Right, but they are an active participant in a crime. It doesn’t matter what the crime is… when people assist in the commission of a crime, they don’t automatically become exempt solely because of their gender, even if biology plays part.
I don’t see any difference in exempting you because you’re black, but putting Mr. Smith in the slammer because he’s not.
I fail to see why only pregnant women can assist in the commission of a crime and be automatically exempt, but everyone else; including infertile women have to do their time.
Because the SD legislature has said so. Now we need to see if there is anything associated with this law that a higher court will take exception with. I personally believe the SC will overturn it, though I’d be very happy to be wrong.
The United States Constitution and the South Dakota Constitution guarantees a right to life. Stated simply people are not allowed to kill you. Killing someone is a crime. Punishments for that crime may vary for a variety of reasons but it is always a crime. Even killing someone by accident is a crime.
South Dakota has granted full personhood (for lack of a better word) on the unborn. This is unequivocal. Not a sorta person. Not a person with lesser rights. A person with an inalienable right to life from the moment fertilization occurs.
I can think of no more fundamental right than the right to live. It need not even be enshrined in the constitution. It is axiomatic. NOTHING* trumps this right. No one, for any reason, can just walk up and kill another without being guilty of murder.
So, a law in SD that states it is ok for a given class (pregnant women) to kill another given class (the unborn) denies a fundamental right, a constitutional right as well, to the unborn.
You may say that constitutional rights are not absolute. Free speech is not absolute for instance and may be restricted. But in this case I think the right to life is the most fundamental and basic right there is. You cannot just legislate it away (not that they cannot try). Ending a life is the ultimate case. There is life after free speech is restricted. There is life if you are discriminated against. Ending a life is irrevocable. Once done it cannot be undone.
The SD law, to me, seems to be unconstitutional because it denies perhaps the most basic and fundamental rights there is to another class. I do not see how anything can trump it. If you allow that it can then we can go to the extreme and ask why pregnant women cannot just kill anybody and be free of criminal wrongdoing. If you say the woman merits a special position in this case because she is the one tasked with caring for the unborn and that is a burden then why not allow them to kill their already born children as they are still a burden to her?
[sub]*-- You can kill someone self defense and the state may kill someone after due process of law under very particular circumstances. In all cases though where this happens it may be said the person who can be killed “justly” has abdicated their right to life by making a proactive choice of their own. The unborn, of course, never do any such thing so cannot be included among this group.[/sub]
Being under stress or what you happen to believe is not a defense to murder. It might be a mitigating circumstance in sentencing but you are still guilty. If I think someone is evil incarnate and kill them for the good of the world I will still be prosecuted for murder.
The SD law explicitly states that their task force has determined that life begins at fertilization. Ignorance, willful or not, is not a legal excuse.
IIRC in cases such as you suggest a crime is still committed. If you are “innocent by reason of insanity” the state will still lock you away…just in a psych ward instead of a prison. I think some states have even tightened restrictions on people getting away with a crime using the insanity defense and often still to prison time (albeit perhaps a reduced sentence coupled with psychiatric treatment).
Regradless in the cases you suggest a class of people is not absolved before the fact. They will be arrested and tried and if mitigating circumstances absolves them then so be it. In what we are talking about you have absolved a group of people of a crime before it is even committed. They cannot even be arrested and tried to see if their case has some unique aspects that allows it.
As JThunder keeps informing us, they weren’t before Roe.
Because you aren’t attacking the root of the problem? Because doctors will break unethical laws? Because desperate people will pay others to break unethical laws? Because RU 486 will most likely increase in availability if the demand goes up and the black market sees money in it? Because people don’t like being told what to do and will rebel against a stupid, shortsighted law? Because you won’t be able to catch abortion providers? Because people like me will do everything possible to help women skirt, break, shatter, or ignore your laws?
Remember, once it’s illegal there is no notification of parents, no counseling, no waiting periods, no licensing, no protest marches, no clinic harassment, no doctor shooting, no Right to Life assholes picketing, no restrictions, no rules, no oversight. Need for abortion won’t go away. Considering the way so many religious whackos like to limit birth control, it will likely increase. You’ll just be fighting the drug war, this time on behalf of “victims” that no one seems to think are real people.
Besides, how can you defend prosecuting abortion providers? You said you can’t defend prosecuting the women because they don’t feel they are doing anything wrong. Do the abortion providers think they are doing something wrong? I bet they don’t. How can you punish them for it if you can’t punish the women for it?
