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Pro Choice Escort by infowidget, on Flickr
One of the ways that the anti-choice activists ply their trade it to intimidate doctors who provide abortions. They put out wanted posters, they show up at their houses, they even make up rhymes like “Tiller the baby killer” and repeat them again and again and again. Then some of their whacked out number actually attack and in cases like Dr. Tiller kill them.
The defense from these people is often that they are trying to prevent the “killing of unborn children”. This has been rejected by all courts who have had it presented to them but if South Dakota has its way, that will no longer be true in that state. The Republican backed bill House Bill 1171 would make it legal to offer an affirmative defense killing someone if they are attempting to harm the unborn child of any person.
Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished.
If the law was just talking about a felony it would not be as much of a problem, there are many states that will add a second count of assault or murder if the woman is pregnant at the time. But it is the great personal injury that makes this a real problem for abortion doctors. That bit of added fluff is very vague and the anti-choice movement has been trying for along to time to assert that great personal injury comes from abortions, even if the woman wants the abortion.
Further, it would be easy to argue that great personal harm to the fetus is the result of any abortion. This whole amendment is designed to backdoor so-called “personhood” for fetus in the Mount Rushmore State. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard has a nice run down of this issue, you can find it here .
The net affect of this law could be to allow family member or even employer of a pregnant woman who wants an abortion to kill a doctor or nurses who are preparing to perform this legal procedure, even if the woman wants the abortion! If enacted, as seems likely since Republicans control the entire legislature in SD, this amendment would make it much harder for any doctor to even consider performing abortions in that state. As it is there are no abortion providers who live and practice in South Dekota, the only provider is flown in once a week by Planned Parenthood. From the article:
“The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers,” says Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers. Since 1993, eight doctors have been assassinated at the hands of anti-abortion extremists, and another 17 have been the victims of murder attempts. Some of the perpetrators of those crimes have tried to use the justifiable homicide defense at their trials. “This is not an abstract bill,” Saporta says. The measure could have major implications if a “misguided extremist invokes this ‘self-defense’ statute to justify the murder of a doctor, nurse or volunteer,” the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families warned in a message to supporters last week.
This is the kind of thing that we on the Left should be pointing to when the Right claims they are not encouraging a climate of violence. To provide for an active justifiable homicide defense by singling out fetuses is just throwing fuel on the fire of the very violent anti-abortion movement. The 23 murders and attempted murders of doctors who provide abortion in less than 20 years shows that this is a real issue. To give a clear and active defense to those who would commit such heinous acts really would take the lid off of this. Up to now we can be fairly sure that the idea of going jail has prevented some of anti-choicers from acting out violently. If this law goes into affect it will not be the last state it is introduced in.
Beyond the fact that South Dakota Republicans want to force all women who become pregnant to bear these children (which is just heinous beyond belief) there is also the legal end point of establishing personhood. When does that happen exactly? The forced pregnancy crowd will tell you at conception. The problem there is that most women don’t know they have conceived right away. It takes until after their missed period to be detected. Then there is the issue of miscarriages. One in three pregnancies end in a miscarriage. That means that there would have to be coroners reports and investigations of foul play for many of these very natural events. The cost alone would be prohibitive.
It is always worth pointing out that that same people who rail against “Big Government” want to intrude into the wombs of every single woman. They want to control and punish them for sexual activity. It is beyond sick to me. As a man I don’t think that I have a whole lot to say about a woman having an abortion. It is her choice, it is her body and carrying a child to term is not a casual thing. It can lead to all kinds of physical complications even if she decides to give the child up for adoption. For men to insist on every woman who gets pregnant have the child is abusive on the face of it.
You might want to take a couple of minutes to write the governor of South Dakota and tell him that you will not be visiting there nor will you spend any money with companies based in his state as long as they are going to make it legal to kill abortion doctors. You can contact him here .
I am just going to leave you with the though that came from a tee shirt my mom had back in the 70’s “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”. I think that is being proved very true by the actions of the assholes in South Dakota.
The floor is yours.
24 Comments
Amazing.
It never ceases to amaze me how endlessly creative the forced-birth proponents are, unto murder of medical professionals about their lawful business.
Oh yeah. But I’d say appalling more than amazing. Things I like are amazing.
The lines between law and crime are being blurred here. What is “legalized vigilantism” and would we agree that this basically what the bill provides for? Since they can’t overturn Roe v. Wade, they instead will empower citizens to kill doctors legally who perform abortion?
What next? A bill to legalize the right of citizens to kill suspected terrorists? This kind of “affirmative defense” is more than a slippery slope. When law becomes the source of chaos, it can not be called law anymore.
Great post by the way. Recommended heartily!
This is going way too far. This is wrong on too many levels.
