Apparently the original bill has been watered down a bit, but not enough, and it shouldn’t exist anyway.
The bill provides for charnging women who have miscarriages due to “intentional or knowing acts.” The previous version of the bill included reckless acts along with willing acts. So, being a poor driver and getting into an accident and your unborn fetus being killed would make you a criminal. The new bill still would allow that to happen, of course, if vehicular homicide is a crime, this would presumably be as well.
But, the details are complex and rather nuanced. I recommend this piece at alternet.
Hat Tip Betsy McCall
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And, yet, when police brutalize a person to death, they get to walk away with nary a slap on the wrist? Not intentional enough in those cases?
Melissa Bird had it dead on in the article. The real world is nothing like the ideal world. Police rarely know with great certainty which tale is true, and, as we find out over the years, a great number of people are thrown on jail only to be proven innocent years later via DNA or other methods.
We need to make these xtian fundies accountable for their nonsense. The law needs to be something closer to any person raising an objection to an abortion will be required to fund that childs existence up to and including the college of that child’s choice. So sick and tired of people trying to tell and legislate what others do when they have no skin in the game. Put up or shut up.
Sorry unbound, I don’t care if a billionaire wants to put up money to raise the kid in the lap of luxury. My uterus is mine and no one can force me to remain pregnant if I don’t want to, thank you very much.
Utah does not put the U in Uterus, I’m afraid.
Greg:
Worst. Pun. Ever.
How long before conservative Doctors use this to force woman out of the workforce? Just say that her work puts the fetus in danger and if she suffers a miscarriage, prison sentence.
This bill is an attack on traditional marriage. 🙂
You know, Germany has a law like that. Only it doesn’t threaten a woman with prison, it means that healthcare has to keep on paying her wages so she actually doesn’t have to chose between eating or suffering a miscarriage.
German abortion law is fucked up (I’ll give you details if you want them), but the prenatal care is rather good because it actually pays attention to getting both parties out there alive and kicking. So, if her work would put the fetus in danger, all she has to do is to inform her employer, so they might find her a different position, or if that isn’t possible, go to her doctor who will then put her on a kind of “sick leave”. But the choice is hers.
Having said that: this bill is fucked up crazy and cruel. Up to 20% of all pregnancies result in a miscarriage, quite often to women who wanted to have a baby. To put women who are probably already mourning, who are asking themselves “what did I do wrong, what could I have done different” under suspicion is sick.
Apart from the obvious fact that it’s my body and not theirs.
scenario (#5): “Just say that her work puts the fetus in danger and if she suffers a miscarriage, prison sentence.
This bill is an attack on traditional marriage.”
No, it’s an attempt to terrify and terrorize women: “Stay at home. Don’t work or go outside. You belong to your husband.”
If a pregnant woman is driving, her car gets hit by another driver and the foetus is destroyed, who’s going to be blamed? It will be the woman, not the other driver who was at fault.
The message to women is clear: You’re property, and your place is to be barefoot, ignorant and pregnant.
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I remember when this whole fracas started. This is still purely knee-jerk legislation. It’s all based around trying to prevent something that happened in *one incident*. Instead of trying to craft legislation based upon the real world, they followed their outrage. This is fabricating an epidemic out of one case.
I’d like to say that things would change if some sweet upper-middle class housewife got charged with this farce of a statute, but the husband’s social connections would take care of things (there’s an institutionalized good-old-boy network in Utah) and they’d probably feel grateful to the system for “protecting children.”
What this is really doing is criminalizing pregnancy for poor women and underprivileged women.
John, exactly.
John Moeller says: “What this is really doing is criminalizing pregnancy for poor women and underprivileged women.”
There’s a similar anti-woman/anti-abortion “law” in the works in Montana (IIRC) or another sparsely populated state. The rightwingnuts want to make it a law that a woman cannot have an abortion on the same day that she first meets with a doctor. She has to come back for a second appointment.
If you’re poor and live a long way from a city, a single trip is already going to be expensive. Being forced to take a second trip to actually get an abortion will be near impossible for anyone except those with significant income.
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