Unless you have been living in an underground lair for the past week( or maybe just Amish) you would know abortion has been in the headlines a lot, particularly in regards to our potential presidential candidates and and what policies they would like to see enacted nationwide. One candidate, Donald Trump, did s,etching I have never seen an anti-abortion rights candidate ever do. He took responsibility for the fallout that would logically follow from his ideological stance. He has since retracted his stance, but the damage is done. He single handedly exposed perhaps the BIGGEST Inconsistency of the anti choice movement. He stated on a tv show during a forum that if abortion becomes illegal, there should be s,e sort of punishment for women who acquire them despite the law. Pro choice groups justly and rapidly condemned his outrageous comments as archaic and misogynist, which they are. But the response from the anti abortion community? Well that is where things get interesting. I wish I could say I was surprised by the responses but alas, I was not in the slightest. Major figures in the anti abortion rights movement swiftly and soundly condemned his comments saying that they have no such intentions of punishing women and that women who abort are victims of a predatory abortion industry that preys upon their vulnerability. To those of us in the reproductive justice movement, this rhetoric is nothing new. Indeed it is standard. The anti choice movement relies upon the caricature of a scared and desperate woman who just doesn't know better in order to pass their paternalistic laws that women must be "protected" from abortion and thereby must undergo such things as mandatory ultrasounds and also forcing clinics to close due to imaginary threats of abortion clinics not being up to par with safety even though they do not insist on such safety measures for medical procedures that are far more dangerous than abortion. But spend any amount of time on an abortion debate forum, or better yet, spend time escorting women into abortion clinics as I have and you will see pretty quickly that such sentiments are a farce. Anti choice protestors routinely harass women entering such facilities and even sometimes perpetrate acts of violence against employees of such institutions. The truth is that anti choice organizations are not upset with the idea of imprisoning women for abortions as Donald Trump espoused. They are upset that Donald Trump exposed their true motives. If anti choicers sincerely do not wish to see women punished for abortion, they don't have to wait for abortion to become illegal in the country. There have been several cases within the last few years of women being punished for self aborting, which raises another thorny question that I wish Donald had been asked. For the sake of argument I will accept the mainstream anti choice movement's position that only those who perform abortions should be punished and not the women who undergo them. What then happens to women who self abort? Also if anti choicers do not want to imprison women for abortion, then why do they do so in countries where abortion is illegal?
To go on a Segway here, I feel compelled to take a moment to address a particular argument I have often encountered when conversing wth people within this movement. In regards to the topic of abortion concerning rape induced pregnancies, a common defense for banning abortion for these victims is that when a woman is raped, she is a victim but when she aborts any resulting pregnancy, she then becomes a perpetrator. Yet now the same people who use that argument are now saying that women who undergo abortions are not culpable for doing so. They can't have it both ways. Indeed, they can't have it both ways on the topic of punishment either. When has there ever been a law against something without a legal consequence for anyone who breaks it? Donald Trumps comments were awful, but not be use they were illogical but because the entire mission of the anti choice movement is awful. It is difficult if not impossible to berate women who abort as filthy baby killing whores ( yes an actual term I have heard used) and then to coddle them as helpless victims of their own stupidity in the next and seek to excuse their behavior instead of punish it. The anti choice movement has two choices. They can accept the current legality of abortion and leave women who procure them the heck alone both socially and politically or they can follow their own medieval logic to its logical and misogynist conclusion and ban it while simultaneously imprisoning women who have. It remains to be seen which one they will choose.
