According to the website, HowMuchTime.org, “If abortion is made illegal, the woman having one would be a criminal.” The website poses the question: “How much time should she do?”
This website is yet another example of how abortion advocates purposefully mislead women and lie to the American public. It is no surprise that the domain name is registered to someone with a Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains email address.
Let these “myth-busters” set the record straight:
Myth: If abortion is made illegal, women will be criminalized and put in jail.
Fact: If abortion is made illegal, women will not be prosecuted and put in jail for having an abortion. Historically, women have never been prosecuted for having abortions. Before Roe v. Wade, only abortion providers were prosecuted for illegal abortions. In fact, women who had abortions before Roe routinely and openly filed lawsuits for medical malpractice against abortion providers after having a botched illegal abortion. Women who had abortions before Roe did not hide from the law, because they knew that they would not be prosecuted under the law for having an abortion. Without exception, current pro-life laws and legislation do not permit the prosecution and imprisonment of women for having an abortion.
Myth: If Roe is overturned, abortion will be illegal.
Fact: If Roe is overturned, abortion will be legal in at least 42 states. In fact, state abortion prohibitions that existed prior to Roe would be enforceable only in (at most) eight states. If Roe is overturned, the abortion issue will change from being a federal issue subject to the dictates of the United States Supreme Court to being an issue controlled on the state level. The states’ power to legislate on abortion will finally be restored.
It’s about time that women learned the truth about abortion and the legal implications of a reversal of Roe v. Wade. In response to the question, “How much time should she do?” my reply is: “She should and would serve no time at all.”
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a subject which has bothered me for twenty years now and I simply must respond. To argue that mothers (and by extension fathers) who freely choose to kill their unborn children should be able to get away with their crimes is not a philosophically credible argument. Adult human beings who choose to commit crimes against other human beings are morally responsible for their actions and have to be held accountable.
The very weak nineteenth century statutes, because of the lack of a criminal deterrent for mothers and fathers, cost the lives of millions of unborn children who otherwise would have lived. That was an enormous price to make them have to pay for a fundamentally unsound and unjust viewpoint. Vast numbers of unborn children were destroyed because mothers were prosecuted never and criminal abortionists were prosecuted rarely.
If we don’t prosecute mothers for freely choosing to commit acts of criminal abortion, we are essentially legally permitting them to kill their children. We would also allow them without hindrance to seek out criminal abortionists, to contract with criminal abortionists to kill their unborn children, to pay criminal abortionists to kill their unborn children and to help physically the criminal abortionists to kill their unborn children. This provides no deterrence at all for parents, will cost several hundred thousand children their lives every year, I believe, and is in fact not pro-life at all, but is abortionist and anti-life.
This position of legally permitting a mother to kill her unborn child is very close to the position of major abortionist organizations. The pro-life organizations who take this position would agree with the anti-life organizations that a mother has a legal “right” to kill her unborn child and has a legal “right” to contract with a criminal abortionist to achieve that end. The only difference would be that anti-life organizations would argue that a criminal abortionist has a “right” to offer to help the mother do what everyone agrees she has a “right’ to do, but pro-life organizations would counter that the criminal abortionist is somehow committing a “crime” by helping the mother do what she has every “right” to do on her own. This is completely irrational and indefensible as a philosophical argument.
Either abortion violene is a violation of human rights and therefore a crime or it is not. If it is not, it should be completely permitted. If it is, it should be completely prohibited and anyone who commits or participates in the crime should be held accountable , prosecuted and punished. The punishment should be consistent with and appropriate to the nature of the crime.
Abortion crime is the only crime of which I’m aware that those who are trying to stop the crime are unwilling to call it a “crime” and are unwilling to prosecute those who commit the crime. If we continue to take this position we cannot claim to support legal protection for unborn children.
The comments from the gentleman arguing that women should not be excluded from criminal prosecution for procuring abortions are thought-provoking, but they ignore the reality of abortion in America today. The comments fail to take into account several important factors.
First, women are second victims of abortion. Protective laws like those advocated by AUL (including, for example, abortion clinic regulations, parental consent, and informed consent) seek to protect both victims of abortion: the woman and the child. In order to succeed and to end abortion in our nation, the pro-life movement must protect women (and their children) from the negative consequences of the abortion using a variety of means: the law, public education, and grassroots advocacy for women’s health and well-being. Women deserve better than abortion and they also deserve a compassionate response that recognizes the reality of what they face and all too often endure when considering or “choosing” abortion. Clearly, this cannot be achieved by subjecting post-abortive and suffering women to the criminal justice process.
Medical researchers, statisticians, and pro-life groups (especially groups like “Silent No More” and others devoted to post-abortive women) readily recognize and document that women suffer physically, emotionally, and psychologically from abortion. This harm is real, credible, and widespread. While an abortion industry more interested in profits and “market share” than women’s health vociferously denies that abortion is harmful to women, minimal research on the areas of abortion complications, the short-term and long-term health risks associated with abortion, and related topics readily reveals the extent to which women are harmed by abortion.
Recent studies indicate that upwards of 60% of post-abortive women were coerced into having abortions. This coercion comes in several forms: abusive boyfriends or husbands, families who refuse to support them if they have the child, the lack of readily available support networks and resources to help women in crisis pregnancies, and, of course, the predatory practices of abortion clinics. The pressure that women face from families, society, and the abortion industry to “choose” abortion is significant. For example, many abortion clinics fail to adequately counsel women about their options and the true nature of abortion. In the 1990’s, several studies found that 80% of women who underwent abortions did not receive the information necessary for fully informed consent and a complete understanding of what abortion is and the consequences. We cannot readily assume that simply because abortion has been legal for more than 35 years in this country that people actually understand it. It is too complex a topic.
Finally, under our criminal law, “coercion” is a defense to criminal liability. Excluding women from possible prosecution for procuring abortions recognizes the reality of abortion in America today and implements key tenets of our criminal justice system.
Denise makes some interesting arguments in her comment, but falls well short of actually justifying allowing mothers (and fathers?) to go unpunished when killing their unborn children.
While it may be true that mothers are victims of the abortionist industry (an immoral and dishonest industry if there ever was one), it is also true that unborn children are victims both of the criminal abortionist and the mother. This is the case in those instances when the mother has contracted with an abortionist to take the life of her child. In those cases when the mother kills her child by herself, the mother is the victim of no one and the child is the victim of the mother alone.
The argument about “compassionate response” also is not valid. Everybody deserves compassion, even wrongdoers, but it does not absolve them of moral responsibility for their actions. Even if 60% of women were coerced into killing their children, what about the other 40%? Should they get away with an uncoerced decision to commit a crime?
The question still remains as to how to protect unborn children when you allow complete freedom for one side of a criminal transaction. You really cannot effectively stop the crime in this way. To stop the killing of unborn children you must both deter mothers from even trying to commit this crime and also apprehend those who attempt to procure or actually procure a criminal abortion. None of this would be possible without full criminal prosecution.
And nothing at all could be done to stop a mother killing her child by herself, because she wouldn’t be breaking any law. Unborn children would be completely at the mercy of their mothers, as now, and would NOT be protected under law.
This lack of deterrence and lack of interdiction would likely cost several hundred thousand children their lives every year. I can think of no argument that can morally justify sacrificing millions of innocent children over the years so that guilty parents can completely avoid the consequences of their freely chosen criminal acts. Such a position cannot truly be called pro-life.