So, the doc who saves a women’s life because the fetus died but did not spontaneously abort and performs the needed procedure is at risk of losing his life because of justifiable homicide?
Any Christian backing this bill has made a grave decision about their eternity.
Bill it would be worth knowing how much money has been spent to get this Bill to the floor of the SD House.
I would look at donations from the groups backing the Bill to all who plan to vote yes. Add it up. Also look at the cost of getting a Bill to the floor just from a “processing” stand point.(And annual donations to the GOP in SD too.)
Add it up. Then look and see if the groups have done much regarding the systemic issues regarding abortion. The point: their actions towards women and the unborn from a systemic perspective, usually to not add up dollars wise. Most will throw dollars at antiabortion before aid to help women and children or young folks in at risk situations. A failure of walk the talk.
I remember reading an article somewhere – this was at least 5-10 years ago, I think, so I no longer remember where I read it or who wrote it – talking about the pro-choice movement. The author was of the opinion that it is the same women who fought for legalized abortion forty years ago who are still fighting to keep it legal, and that women of childbearing years, those who have the most to lose, have not become activists in this cause. The dirty effin’ hippies are still doing the heavy lifting. She posited that this was the case because there is now an entire generation of women who grew up not having to fear the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy in a society where abortion is banned.
I have no idea if this was, or is, true, but it was an interesting read. And I *do* think that women have *got* to organize and get aggressive with this issue or we’re going to end up back in the dark ages of back alleys and coathangers again.
KangroX on Twitter:
RT @KagroX: If you’re pregnant in South Dakota and a mining company dumps toxic slag in your watershed, can you kill the CEO?
2 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply
Recommended.
Very important diary, thanks.
David Swanson had a very insightful statement:
So in the bankster world, they look at staying in control of the operation and fending off attacks to their control from others like them. So, I think the banksters are puppeting SD politicians to send a bit of a twist on their terrorist message, “Keep us as your slave masters or we will kill the doctors who work for your welfare and freedom.” The way people deal with that is to come together and bring the people that serve their communities in among them. Then the community can tell the terrorists to get lost. I am not saying it is going to be a simple or pretty process.
“justifiable homicide” in the history of the world has never been a legislative act, but a legal defense decided in courts of law. Outside of that it’s called state sanctioned vigilantism–or to put it another way, state-sanctioned terrorism.
There have been *many* instances of a fetus dying in the womb, but there is no evidence that it was dead. My own mother nearly died in a Catholic hospital because of such short sightedness. Thankfully, she was able to go to a different hospital, and have me a few years later.
People just DO NOT THINK when they start enacting legislation like this. They would have consigned my mother to death trying to carry a child that was already dead, simply because it “might be” alive. I wouldn’t be here thanks to such idiots.
We’re going to start dividing into wingnut and non-wingnut states, with the probably outcome being a fracturing of the country into two or more parts. I’ve reached the point where I don’t think that’s so terrible any more. It would limit the damage we could do in the world, and conceivably isolate the wingnuts in their own nation-state where they could all hate each other to death.
Once again we rise to the fly like a hungry brook trout. Re-acting to these cement heads only validates their pandering to the yahoos. Custer himself said the only good thing about the Dakotas was that they were a good place for his horses to crap. No sane person lives in a place where the wind howls and average 25 mph all year long and the difference between the winter and summer mean temperature is 75 degrees. These stories make big bucks for the pro-chioce harridans. It is like those oppurtunists of the Southern Poverty law Center who drool every time some clown puts a sheet over his pointy head. Does anybody on the planet believe there is a chance this piece of republican pandering will ever be enforced? Come on now, hit those keys. You would have to have the brains of a birther to even consider such an event.
Zenostoa
The stupid just burns.
I noticed that when my ex- was pregnant with our sons (both times, two different states) people would go well out of their way to open doors for her, help her with bags if she was trying to carry something, and so forth. And this was happening when I was around, and trying to do those things. Once the baby was on the ground, and she was trying to manage baby,diaper bag, purse, etc. it was like she was invisible. We commented more than once on the irony of it: when she was pregnant, she had two free hands, no baby gear to haul, etc. When she needed the help, it wasn’t there.
I wonder if this is symptomatic of our national obsession with fetuses?
And the Norwegians came to North America from the Land of Lutefisk, migrated westward, reached North Dakota and said, “This is The Place.”
Makes one wonder what kind place Norway was, eh?
This law could be ruled unconstitutional because it violates the civil rights of the doctors and their patients and it is tantamount to legislating hate crime. They might as well sanction the taking of scalps or the formation of lynch mobs.
People should lobby U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to file suit in federal court to have this overturned.
Here’s something to think about: What if the foes of abortion actually succeeded in outlawing abortion?