Well, obviously abortion laws for the last one hundred years have this distinction. And more importantly, have withstood any court challenge on the grounds you outline.
Whack-a-Mole, you keep arguing some variation of, “But the law says such-and-such.” The law says whatever the legislature says it does, so long as it isn’t successfully challenged in a higher court. If the law says that being desperate and pregnant is mitigating circumstance enough to exempt one from prosecution, then a person in that circumstance is exempt. Period. So long as there is not a constitutional provision that prohibits it, that is.
This law does not take away a right to life. It protects it, albeit in a manner that you think is illogical. But laws can be illogical. They just can’t be unconstitutional.
I’ve read JThunder’s cites many times, and they don’t at all suggest that the society of abortion providers will more freely provide abortions once there’s a penalty than when there wasn’t one.
You asked why it wouldn’t LOWER abortions. I replied.
I do think that blackmarket RU 486 could increase the number of abortions. I do think that no law will significantly decrease the number of abortions, especially if women are exempt from prosecution.
No, they are smart, ethical medical professionals who feel as if they have no choice but to help those who need them.
Well, this is still silly. A law prosecuting abortion providers will not decrease abortions, not to any degree. In fact, it might increase them, because then women would get a drug on the black market that was readily available to them legally before the law went into effect. Okay, gotcha. Makes perfect sense.
Yeah, they’re real saviors all right. Unfortunately for them, the law makes no exception for their noble motives.
I have already explained what could be a mechanism behind increased availability of RU 486 if surgical abortions were outlawed. If surgical abortions were outlawed, demand for abortions would not go down. (And, to repeat, if the religious whackos get enough power, who knows what will happen to birth control drugs, which could make the demand for abortions skyrocket.)
Right now, getting an abortion with RU486 is actually harder than getting a surgical abortion. You still have to go to the clinic, which may be a very long trip. You still have the counseling sessions. Some clinics don’t offer the drug. And I believe (though would happily be corrected) that it takes 3 visits to go the drug route. For poor women, this is incredibly hard and the surgical option is less of a chore.
Take away the legal surgical option. As you keep and keep and keep and keep and keep saying, women will suffer zero penalty for getting an abortion. You will have no way in hell of policing the market for the drug. All of the women who would have gone with the legal surgical option are potential customers for the drug. Of the possible abortion options, the drug will become more attractive. Remember, zero penalty. It’s a lot easier to smuggle a pill into a state than it is to smuggle a doctor in. It’s a lot easier to slip pills to a needy woman than to slip her some surgery. The market for abortion will remain steady at least. Certain women who were unwilling to do something so “public” as go to an abortion clinic (and remember, abortion clinics aren’t on every street corner), or who couldn’t afford to travel, will suddenly find that they don’t have to travel to get an abortion. They don’t have to walk through asshole protestors. They don’t have to risk getting bombed or shot.
The market for blackmarket abortion drugs isn’t there now because there is a legal alternative. People will tend to take the legal alternative rather than risk illegal alternatives. But if you take away the legal alternative, they will simply turn to the illegal one, and people like me would help.
Mind you, you might get a couple of years after a ban where rates are lower. It might take a while for the pipelines to open up. And since you’ll drive it underground, you won’t have scary accurate statistics to look at, so you’ll be able to tell yourself that you just ended abortion.
Yes, they are saviors. They save women. Radical idea, huh?
You are the only pro-choice person I’ve heard who believes abortion restrictions not only won’t ultimately reduce abrortions, it may increase them. Sorry, I don’t buy your logic. Seems more logical to me that restricting abortions might actually, I dunno, restrict them.
Yes, those women would die without them, for sure. Those abortion doctors are saints.
Probably not saints, since I don’t believe in saints. Doing good work? Absolutely.
As for increasing the number of abortions? Could happen. It’s a market, like any other market. Prohibition doesn’t work. Prohibition without repercussions is hilariously stupid. But I’m sure it would make some people feel all warm and snuggly, and isn’t that the whole point of all laws, to make sure religious folk get to feel good about themselves?
Jailing abortion doctors = no repercussions? Um, okay.
And you realize the black market is called that because it’s illegal, correct? This river of black market abortion options you envision, a ready supply without strings or worries–I don’t think so. But if it makes you feel all warmly and snuggly to believe this, be my guest.
There is this quote and one from stratocaster, #353 I believe, but can’t access for some strange reason at the moment, that I want to address.
You all keep saying that you don’t want (and don’t think it appropriate) to prosecute pregnant women. We can get into the inherent sexism of this later. My point is this: these women are NOT pregnant! They’ve aborted.
