Wrong.
Criminalizing abortion will do nothing but lead to the invasion of women's privacy and to a takeover of their liberties. If you criminalize abortion, you make every woman who has a miscarriage a suspect of murder. After all, if a woman is pregnant and later miscarries, how do you know if she really miscarried naturally? What if she intentionally induced the abortion? What if she smoked? What if she drank alcohol? What if she took drugs? What if she rode a roller coaster? What if she intentionally fell down the stairs? How will we figure out if she did any of these things? Should we just lock all pregnant women in special institutions that watch over their each and every move so we'll know if she committed "murder"? Are anti-choicers willing to take away women's right to privacy in order to advance their agenda? My guess is yes.
A Utah bill that criminalizes miscarriage was passed recently. This brings us back to my prior questions. How do we know if it was a spontaneous abortion or an induced abortion? How do we know that she intentionally fell down the stairs? Will we start investigating every person who has a miscarriage? How far, exactly, are antis willing to go in order to give fertilized eggs special rights?
If you bring this up when engaging an anti, they're likely to tell you that you're just being paranoid. The sad truth is that this isn't just paranoia. It's not even a guess as to what is going to happen. It's happened already. This is what happens when we make abortion a punishable crime. Pregnant people, even those who want their pregnancies, become suspects. This is why I "Trust Women".
The criminalization of miscarriages ties into the "personhood" issue. The anti-choice attempt to grant "personhood" to fertilized eggs is nothing more than a distraction from the fact that women are persons. When you grant personhood to the fetus, you begin to strip away female personhood. Dr. Hern makes excellent points in this article about fetal personhood.
Does it matter that a woman may spontaneously abort (“miscarry”) a pregnancy before she is even aware of it? Does it matter that this may happen in at least 75 percent of all conceptions? What about a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) that happens when the woman is aware of the pregnancy? This happens in about 10-15 percent of all known pregnancies. Is the spontaneously aborted embryo a person? What if the woman smokes or drinks or takes drugs or rides the roller-coaster or hangs out with weird people? Is she guilty of homicide if she has a miscarriage because some or all of these activities are known or thought by some to cause damage to the embryo or cause a miscarriage? Who will document this damaging behavior, and who decides what is damaging?
Anti-choice attempts to take away women's basic liberties are real, and we must expose this to the public. Women being jailed for falling down stairs and the senate criminalizing miscarriage are two very small glimpses into what the future will look like if we let the anti-choicers win. For the sake of your sisters, aunt, best friend, cousins, and even for the sake of anti-choice women, we have to fight against this.
God bless all of you!