How would you enforce that? It would be a nightmare. Judges would literally be signing warrants allowing police to search the uteruses of any women suspected of having an abortion.
Nature aborts a certain number of fetuses for its own reasons, but a woman who was pregnant one week and lost her baby to a miscarriage could be brought up on charges of attempted, premeditated murder—a capital crime!
Building the enforcement apparatus to eradicate abortion would wipe out what’s left of the individual freedoms of this Republic.
A lot of people don’t know this, but abortion was legal in this country and advertised in newspapers from before the Declaration of Independence up until the Civil War. The only reason it was outlawed was to protect the health of women. Too many women were dying from botched abortions.
Besides even when abortion was illegal, there weren’t just back alley abortions, but illegal abortions performed by licensed medical doctors for those who could afford to pay.
Even when it was illegal, the police did not go out of their way to enforce it. In Los Angeles during the 1940s, Dr. George Hill Hodel performed “lots of them.” The police knew about it, but took payoffs to be quiet. In addition to being an abortionist, strong evidence provided by his son Steve suggests that Dr. Hodel murdered Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, among many others.
That’s only one example of a break down in the system in a time period that many people regard as the “good old days.” Machiavelli said in The Prince, that a wise ruler never makes a law or gives an order he can never enforce. I think this qualifies.
Having explained why I am against outlawing abortion, I still am in favor of eradicating it as a practice.
After years of being 100 percent Pro-Choice, I could not escape one simple fact: That despite where you may stand on the where and when life begins questions, you can’t escape the fact that an abortion interrupts a process that will more than likely end up coming to full term as something that everybody agrees, without a shadow of a doubt, is a human child.
You can’t escape that. I know. I really tried because I did not want to believe it. If you can logically get around that, I want to know how.
As such, at the very least, people need to be a hell of a lot more careful than they are now. If people sleep with one another, they should be prepared to man and woman up and marry each other to raise that kid. If you’re not prepared to do that with the other person, don’t sleep with them. Only sleep with someone with whom you’re ready to do that.
Or if you don’t like kids or don’t want kids, don’t have any. Get snipped or your tubes tied. That way, you’re only responsible for yourself and the other person. There’s nothing wrong with that. Too many kids throughout history have been born to parents who did not want them and have paid the price.
People these days don’t seem to want the kids they’ve got. They say they want them. They even pay good money to genetically engineer them into boys or girls to suit their preference, but then they leave them at the daycare center for more than 12 hours a day.
That’s no joke. I’ve worked in that business. People will bring their kids at 6 a.m. and will wait right up until 6:30 p.m. when the center closes. They have them for two hours when they feed them, usually a Happy Meal, and they’re putting them to bed. They bring them back the next day, often without bathing them and without changing their diapers. I’m not talking drug addicts, but so-called educated “professionals.”
Granted, single parents, don’t really have a choice and I realize a lot of couples are struggling. I’m not talking about those folks.
I am talking about people throwing down $300 to $600 a week in daycare coin just to warehouse their kids. And I’ve got to tell you, there are mean people at these centers who hate the children in their care.
Now you could argue these rich folks are the same as their less prosperous counterparts, wishing to see their children, but having to work. Except, they dump their kids off even when they’re off from work and on snow days. They’re always trying to get away from them.
They’re only little for so long and then it’s over, but these folks are in a constant hurry—to get them out of diapers, to get them to elementary school, to get them out of high school and into college.
If it’s such a pain in the ass having kids, why did you have them in the first place?
In a few decades, I’m sure these same kids will return the favor by dumping their parents off at the cheapest old folks home they can find and those parents will be lucky if those kids drop by even once a year.
Kids deserve better than abortion. They deserve better than daycare. Parents need to be paid enough so that a least one of them can stay home with them. I’ve outlined ways that could be done in previous entries and in my blog. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the mom who stays home.
Not only would a full-time parent do a better job of raising their kids than someone making $7 an hour and not only would that replace dozens of social programs designed to deal with the fact that parents are no longer in the home, but they would provide a built-in network of parents watching out for pedophiles and other criminals in their neighborhoods.
Kids deserve parents who love them and we need to do everything we can to foster a world that respects all life from cradle to crave, from the boardroom to the classroom to the courtroom.
And Now, For Something Completely Different:
Zenostoa,
The whole point here is that this doesn’t require any sort of active enforcement. It provides an affirmative defense for people who would murder GYN’s, surgical nurses, etc. who provide abortion services.
If Kansas had a law of this ilk, Roeder would have had an affirmative defense for his murder of Dr. Tiller. There probably would have been 20 lawyers associated with Operation Rescue and various Catholic lay organization clamoring to help him get off.
