Daily Archive

    Liberty in the land of the brave, and the home of the free seems to be missing a clause somewhere because liberty is not really working well for women, especially if looking for access to reproductive health services such as abortion.  The Alternet article lists the top 10 states where Abortion is virtually illegal.  For me this is a bottom 10 list, and I will highlight the lowlights of this particular list.

“1) Idaho. Even though the constitutional right to abortion has been established for 38 years, a woman in Idaho was arrested and charged for aborting her pregnancy. The woman bought some drugs online to terminate her pregnancy, and was ratted out by an acquaintance who disapproves of a woman’s right to choose.” 

2) Iowa – Christine Taylor accidentally fell down some stairs and went for treatment at the hospital. While telling the nurse about her personal problems, a common enough situation at a hospital, Taylor let on that she had briefly considered abortion early in her pregnancy. The nurse called the cops, claiming the accident was an attempt at self-abortion. Taylor suffered three weeks of purgatory before the D.A. dropped the charges, but the fact remains that a woman was arrested and charges were considered on the grounds that she’d thought about exercising her constitutional rights. 

3) Utah. As Michelle Goldberg explained in the Daily Beast, no woman’s story is too heart-rending for anti-choice zealots not to try to put her in jail for attempting an abortion. A pregnant 17-year-old who lived without electricity or running water in rural Utah, who may have been exploited by an older man and who certainly had no way to get to a doctor or pay for an abortion, paid a man $150 to beat her in the stomach.

4) Louisiana. Using law enforcement creatively to get around the legal right to abortion is done in ways other than prosecuting women, of course. There’s also the practice of targeting abortion providers and hitting them with unnecessary, harassing regulations that aren’t applied to any other medical facilities.

5) Kansas. It may still be legal to get or provide abortion in Kansas, but it’s become increasingly dangerous to do so. Human rights aren’t really being secured if trying to exercise them means facing threats of violence, as the civil rights activists of the past can tell you. Already one abortion provider in Kanas, Dr. George Tiller, has been assassinated, which dropped the number of providers in the state from four to three. 

6) Virginia. Virginia is quickly rivaling some of the more deep South states in the art of using legal harassment to run abortion providers out of business. Not only is the legislature trying to pass regulations that hold abortion clinics to hospital-level standards, but anti-choicers are trying to interfere with the Department of Health’s decisions allowing abortion clinics to operate in the state.

7) Mississippi. The legal battles continue over whether or not it’s legal for the state to issue a ballot initiative on the question of whether a fertilized egg should be legally considered a “person.” If civil liberties groups challenging the ballot initiative lose out, it will probably pass into law, which not only threatens abortion, contraception and IVF access, but could result in legal actions taken against women who merely miscarry or give birth to stillborns.

8) Indiana. Indiana has dropped from 15 providers in 2005 to 12 in 2008. Law enforcement in the state has been looking for creative ways to put women in jail for failing to bear live children. A woman who attempted suicide while pregnant, only to give birth to a baby who didn’t survive, has been charged with murder.

9) Ohio. Luckily, legislation that would ban abortion of any pregnancy where the fetus has a heartbeat is currently stalled in the legislature, but if this bill moves forward, it could be nearly as dangerous as a bill defining a fertilized egg as a person. 

10) South Dakota. South Dakota legislators passed the most stringent waiting period law in the country, requiring a woman to wait 72 hours for an abortion and consult with a registered anti-choice pregnancy center before getting her abortion. 

As no anti-choice centers have signed up yet, the law functionally bans abortion in South Dakota.

My personal favourite is Mississippi where they are really going wild-crazy-sauce with trying to legislate into existence the definition person being a fertilized egg.  It just scary really how far the anti-choicers are willing to go force pregnancy on women.  Women are not incubators yet it seems Mississippi legislators are doing their best to turn them into exactly that.

Hopefully, there remains some sensible people down south who can throw out this attack on women.