Stop with the Perry Mason scenario so upsetting the mother-to-be that she spontaneously miscarries right there on the witness stand. This stuff is straight out of Victorian times.
It makes no sense to NOT prosecute the woman. None. IANAL, but it strikes me a bad law and one easily disallowed or struck down whatever they do to nonsensical laws.
I have had an abortion–me, a married, upper middle class woman with 3 other kids. I declined to have #4 for health reasons. I knew exactly what I was doing. I thanked God I had the CHOICE to do so and would do it again in a NY minute. I have no worries about hell or purgatory. I have a slight regret that my health didn’t allow me to have more kids–but it is not a haunting feeling, by any means.
It seems to me that the DS legislature wants to have its cake and eat it, too.It’s disingeous to not prosecute the woman (and the man–afterall, she didn’t get pregnant in a vaccuum, did she? oops, forgot–this is all about controlling the woman’s body-not the man’s).
If I am the instigator of murder (and we are all agreed that SD considers this murder, correct?), I am no less guilty than the doc who performed the AB. I should at least serve jail time. Who will watch my other kids? Perhaps one of those nice protestors outside of the clinic the day I had my AB.
To say that women are desperate and wrongly informed that “it’s a glob of tissue” is incorrect. My experience at the AB clinic was not like that at all. No one mentioned anything about a glob of tissue. No one patted me on the back, either. It was a simple, straightforward, outpt procedure with all proper medical procedures followed (sterility of OR field etc). And?
Sounds to me like alot of anti-choice people really don’t know much about abortion. And yes, you are anti-choice–you support my loss of choices. Pro-choice doesn’t always mean pro-abortion–a salient fact consistently ignored by the “pro-life” crowd.
I can walk a block from my house and buy drugs. I have never used an illegal drug in my life, but I know where to get them. Ostriches know where to get them.
You realize that the black market is called that because it’s illegal, correct? Which means that this massive quanity of illegal drugs that already exists out there is against the law. And yet the law can’t do anything about it, and that’s even with making drug use criminal.
As alcohol prohibition showed us, if you make something criminal that people really want, they’ll get it. I know that some of you seem to believe that if you take legal abortions away women will just grin and bear it (no pun intended). But women have risked much more to get an abortion than you’re willing to threaten them with.
I just can’t take this debate seriously. The pro-abortion rights side says that a fetus is worth less than a woman’s life, health, or happiness. The anti-abortion side shrieks that a fetus is a person a human fully 100% real live baby baby baby! Oh, but if you kill it no big deal, really. Go about your business. After all, it isn’t like it’s murder or anything.
And then the pro-abortion rights side says we know it’s not murder. That’s what we’ve been saying. And then the anti-abortion side starts shrieking again about baby baby baby. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Enough. I’m done. If an argument with any integrity were going to be made here it would have already.
See now you’re saying that a pregnant woman has the mental capacity of a five-year-old.
Can you not see that you’re conflating differences in degree with differences in kind? Yes, I can conspire to murder someone with premeditation, and wind up getting convicted of 3rd degree manslaughter. But the possibility for being convicted of firstb degree murder still exists. In fact, if it can be proven that I conspired and premeditated the murder, I will face first degree murder charges. If I wind up pleading out, it will be because the evidence is possibly insufficient to convict me, and the DA wants something, and I don’t want to risk a lifetime behind bars.
As holmes pointed out, the mother in this case is someone who is participating in the crime from beginning to end. If you can prove a crime was committed under this statute, then you can prove the mother was doing it, and she should be prosecuted. Again, while a DA may make decisions on who can be convicted of what by a jury properly executing their duty, you can’t create a plenary exemption from prosecution for one class of individuals.
To target women, there would have to be a law allowing it. And there isn’t the support, in ANY state, for such a law. Not in the last century, not in this century. Probably never will be. In fact, trying to prosecute the woman could even cause a backlash. So, if one is anti-abortion, it makes no sense to support a law that would
a) never pass
b) have no public support
c) probably cause a political backlash if it did.
Does that make sense?
Like I just said above, that’s how abortion laws have been written for the last hundred years, and they have never been struck down by any court under that argument.
No, we are definitely not agreed. This law was not an amendment to its murder statute, and the law conspicuously avoids using the word “murder”.
When national prohibition ended in 1933, per capita consumption of alcohol had dropped to half of its pre-prohibition levels. And didn’t return to its pre-prohibition levels until the 1970s.