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Jan
31
Utah is on the forefront of banning abortions and that includes criminalizing a doctor’s performance of the constitutionally protected medical procedure, but not criminalizing the woman’s act of seeking or getting the abortion.
First, the progress of the legislation:
Two of the four abortion bills that critics say are clear and decisive steps to completely outlawing abortion in Utah were approved in committee this morning on two 6-1 votes.
HB90 provides exceptions to abortions performed 90 days or more after the conception and amends current abortion law by providing that violating the exceptions in the bill constitutes the second-degree felony offense of “killing an unborn child.”
HB222 requires that at least 24 hours before a physician performs an abortion, the woman must be informed of any anesthetic or analgesic that would alleviate organic pain to the fetus. Sponsoring Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman, said despite overwhelming evidence that fetuses feel pain, people still argue that they don’t.
The Salt Lake City Tribune examines the constitutionality while one of its columnists writes, “…I have a modest cost-cutting proposal of my own: Cut the legislative session in half. Don’t waste our time and money piling up redundant criminal penalties for abortion doctors…”
Now, remember when I made the big stink (fyi – more patriotic dissent for Mamalogues to note) over then-candidate Barack Obama’s failure to adequately and accurately discuss “mental distress” as it relates to abortion? And Mahablog even banned me from commenting because I kept pressing the point of how important it is to be sure that we are clear on the mental health aspect?
Well – here’s to that:
Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, has legislation that would make performing an illegal abortion a second-degree felony, the same penalty faced by those who cause the death of a fetus in the murder of a pregnant woman. Under the bill, abortions after viability, after 20 weeks or so, would only be legal only to protect the life or physical health of the mother, or in cases of a fatal fetal defect, as long as two physicians signed off on the diagnosis.
But the bill also would narrow the definition of a woman’s health to “irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” removing any consideration of impact to a woman’s mental health.
Lovely. (You can read all that I wrote there and here and realize, I’m not talking about getting the blues, folks.)
Ray’s bill states that, to justify an abortion, two physicians would have to separately determine a fetus has a birth defect that would prevent it from surviving outside the womb, but [Salt Lake City family physician Laura Nell] Hodo said it may still force women to give birth to children who have no chance of long-term survival.
Standard.NET reports on how the bill works with current Utah law:
Under current state law, abortion is allowed only in cases of rape or incest, if the fetus cannot survive outside the womb or is unlikely to survive, or to save the mother’s life or preserve her health.
Abortions that don’t meet any of those standards can result in third-degree felony charges.
Under House Bill 90, sponsored by Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clinton, physicians who perform illegal abortions could be charged with second-degree felony criminal homicide.
“In my opinion, illegal abortion is the same as murder,” Ray said. “This is the right step for Utah to take to protect the lives of unborn children, because they don’t have a voice.”
Anti-abortion advocates hail the legislation as progress in the fight against the practice.
“We support any limits we can get on abortion,” said MaryAnn Christensen, secretary of the Utah Eagle Forum.
“The practice of killing our own offspring is barbaric and shouldn’t be embraced by any society.”
You can read more at Utah Legisture Watch which I give props to for having links to the bills I’ve mentioned:
These moves also relate to why I’m thrilled that South Carolina GOP chair Katon Dawson was not elected to be the national RNC chair yesterday, given that state’s lack of women in its legislature (not a single woman in its state senate) and its aggressive pursuit of banning all abortion: the South Carolina state representatives wants to push through an even more stringent version of the ultrasound law that Ohio is now saddled with. Can you imagine one of the two legislative bodies working on such a bill has being completely devoid of the gender that actually can be pregnant and give birth?
Major hattip to Sylvia M at Comments from Left Field who wrote this post about the Utah situation including this:
If you live in Utah or you want to send some strongly-worded letters to the Democrats in their House of Representatives about this bill, here’s the UT House website. Tell these representatives that doctors protecting women’s health is not an air quotation myth.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:42 am January 31st, 2009 in Abortion, Gender, Government, Law, Politics, Sexism, Statehouse, Women
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7 Responses to “Utah bill making post-20 week abortions second-degree felony homicide advances”
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Toots, get one thing straight. I DID NOT BAN YOU “because I kept pressing the point of how important it is to be sure that we are clear on the mental health aspect.” I agreed with you, over and over and over, that such concern is important. I banned you because you had the nerve to lecture me about my responses to other commenters.
