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It's not just abortion. Republicans are openly entertaining the idea of jailing women for having miscarriages which is a natural bodily function that happens sometimes.
Imagine if Republicans wanted to lock you up in prison for a bodily function you have no control over, you'd get angry too.
They're not entertaining the idea; they've already executed it. Women have already been arrested for miscarriages in multiple states.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
They certainly are. Fucking christofascism.
Its much more common for women trying to have children than most understand it to be.
"Among 53,479 different women admitted to labor and delivery ward, 43% of women reported having had 1 or more first trimester spontaneous miscarriages" source
So 43%, nearly half of women, that eventually bring a pregnancy to term have experienced at least one just in the first trimester.
Notice that this risk of being jailed only applies to women.
How big is the risk of being jailed? Of all the women having miscarriages every single day, how many are being jailed? And for how many of those is there other circumstances? Do you think the end goal is to jail half of women? Seriously...
Of course not. The goal appears to be to subjugate women and remove their autonomy. Because only women can be charged with crimes on how they use their reproductive organs in choosing to carry a fetus to term or not, it presents a perfect way to insulate men from any responsibility or consequences of sex.
I don't believe Conservatives want to punish women legitimately trying to give birth to children, but instead to discourage any woman from attempting to end a pregnancy, they have to have the option to punish any end of pregnancy that doesn't include delivering a live child. That means that miscarriages (of which they are shockingly common just because of biology) will be used for selective enforcement if they suspect the mother tried to end the pregnancy.
Yeah I suppose it opens the door for investigations in case of miscarriage since some of the methods for abortion can be hard to tell apart from natural miscarriage. And yeah it could be abused or selectively enforced, and that's the danger of any laws. We are always walking that line.
This is the result of really terrible sex ed. I learned about miscarriages in eighth grade. Scared the hell out of me thinking of a dead body inside me, and I don't even have a uterus.
Let me tell you, informing kids of all the things that can go wrong with a pregnancy is some damn effective contraception.
Welcome to being black
Also last year we legalized abortion here by ballot measure to the constitution. Ohio wants abortion
Farting declared illegal in Arkansas
Miscarriages are insanely common, to the point where you are talking about jailing a majority of women. Do you actually believe that they want to do this? That's like cartoon-villian level of evil and so extreme that it's astonishing to me that people find this kind of hysteria so easy to believe. This place blows my mind sometimes with how much of an echo chamber it is.
Yes, I do. And yes, it is evil. It has already started in red states. That's why we are against it.
How many times has it happened? I would be astonished if it has happened even once without being very obviously abuse of some kind. Something like drinking heavily or doing drugs even though you know you are pregnant.
Also, what would be the motivation to do this? An excuse to lock women up in jail? This is one of the weirdest conspiracy theories that still somehow persists despite a complete lack of rationality.
Well, last month is a good example of a recent one:
She was accused of murder after losing her pregnancy. SC woman now tells her story
"At that point, she said, she didn’t know she was being criminally investigated. Yet three months after her loss, Marsh was charged with murder/homicide by child abuse, law enforcement records show. She spent 22 days at the Orangeburg-Calhoun Regional Detention Center, where she was initially held without bond, facing 20 years to life in prison."
This is the group you are defending. Are you astonished now?
She got charged because she left the baby in the toilet, and even then they almost saved it. She was ultimately cleared of blame, but this story is nowhere near being representative of normal miscarriage. My cousin had a late term miscarriage, my mom had late miscarriage with twins, and two of my sister in laws did as well. None of those cases came even close to being treated as anything other than regular, normal (but sad) miscarriage. They had small funerals and buried or cremated the babies in each of those cases.
Get out of here with that "they almost saved it" bull. A full term pregnancy is 40 weeks. She was at 20 weeks as cited in the article. The most premature infant to survive by Guinness World Records for premature for survival of a premature birth is 21 weeks and 1 day. source
I'm sorry your family members experienced those miscarriages. They have no fault in those events. It is just biology at work. However I have to ask, are your family members black and residents of a southern state that has a long history of disproportionately charging people of color with crimes that they let white people off for? If you're looking for another statistic to back up that statement, of the 44 people put to death by the state of South Carolina since capital punishment was enshrined in law 59% were white, while 39% were black (with 2% Native American), yet blacks make up only 25% of the population of South Carolina. The most recent person put to death by South Carolina was FOUR DAYS AGO...and yes, he was black.
That may be so, but you can't just get rid of laws because they could be used unjustly. All laws could be used unjustly.
You absolutely can, and should.
Law is supposed to be a mechanism to provide justice. If the outcome of a law is injustice, it fails fundamentally at what law is supposed to do and should be discarded. That doesn't mean a just version of the law couldn't be crafted, but if we, as a society, let unjust laws stand, then just laws will never be crafted. So yes, get rid of unjust laws.
Unjust laws can and should be eliminated, but people using laws unjustly cannot. Speeding is a crime, but it is not perfectly enforced. Cops let family members go more often, good looking people, people they identify with, etc. Speeding is a just law that is not always enforced in a just way. This is always the case.
Your example ignores the consequences to those accused and convicted which negates the value of using it as your argument.
The worst someone will suffer from indiscriminate speed ticket enforcement will be a sub $500 fee.
The worst someone will suffer from indiscriminate "illegal miscarriage" enforcement is prison, loss of livelihood, with the knock-on effect of death of the accused from trying to avoid being charged with the unjust law.
There's a drastic difference between those two examples, and trying to use the same brush to paint them the same is counterproductive, wouldn't you agree?
Ok how about murder? Guy murders someone by hitting them when he is drunk. Rich guy with a good lawyer and connections in the community gets community service, but the poor, black man with a pot possession misdemeanor when he was 15 gets life in prison.
Now you're citing two laws instead of one with selective enforcement which is what we were talking about.
Murder is one law. Someone convicted of murder isn't getting community service. Someone could have murdered someone and been charged with a lesser crime for whatever reason, but then they'd be getting community service for whatever that lesser charge was, not murder. So the law for murder in your example isn't flawed.
Pot possession is a different law, and I don't know any state in the union that will give you 15 years in prison for one. A quick google search says 180 days in jail is the max for most misdemeanors and I found one reference that says that in 24 states the max is 1 year in jail (still not prison).
Your examples are getting farther from relevance not closer. I think we've reached the end of productive conversation with one another on this topic so I'll bow out. Thank you for talking with me up to now. Have a great day!
You completely missed my point, let me clarify my example. Two guys got drunk and killed someone while they were driving. One of them was a rich guy with connections, the other was a poor black guy with a criminal record. The rich guy gets a very light sentence and the black guy gets a much more serious charge. In this example the laws were selectively, subjectively, enforced.
This can happen with any law, with every law. I can come up with different examples all day. Every law, and all laws can be selectively enforced.