Last week, I put up a brief challenge to those who oppose abortion rights: what are your policy prescriptions? What legal penalties, for women and for physicians, do you propose? The pro-life community owes us clarity; if they want us to be conscious of abortion as a moral wrong, they must also be explicit about what they regard as the right consequences for seeking or providing an abortion. Dan Whitmarsh, a pastor and blogger, takes up my challenge in his very thoughtful post. He invites more responses, with the caveat that his thread is not the place to discuss abortion itself, but the policy prescriptions that the anti-abortion movement ought to put forward.
If you comment, respect his blog and his thread, please, with the civility for which you are already much celebrated.
I think it’s sad and pathetic that he says he’s never really thought about the consequences of the policies he’s supposedly trying to implement. It’s a great example of how the anti-abortion side so often doesn’t really acknowledge the existence of women in any capacity other than to make babies. For shame.
Sigh. This kind of thing really rankles me. “We care sooooo very much about women, yet in all the decades of our movement’s history, we’ve never bothered to give any thought to a coherent position on what should become of them if they choose abortion.”
What disturbed me most about Pastor Whitmarsh was his failure to recognize that abortion restrictions will create a two-tiered system of justice. Middle to upper income women will be able to circumvent legal limitations with relative ease. Poor women will be targeted.
The world has changed these last 40 years. Women are no longer economically dependent, isolated from resources and support, nor necessarily subject to dangerous invasive procedures in order to procure an abortion. How does Pastor Whitmarsh envision enforcement of abortion restrictions when women themselves are more financially secure and better connected than ever before, and living in a time when an abortion can be a matter of swallowing pharmaceuticals?
Just where is the hammer going to fall?
I have long felt – the realization was one that tipped the scales for me – that any anti-abortion movement that did not actually welcome the prospect, featured in a pro-choice ad way back in the 80′s, of the police investigating any/every woman’s miscarriage as a matter of policy was not an anti-abortion movement, but a thinly-disguised anti-sex crusade.
As I recall, the ad in question (ran full-page in the Grey Lady one Sunday) caused a good deal of outrage from the soi-disant pro-life crowd.