We had a long exchange in the comments thread about mental distress, in which I politely agreed with you over and over and over but said there were other considerations. You continued to restate the same argument, and I continued to respond politely. The thread went south beginning with a comment from someone else, Debcoop.
If your readers are interested in the sequence of comments that got you banned, here it is:
Comment #21 by Debcoop.
Comment #24, my response to Debcoop.
Comment #28 by Debcoop.
Comment #29, my response to Comment #28.
Now, here’s where you butt in. In comment #30, you criticize me for my tone with Debcoop and insult me by saying “Just to be sure, I read that as saying that you don’t see any other way to look at what he’s said and you don’t recognize that others see it differently.” This was after I had bent over backward politely agreeing with you in comment after comment prior to this. What Debcoop and I were arguing about were her misstatements of fact about Roe v. Wade, not directly related to the mental distress issue. Like, whether Roe v. Wade allows states to prohibit elective abortion after viability (it does) an where the medical limit on viability was in 1973 (24 weeks). Debcoop also was raising strawman arguments, twisting my post around to mean things it didn’t say so she could argue with me. I hate it when people do that.
Now you have pissed me off, but in Comment #31 I responded to you very politely.
However, you lack the grace to leave well enough alone, and in Comment #32 you criticize me again, whining, “Frankly, it’s destructive to judge others for how far they can go or not go in criticizing.”
At this point I have pretty much lost all patience with you, I respond in Comment #33, “Um, you do realize my post #29 was not addressed to you, right? You seem rather hypersensitive about something that doesn’t concern you” and “So, no lectures from amateurs about how to run my blog, thanks.”
Now you get into a big snit because you feel I have insulted you by calling you an “amateur,” — your insults of me didn’t count, I suppose — and in Comment #34 you complain I was rude to you.
It was Comment #34 that got you banned (see my Comment #35).
So, your banning didn’t have anything to do with your opinion on mental distress an abortion. I banned you because you were being…tiresome…and taking up too much of my time.
Unless you’ve altered what I’ve written, anyone could go to that thread, read it, and realize that it is your mind inferring “lecture” that’s at the root of your “pissed”-offness.
Thanks for the comment – I’ve taken out the profanity.
FYI to readers:
The author of Mahablog has posted about the reference in this post by me to her 7/08 post where I commented about the importance to me of the mental health aspect of discretion being applied by doctors to abortion decisions.
I’m banned from her blog and can’t comment there – I also don’t have anything to add that isn’t already in this post or that one regarding the topic.
But for the record, I can now proudly say again that I’ve been called everything from a neocon to a PUMA to a radical progressive to a Republican male (the PUMA Hillary Clinton Forum called me that last spring).
Conventional wisdom holds that if you’re trashed by people on the left and the right, then you must be doing something right. So I’m feeling pretty good today.
Not choosing sides one way or the other, I can attest that Barbara doesn’t like being pointed out when she’s wrong. In an another unrelated post of hers, she made an erroneous claim that a substantial amount of soldier’s death during the Viet Nam war happened on Nixon’s watch. I pointed out to her that her assumption was incorrect and that the the actual percentage was lower than she attested to. Rather than simply accepting this fact, she instead went on numerous unrelated tangents as to why Nixon was a bad guy. She completely disregarded the fact I agreed with nearly her entire post except her calculations. She dug her heels in and did this tactic several times. Frustrated with her evasive maneuvers, I simply let her know that she was wrong on her numbers in no uncertain terms.
Truthfully, it felt like I was debating a conservative, who upon knowing they have been proven wrong, will change subjects on a dime just so they can avoid embarrassment of admitting they are wrong.