This sets the stage for whack-a-loons like Scott Roeder to (quite literally) get away with murder. Except that they won’t, because no sane surgeon would ever perform an abortion in SD again.
Check your statistics. Better than half of all fertilized ova fail to implant. A large fraction (I’ve seen numbers like 1/4 to 1/3 or more) of those that implant abort spontaneously, usually due to genetic problems or developmental defects of one sort or another.
A smaller fraction of those suffer from developmental defects that will be fatal in the short run. I studied biology before I got into the mathematical side of things. One of the courses I took was embryology. Mammalian development is so complex and such a Rube Goldberg system that it amazes me that it works at all.
After years of being 100 percent Pro-Choice, I could not escape one simple fact: That despite where you may stand on the where and when life begins questions, you can’t escape the fact that an abortion interrupts a process that will more than likely end up coming to full term as something that everybody agrees, without a shadow of a doubt, is a human child.
You can’t escape that. I know. I really tried because I did not want to believe it. If you can logically get around that, I want to know how.
An abortion ends a potential human life. I know that, and I accept that. The vast majority of legal abortions are performed during the first trimester when the fetus has NO, and I repeat, NO possibility of surviving outside the uterus.
I certainly agree that people should be thoughtful and act responsibly when they decide to become sexually active. That’s why I support full access to medically and scientifically accurate sexuality education and access to all forms of birth control. If a woman becomes pregnant and she feels, for WHATEVER reason that she is not ready to become a mother than I support legal abortion so that she can safely end the pregnancy.
I remember the pre-Roe v. Wade days all too well, and fervently do not want to see the days of back alley abortions return. I can live with a few qualms so that women can make their own decisions about their lives.
No, I agree. Choice needs to become a matter of conscience, rather than law, for the “nightmare” reasons I’ve laid out here. I am not saying strike down Roe. Your rights are safe.
But listen to this argument about statistics. It is so cold blooded. So, BargainCounterTenor, 25 to 30 percent of ovum don’t implant, that means 66 percent to 75 percent do implant. They do become people. As I said, you can’t escape that fact. The majority of fertilized ovum will implant and become human beings. Liberaldem, you can “accept” that an abortion ends a “potential human life.” Ouch. It takes at least a bit of heart-hardening to say that.
People have been forced to harden their hearts in this country for too long. I am sure both of you are loving people. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have rights and encourage people to love, to act in a loving way, to get them to want to do right by their mates and their kids—out of love and not law. It doesn’t even cost money
Look at the situation. We’ve got two political parties, nearly an entire nation that doesn’t care about kids. The GOP wants to save the fetus, but it could care less what happens to them once they exit the birth canal. The fetus more or less gets handed a job application and told to work hard and save from that high-power Wal-Mart job.
The other party only emphasizes the rights of women and doesn’t care about children accept to pay lip service to Head Start, WIC, TANF, and free-and-reduced priced lunches before handing them some rubbers and birth control pills to help them.
But does anyone love children, anymore? Does anyone want to spend time with them anymore?
The political party that truly embraces children and loves them, that really supports the family—not by forcing a particular faith on them, but by giving them the economic resources they need and creating the economic climate for them. Those who say they support families, I say to them give families the jobs they need to support themselves.
The party that realizes this will sweep the other parties aside and be swept into power.
Let’s get some things straight. We’re talking science here, not theology. Since we’re talking science, it’s important that we get our terms correct.
First, ova do not ever implant. Zygotes (fertilized ova) might implant. Then again, a zygote might not implant. We don’t very well understand what determines that. Part of it is determined by the woman’s physical condition, but not all of it.
Second, even if a zygote implants there is a substantial chance (at least 1/3, some research suggests more like 1/2) that the pregnancy will spontaneously abort before the woman realizes she’s pregnant. If you’re counting (and I am), we’re now well under half of the zygotes we started with even reaching the woman’s awareness.
Of those that the woman becomes aware of, another substantial fraction will also spontaneously abort (we call them miscarriages, in English). I’ve been through half-a-dozen or so of them (we’re not quite certain of the count). I never knew what to say to make my wife feel better about it. We’re past the point in our lives where that will happen. But I’ve learned the hard way that just because you and she got the timing right, nothing’s assured.
The bottom line on it is this. A zygote is an interesting thing. It has a substantial chance but nothing like the guarantee you imply, of developing into a human being one day. It’s entitled to some level of respect for that potential. It is not entitled to the same respect as the woman involved. Even in the absence of abortion methods, only a minority of the zygotes make to a live birth.
There is an enormous difference between potential and realization in every human endeavor. Respect is earned by realizing potential, not for having potential.
Update:
{ snip }
(excerpt from “South Dakota legislator backs down from ‘pro-life’ bill to legalize murder,” Feb. 16, 2011)