You gave up your freedom when you chose to have ovaries

No one tell the wingnuts that female fetuses have ovaries and a uterus before they're born, or they might start putting forward bills demanding DNA sex testing before abortions get approved. Just kidding! After all, the daughter of the woman you force to bear children against her will today is the woman you'll be forcing the same thing on tomorrow.

Molly Ivins brings this home in this week's column about the Texas legislature's attempt to turn parental notification laws into parental consent laws by simply reprinting some of the requests for a judicial bypass. Warning--I nearly cried reading some of these.

"My little sister was raped. Our parents are somewhere in Mexico, but I don't know if I can find them." -- older sister.

Grandmother of a 15-year-old: "She just told us that she was raped. We had no idea that she was pregnant. Her mother is dead, and her father is being transferred to (another prison). Is there any way we can get this done?"

"My mother's boyfriend used to hit her and sometimes I would try to stop him, but then he'd start hitting me. I left home to live with my boyfriend when I found out I was pregnant the first time. My mother wouldn't let me have an abortion, so I knew a baby would be safer living away from her and her boyfriend. But my boyfriend started hitting me as soon as I moved in. So I got my own place, a car and two jobs. I'm pregnant again, but I can't tell my mom because she would stop me from getting an abortion." -- 17-year-old high school graduate, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, father deceased.

Parental notification/consent laws are sold to the public as a way that the government can keep your darling daughter from turning into Jezebel behind your back. In reality, they function to punish young women for the crime of having parents they can't turn to when they have problems. I like to think of them as laws that seem perversely designed to help rapists who prefer minors in their charge as victims. Even if you are one of those who think that all women should fulfill their potential to be mothers, even if they are very young, would you really go so far as to say that they should even if the father is her own father?

Anyone who supports parental notification/consent laws needs also to stop and think about the logic. It's not enough to say, "I would want my daughter to tell me if she had an abortion!" Wouldn't you also like your daughter to tell you if she planned to have the baby? Some parents would like to force abortion on their unwilling daughters, but there are no laws helping them. If you think minors aren't fully capable of deciding to have an abortion, why do you think they're capable of being mothers? Must not think much of motherhood, if that's the case.

And of course, lest we women start getting uppity and thinking that our right to privacy actually means that we have a right to privacy like we were non-ovaried Americans, the attorney general of Kansas is here to put us in our places.

The Kansas attorney general is demanding abortion clinics turn over the complete medical records of nearly 90 women and girls, saying he needs the material for an investigation into underage sex and illegal late-term abortions.

Two clinics are fighting the request in Kansas Supreme Court, saying the state has no right to such personal information.

But Attorney General Phill Kline, an abortion opponent, insisted Thursday: "I have the duty to investigate and prosecute child rape and other crimes in order to protect Kansas children."

Of course, we all know that Kline is being disingenous with his blather about protecting underage rape victims. Rape victims who avail themselves of their right not to bear their rapists' children are the ones who will be treated like criminals, having their files poked through and families interrogated. Those who bravely endured having a child by their rapist apparently have been punished enough for the crime of being a victim of a sex crime.

The other women who will be under scrutiny will be teenagers who presumably had consensual sex and had to get abortions and women who had late-term abortions. Like Kline, we can assume the latter category is a bunch of selfish bitches who waited until after 22 weeks to terminate their pregnancies because it's more fun to get abortions later. We can safely assume that none of them waited because they intended to have the baby and then found out that they couldn't or shouldn't for health reasons.

Okay, okay, okay. It's silly to think that there are hoardes of women waiting for 5 months to terminate their pregancies simply for the thrills. They may have had medical reasons, but it's selfish for a woman to want to keep her life instead of fulfilling her duty to suffer and perhaps die for the sake of right wing ideaology, is it not?