Hi Jill,
Well, I followed the entire thread, up to the big blow-up, and all I can say is that, although you did criticize a little about tone, as well as pressed for clarification in light of her own and Obama’s expressed views about mental health exceptions, Barbara also got very, very angry over it.
I interpreted it as an over-reaction on her part and completely understand your feeling that you needed to defend yourself.
I found the whole thing unfortunate. I think the two of you could have some really interesting conversations and it is a pity that the welcome mat has been rolled up based on a snap judgment in a single thread.
I was not satisfied with the Obama spokesperson counter-spin explanation either. I think he stuck his foot in it and needed his handler to extract it, and I am still trying to figure out which Obama is the real one. Based on his cabinet appointments and nominations so for, it is anybody’s guess where he stands on social issues of civil rights. We will just have to wait and see what he does with the court.
Call me heartless, if you will, but I have very firm views on the rights of the fetus. It has none until it is outside of the womb. I know that sounds extreme but it is the only logical interpretation that squares with individual liberty. A fetus inside of the womb is not individual. Period.
I can guess what some of your own objections to the ‘mental health ban’ inferred by Barbara in her contention that all healthy third-trimester fetuses are going to be ‘born’ because no doctor will abort them unless it is a physical emergency to save the mother’s life…
There is no federal law against it and I guarantee that some doctor somewhere is doing just that, regardless of what conventional wisdom might lead one to conclude. Common sense tells me that there is a demand out there and someone is supplying it regardless of the potential for murder charges by handing out psychiatric diagnoses or inferring psychiatric risk.
I am fine with that. Like I said, a fetus has no rights. I will post a clarification of what I mean, to illustrate two hypothetical cases where common sense leads to only one interpretation.
I would have liked an elaborated response from Barbara about the glib attitude Obama demonstrated towards disparity in mental health care in his abortion statement.
According to Wikipedia, conservatives refused to put an exception for health into the so-called ‘partial birth abortion’ bill specifically because they were afraid that mental health would become a blanket justification:
It seems that he may be just as ‘conservative’ i.e. corporate (for an alleged ‘liberal’) with his Supreme Court nominees as he has been with his cabinet. What good is a frontal attack on the bankrupt policies of the former administration if the first official words out of one’s mouth are, “Here, take the Sudetenland!”??
I do not accept that the psychological risks of birth are either insignificant or identical to the psychological risks in termination in late term, third trimester, or whatever. This is a patent oversimplification.
Even though obstetricians may artificially induce late abortions vaginally in a simulation of birth, they are going to do so with a very *strong* dose of contractive agent *after* having administered a fatal injection to the fetus, to prevent any accusation that they have performed a so-called ‘partial birth abortion’ or worse yet, murdered a live baby after delivery.
They will expect a relatively fast, easy passage of a somewhat smaller pre-term and dead fetus that is immune to chemical poisoning from any medications that are administered to the mother, requires no fetal monitoring, and needs no emergency cesarean to rescue it from ‘distress’.
If they absolutely have to intervene, instead of cesarean, obstetricians can potentially perform a late-term intact dilation and extraction without fear of legal sanction despite the ‘partial birth abortion’ ban because the fetus is already dead due to the lethal injection and immune to the ‘inhumane’ pain of ‘partial birth abortion’ that never really caught on with physicians anyway.
Thus ‘partial birth abortion’ ban is effectively circumvented by lethal injection. I suspect that the ‘inducement’ statistics presented at drtiller.com actually refer to inducement of dead fetuses. How else would they get around the ban??
Therefore, once lethal injection and inducement have been initiated, cesarean is out of the question unless there is just absolutely no other way to get the dead fetus out of the womb. I suspect that cesarean is almost never used.
Tell me, am I wrong? Ignorant? Obnoxious?
