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.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
8 comments
June 22, 2011 at 10:49 am
Vern R. Kaine
I read about #10. It sounded like a “pro-life” workaround/setup, to require women to talk to a counselor before she has the procedure and yet not have any counselors available to talk to. What does a woman do, then?
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June 22, 2011 at 10:56 am
tildeb
It really comes down to the belief about who owns what. As long as there are people who think themselves justified to assign ownership of a human life to god rather than the person responsible for it, we will continue to have these misguided people abusing public office and public power to legalize force to impose this belief by secular law enforcement.
We need to continue to always call this push what it really is: anti-choice, anti-freedom, anti-dignity. It is not “pro-life” but an attack on the very dignity of people to be responsible for themselves.
So the next time someone comes along and tries to tell you that ‘liberal’ religion and some deistic religious belief in a creator is harmless, remember how frenetic are the forces arrayed against the right and freedom to make personal choices over life and death and how willing they are to impose their beliefs through law over everyone. You see, it’s the same groups that are dead set against assisted suicide, and for exactly the same reason: they believe we don’t own our own lives and so feel justified to think that we have no right to make such decisions. Not for one second do they question this assumption of ownership nor consider that what they are doing is imposing a tyranny of the worst sort in the name of Oogity Boogity.
Religion, once again, poisons everything.
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June 22, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Reneta Prescott
Wow, it is sad to think of the lengths people are going through to railroad people into this. I think all people have a right to their own bodies, but we live in a world with some very radical and asinine people who want rights over that too. I think the world has enough mouths to feed without forcing women back into the stone age. Especially considering that a woman doesn’t have to consent to sex to get pregnant, I think these laws and systems are unconstitutional. No one has domain over my body, and anyone who says they do will get an earful. I just hope that this stuff doesn’t catch on, and if I get a change to prevent it myself, I am sure I will. To me, its as much a issue with patriarchy, as it is with government governing morality, and it’s got to stop somewhere. No one owns my body.
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June 22, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Reneta Prescott
Agreed
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June 22, 2011 at 8:55 pm
The Arbourist
Exactly. She gets turned away, and if she does not have adequate resources, gets to go down the forced childbirth route.
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June 23, 2011 at 7:13 am
flaarnsturgen
See also Paul Krugman’s comments (“Live Free And Die”, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/live-free-and-die/) earlier this week. The reduction of U.S. abortion rights is apparently not the only thing we can thank the newly ascendant Republicans for. The life expectancy of women declined in 737 counties — mostly in “red states” — during the period 1997 through 2007 for the first time in decades, bucking the overall trend in the U.S. and the world. Smoking and obesity (both perennial Republican causes, since they further the transfer of wealth to corporate interests) appear to be the main culprits, but both declining governmental health care spending and widening income disparities deserve shout-outs for their role in this travesty.
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July 1, 2012 at 11:31 pm
SaraJoy
Thanks for your post. I suppose you’re thinking it’s time to update the lowlights. I thought you’d like to know that I used your graphic (very cool) in my recent post: A Pro-Choice Response, and linked it to this post.
[ed. I added the link to your article, I hope that is okay.]
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July 2, 2012 at 10:57 am
The Arbourist
Flattered. :) I read your post. Articulate and persuasive. I think it needs a little more screedy-shouty over the top emotional argumentation to reach the people arrayed against your position though… *sigh*. Thanks for the link love.
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