By
William A. Gralnick
What in the Sam Hill is going on?!? Many believed that the anti-abortion crazies gunning for Roe V. Wade saw that group as an excellent puzzle piece to plug into their election strategy maps. Now we have a way for religious belief to bore into politics like a bull moose bores into anything that makes it angry. A conservative majority in the Supreme Court was hammered into place. That process proved that a lie here or there in pursuit of the black robe fell under the rubric of the ends justifying the means.
I wager most people don’t understand that the constitution was very protective of states’ rights. Only by interpretation and in some cases, dire needs of the country as a whole gave us a burgeoning Federal government. Once the Court put Roe v Wade behind bars, the states could now be the arbiters of what a woman could and could not do about her personal family-building feelings. In a perfect world, which by so many measures this one is not, this seems to be the way the framers wanted things. They did not see the lunacy that could overtake the system.
Lunacy, while applicable, is not really fair. What we are seeing is the cock-eyed result of the urban (progressive)-rural (conservative) in this country. Many state legislatures are tilted towards the right. One reason is that middle-class, liberal, well-educated voters tend to turn their noses up at state legislators, thinking only the Federal vote matters. The other is that motivated conservative voters knew what they were doing when they began taking state doings seriously. (Below is Tallahassee, Florida. Not quite urban America).
So, this is what you have. According to a March report in the New York Times, 13 states have either forbade abortions or allowed them with such restrictions, i.e. within six weeks of conception, that they might as well have made them illegal. Georgia is one such state. As of this writing, a legislative committee has voted to move the bill to the floor. The states in the illegal or near-illegal category are these:
Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. You can pretty much add Georgia and Florida. If I were a betting man, I’d bet there are more to come. Nor, of course, is that all. Now we are entering the battle of the abortion pill. This issue will end up with the Supremes. Surely there will be a challenge regarding whether a state can infringe on what patrons send through the United States Postal Service. At least there is an oral backup medication. Not as effective, but at least there is one.
And if you think we’ve reached the summit of insanity, think again. Here is the story from South Carolina about a bill that was under consideration. Yahoo reports, “ The “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023” would amend the state’s code of laws, redefining “person” to include a fertilized egg at the point of conception, affording that zygote “equal protection under the homicide laws of the state” — up to and including the ultimate punishment: death.
One objector was interviewed by Stacy Jackson of Black Enterprise. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican representative of South Carolina in the U.S. House, believes the bill is a factor of a “deeply disturbing” trend.
“To see this debate go to the dark places, the dark edges, where it has gone on both sides of the aisle, has been deeply disturbing to me as a woman, as a female legislator, as a mom, and as a victim of rape. I was raped as a teenager at the age of 16,” Mace said. “This debate ought to be a bipartisan debate where we balance the rights of women, and we balance the right to life. But we aren’t having that conversation here in D.C. We aren’t having that conversation at home. We aren’t having that conversation with fellow state lawmakers. She feels it is a “deeply disturbing trend.
“There are other bills with exceptions, but will do little or nothing to save the lives of pre-born children,” Harris said regarding victims of rape, listing exceptions that would include “a ‘duress’ defense for women who are pressured/threatened to have an abortion” and “medical care to save the mother’s life,” adding that “the functional language in that scenario is whether the baby’s life is forfeited ‘unintentionally’ or ‘intentionally.’”
To date, the bill has attracted 21 co-sponsors.
Legislators in South Carolina revived the electric chair and firing squads in 2021 as methods for inmates who have committed capital crimes to be put to death.
Currently, abortion is legal in South Carolina for up to 21 weeks and six days. However, a Greenville woman was previously arrested for using pills to end a pregnancy in 2021, violating the state law that deems it illegal to conduct a self-managed abortion.
The revulsion that spread around the state, the country, and the world was immediate and powerful. The good news was many behind the bill jumped on their bicycles, hoping they could pedal backward.
According to The New Republic’s Toto Oren, the bill has become too hot for even some of its supporters to handle. Nine of the bill’s 24 original co-sponsors have yanked their support in the past few weeks, following a massive outcry on social media. Several explained they did not want to criminalize people who get abortions. One, Representative Brandon Guffey, claimed he had not read the bill thoroughly before signing on.
“I did not read into the bill far enough to be aware that it included the death penalty,” he said in a Facebook post. “I read through it, but I did not click on the code that linked to stating that a woman should get the death penalty.”
Guffey pulled his name from the list of sponsors on Thursday. In his Facebook post, he explained he is “pro-life, but that includes the mother’s life.” He also said he supports other bills that restrict abortion access in South Carolina.
That’s the good news; the bill seems doomed. The bad news is that even one person could have such a draconian thought and, worse still, find others to co-sponsor it. The authors of the bill can’t abashedly claim they didn’t know what was in it. They wrote it. They put the words in it.
What’s worse, voting on a bill without reading it or reading a bill that equates abortion to first-degree murder? Frightening—at least from my perspective.
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