A woman who has already been raped and spent the first two trimesters in a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder funk cannot gain from legislation that converts her womb into a state-sponsored incubation chamber for the eugenics benefit of the psychopathic pervert who raped her. The only benefit goes to the fetus of the man who took advantage of her, and that fetus, by any moral standard grounded in the tradition of individual liberty embodied by our constitution, has no right to exist in the first place. Otherwise we are giving every nut job lurking out there the legal authority to sow wild oats by force for as long as he can avoid incarceration with *government protection of his illegitimate bastards*. I am not sure that propagating psychopaths via government protection of their illegally begotten offspring serves any compelling social interest let alone protects any legitimate moral cause or defends any legitimate human right, but conservatives seem to love the idea anyway?
What does this say about Obama, if he lines up on the side of right-to-rape conservatives, but *only* with respect to the offspring of a psychopathic father that is also crossed with a *mentally marginal mother* who could potentially break down with stress-induced mental illness from the complications of child birth if her PTSD load exceeds her threshold for abuse during the birth?
Cesarean has both physical and psychological risks, and the exposure to these risks is potentially devastating on a psychological basis, especially if the woman experiences chronic pain and/or permanent disability as a result of complications of a government-mandated cesarean section gone wrong.
The psychological risk persists regardless of whether or not the birth goes cesarean. For someone who is already traumatized, even the knowledge that the spawn of her assailant has become an independent being can be disturbing, especially if torn between the choice of raising it as one’s own and having a daily reminder of the horrific trauma that originally produced it, or giving it up for adoption and being wracked with guilt later because of the abandonment. It might be safer, psychologically, just to nip it in the bud and move on, even if the first two trimesters have already passed in a rape-induced funk.
Does Obama agree, or not? According to his statement, no!
Another potential issue is in the case of severe lifelong mental illness. Consider the possibility of a schizo-affective woman, word-salad psychotic since the age of 25, raped by her father and locked in a closet for 7 months,
She is rescued and wakes up in the psych ward with a swollen belly and a stiff dose of intramuscular antipsychotic in her hip. Obama’s deadline has already passed, but she is adamantly opposed to bringing her own father’s child into the world. What will she do? She is incarcerated and completely dependent on her doctors for her sanity. The last thing she needs in her life is to give birth in her fragile mental condition, yet she is legally prohibited from doing anything about it even though she was legally incapacitated, illegally imprisoned and oblivious to her circumstances during the period when she could have done something about it.
Will Obama nominate progressive judges who are sensitive to these types of dilemmas? If his cabinet appointments etc. are anything to go by, possibly not!
Where does that leave the large numbers of people with mental illness who are disabled but not getting disability income benefits and paying outrageous out-of-pocket health care costs because of widespread discrimination against people with mental illness among all insurance companies and social services?
I thought it was a very pertinent question that you asked, particularly in light of the larger context you referred to, and no, Barbara’s response did not satisfy me either. I was hoping for either a clarification that went beyond the goshdarnit I aint no psychiatrist and anyway his spokesperson contradicted him, sort of, except it is this nuanced thing where the psychiatric diagnosis must exist before the birth… without regard to the likelihood of developing one during or after the birth… and anyway nobody ever aborts a healthy viable baby unless the birth would cause organ failure and death… (in a time of cesarean sections, antibioticsm, gamma globulin, and thrombin? How is that possible?)
like she says, WTF?
like I say, fetus has no rights. Main purpose of abortion is birth control and in the case of rape, if momma says no, good riddance. No one has squatter’s rights inside a woman’s womb! That there’s private property!
To tell you the truth, despite his superstar popularity I viewed Obama as a same old same old quasi-liberal corporate backpedaler/waffler/appeaser, particularly since he had studiously avoided senate votes on abortion throughout his term. My expectations are not very high.
At least it’s not a republican. I am still waiting for them to put forward a candidate who is not sunk to his eyeballs in corporate corruption or lost in a right-wing Christian fog. I know they are out there… I met one once, but unfortunately, he was basically poor and powerless, just like me.
Ray and Cheryl – thanks for taking time to read and comment. I really appreciate it.
Cheryl, I’m going to re-read both your comments over the next day or two – I’ve not had a chance to sit and read them and think about them. I think I agree with much that you’ve written but I’m not sure if I agree with all of it – I think I’m tired, to be honest!
But again – you obviously took a lot of time to put down your thoughts, so thank you.