Worse than it was pre-Roe

Now we know why anti-abortion activists push so hard for laws that criminalize attacking a fetus. It wasn't so much to create a pathway to banning abortion, though that's a side benefit. They want those laws in place so that when Roe v. Wade is overturned, they can put people in jail for homemade abortions. This strategy is getting its test run now in a case of two teenagers who induced a miscarriage in Michigan because the girl was barred from obtaining an abortion due to parental consent laws. (Thanks for the tip, Ron!)

The details of the case are reason enough to rethink those stupid parental consent laws. The desperate teenage girl permitted her boyfriend to beat her with a toy baseball bat until she miscarried. The fetus was buried, but the police got to it anyway and are processing it like it is a real murder victim. The police are considering whether or not to prosecute the kids for manslaughter.

Reading this, the whole nefarious plan of the anti-abortion activists became very, very clear. We pro-choicers have been worried about women obtaining illegal abortions if Roe is overturned and getting hurt or thrown in jail for getting an illegal abortion. And those things will happen. But on top of it, the anti-abortion forces have set up the means for prosecuting women who do things in the privacy of their own home in order to rid themselves of a pregnancy. They know damn well that women will do desperate things to terminate if they can't get a safe, legal abortion, and they want to treat these desperate women like murderers.

When I was in college, I was really friendly with a coworker who was, to say the least, a hell of a woman. She had escaped from East Germany while they were building the wall in a hail of gunfire at the age of 17, and her stories only got better from there. But possibly the saddest story she told me was about getting pregnant at 18. Abortion was illegal in West Germany at the time. She told me that many of her friends had successfully executed do-it-yourself abortions, to much pain and anguish and threat of death. One of her friends threw herself down a flight of stairs, which apparently worked but also broke bones in the process. My coworker said she just got drunk every night on red wine, because she heard that worked. It didn't. She had no family, no support, and she had to give the baby up for adoption. (Luckily, the baby wasn't worse for the wear due to the alcohol abuse.)

These stories are reason enough to be concerned about the deeply anti-woman agenda of the pro-"lifers". In the days before Roe, women didn't have a right to control their own wombs. And now the right wants to go even further and take away our right to walk free altogether if we dare put ourselves in physical danger in an effort to to retain the right that should be ours without question.