As you likely know, Donald Trump recently said that women who have abortions should be punished. He then tried to walk it back.
But what he said, initially, exposes the real logic of the Cult of the Fetus. For if one believes that life begins at conception, then abortion is murder. And if one believes that, why wouldn't that include punishing the person who decided that the murder should be committed and who contracted for the murder and paid for it.
In most states, engaging in murder-for-hire, whether as the contractor or the customer, merits enhanced punishment (often capital). It's simply more egregious to pay for another person to whack your target than to do it yourself.
The logic of the Cult of the Fetus, though, goes further. In Tennessee, it is a crime to use drugs while pregnant. In 44 other states, prosecutors have gone after women who have used drugs while pregnant. In Utah, having a miscarriage can result in the woman going to prison.
Mikey Pence signed a bill requiring all miscarried fetuses to be interred or cremated. So then, would the advocates of the Cult of the Fetus seek to have all miscarriages treated as crime scenes? They would have to, really, for the logic of their position demands it.
What about drinking coffee? That one could possibly open the male participant in the act of conception to charges, as caffeine consumption may increase the risk of a miscarriage.
What about drinking alcohol? The CDC recommends that women not on birth control refrain from drinking any alcoholic beverages. The risk to a fetus is fairly well known.
How about smoking? Would it be a crime to smoke in the vicinity of a pregnant woman? Or what if the mother refuses to eat healthily?
Sure, the anti-abortion groups will scoff at all that. "We have no intention of ever advocating such legislation," they'll respond Well, I believe they are masking their true intentions, just as the Bloombergers lie about not wanting total weapons confiscation. The logic of the anti-abortionists demands that they adopt such measures.
I argue that if they don't adopt such positions and try to enact legislation for those purposes, then they would have to accept that a fetus deserves less protection, as a person, than the law could provide.
What Trump did was follow the logic to its rational conclusion. Which is never a good idea in politics.
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2 comments:
Nah, you're being logical. Abortion is really a dependable cash-cow for the right wingers, and if they actually got their way it would hurt their pocketbooks bad. That's why "what should the punishment be?" has always been the best response to the political anti-abortion faction. There are certain people who actually don't like abortion, but their political function has always been to vote, pay, and STFU after the election is over. Those are the very ones drumph has been harvesting on all of the other issues, with proposals just as batshit in their own ways, but this one outed a con far too lucrative to blow over like the others. Maybe.
-Doug in Oakland
The right-wing religious fundamentalists' main goal is to enforce - by any means - a set of sexual taboos dating back to the bronze and iron ages. The human sex drive is part of the species drive to survive - the strongest evolutionary imperative there is. Religious leaders understand that to control the sex drive is to control the person. They can redirect the drive into religious zeal. It is the rationale behind celibacy for priests and nuns - who, they hope, will sublimate this powerful drive into religious zealotry. Sometimes this sublimation pops up in other forms - like pedophilia, to the discomfiture of the occasional alter boy or young Sunday school girl. Guerilla leaders, like Mao and Castro also understood this and also required celibacy of their fighters so they would sublimate the drive into revolutionary zeal.
The fundies' aim is to suppress all expression of the sex drive unless it is within a very narrow and rigid set of rules sanctioned by their high shamans. Virginity until a church-sanctioned "sacramental" marriage and severe limitations even in marriage to the expression of the drive is the ultimate form of control. The fundies try to enforce this on the rest of us by making sure that penalties for transgressing their taboos (especially for women and the LGBTQ community) are as draconian as possible. Pregnancy and unwanted children, maximal chance of contracting STDs, moral opprobrium, even now possible jail are all just techniques to instill fear and to try to coerce people who do not subscribe to their ancient sexual taboos to conform to them.
Next, I suspect that somebody will come up with the idea that women of child-bearing age be forceably administered pregnancy tests at frequent periods (no pun intended) so they can catch the "malefactors" who suffer early early miscarriages.
Considering that modern medical science has shown that at least 50% of all fertilized (and, to the fundies, "ensouled") ova never even attach to the womb, and pass through the body unnoticed in a woman's monthly menstruation, and that their particular god, in his (always his!) Intelligent Design, created a system that works this way, that would make their god the most prolific abortionist in history.
"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."
-- Voltaire
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