patient’s pregnancy.
He initially refused to treat women of child bearing age, but then changed to refusing to see broad categories of patients that might lead to prosecution.
The hospital pushed back, so he’s currently not working. He is looking into relocating to a less oppressive state.
All of this was predictable and predicted. Savita Halappanavar was killed by a similar legal regime in Ireland. Abortion was notionally legal when necessary to save the woman’s life, but there was no legislation saying how that exception worked, and the penalties for an illegal abortion were severe.
I agree with everything you wrote and will just add one other facet – anti-abortion crusaders are cognitively incapable of seeing their crusade as anything less than one of unerring, unquestionable righteousness. They simply refuse to believe than an abortion could ever present an ethical dilemma and would rather bend reality than have to reconcile that in their minds. That’s why they push back so hard on pregnancy due to rapes – e.g. holding that a woman can’t get pregnant in a “legitimate rape,” claiming that the 10-year old who had an abortion in Indiana is a media fabrication, etc.
Coming up with a real-world scheme to implement an abortion ban would force them to consider the morally complexity of abortion. And they simply won’t do it. Because the most important thing for them is maintaining the enormous righteousness erection that their moral certainty gives them.
I haven’t seen much on another issue arising from the recent Supreme Court decision - that of prescribing drugs for a variety of medical conditions, that also have the potential to induce abortion.
This has particular impact on patients with autoimmune diseases for which methotrexate has been a highly useful drug.
"Kirchner raised some serious questions about the ability of rheumatologists to prescribe methotrexate in a post-RoeUnited States.
“Will we need to somehow prove that every methotrexate prescription we write isn’t going to be used to induce abortion?” she said. “Will our ability to write prescriptions be hampered? Maybe just for certain populations, like perhaps women of childbearing age?”
Use of other drugs may also be hampered due to fears of prosecution under anti-abortion laws. And we’ve already experienced the phenomenon of Conscience Pharmacists, who refuse to fill prescriptions for drugs if they think the purpose is to terminate a pregnancy.
This is correct. The anti-choice side is now simply lying about what they’ve done in order to deflect the blowback.
We have the wife of Sen Josh Hawley openly lying to Congress by stating that ending an ectopic pregnancy “isn’t an abortion”. That’s false, and she knows it’s false, but she (and others) are trying to sow confusion about how they’re menacing the lives of patients and livelihoods of doctors.
They want women to die as atonement for having sex. This country hates women more than any other minority. And women aren’t even in the minority!
They don’t hate women. They just think women should be owned by a single man who controls her sexuality. They like women just like they like nice houses and fancy cars.
I think I just need to point something out in the interest of fairness. While there are, no doubt, plenty of misogynists in the pro-life movement, and plenty who think sex should be punished, I’ve certainly known some for whom the issue is a belief that personhood starts at conception. Even some sexually active, unmarried women I’ve known feel that way.
Don’t think for a minute I’m defending pro-life positions. I’m as pro-sex and pro-choice as you’ll find. But we’re supposed to fight ignorance here, and that brush is just a little too broad (just a little, admittedly).
I’m willing to grant that there are people who believe this sincerely. But if they believe that the rights of a “person” gestating in a woman’s uterus are more important than the rights of the woman herself – even if it means legally prohibiting a medical procedure that’s necessary to protect the woman’s health, future fertility or even her life – then I vote for “misogynist nutjob.”
We’ve already got evidence in this very thread that some in the “pro-life” camp reconcile ‘All abortions are murder’ with ‘It’s obviously moral to terminate an ectopic pregnancy, or the pregnancy of a raped 10-year-old’ by re-classifying the latter as not abortions. There’s even Catholic doctrine about ectopic pregnancies. It’s obscene - it forbids a direct termination of the pregnancy, but allows for removing the Fallopian tube thereby unnecessarily harming the woman, because by removing the tube the intent is to save the mother rather than to kill the fetus (I know, I know, don’t even get me started) - but it at least allows for a timely medical intervention.
At least some pro-lifers simply accept as gospel that all abortions are murder, and then do all sorts of mental gymnastics to reconcile this with situations where it leads to morally absurd results. You don’t necessarily need to posit misogyny to get to this sort of view, although there is certainly a large dose of systemic misogyny built into the Catholic and Evangelical religious views that underpin much of the dogmatic pro-life position, and moreover the end result has misogynistic impacts even if it is not motivated by conscious misogyny.
I think the clearest demonstration that Republicans have a specific strong desire that loose women should face punishment comes in their opposition to the HPV vaccine. There isn’t any unborn child around to complicate matters in this case. Their sole opposition is that by eliminating the threat of HPV, and by extension cervical cancer, women might feel safer having sex.
You know, if this camp is willing to allow pregnancy terminations in the case of rape, incest or to protect the mother’s health simply by saying those are not abortions, that’s a better situation than what currently exists in several states. It’s still evil and patently absurd, but that’s an upgrade over even-more-heinously evil and not absurd.
Except that this particular absurd belief of theirs isn’t codified in the law.
Of course, I’m sure that “Someone told me that this abortion wasn’t an abortion!” will be taken into consideration during the trial for murder [/sarcasm]