Xeni on Boing Boing posted this earlier today or this week, and it's just too important not to repost.
Here are the links:
US state tightens abortion laws. this describes how South Dakota "...makes it a crime for doctors to perform terminations... Exceptions will be made if a woman's life is at risk, but not in cases of rape or incest. "
American organisation "Planned parenthood" are shouting loudly about the ban here. Please get involved and support the fight any way you can.
I strongly support the pro-choice argument regarding abortion. Making abortion illegal is a sure way to basically murder women who might otherwise have gone on, and had a planned, wanted child in future. Women will go to back street abortionists. They will be killed or maimed for life. There is no justification for this, I'm sorry.
Having a legal abortion system must not have anything to do with your own personal feelings regarding whether a child is alive or "pre-life" in the womb. It must have something to do with the cold hard fact that women will die. This represents such an horrendous curtailment in human rights that it cannot possibly be allowed to happen. To kneejerk suggest "what about the foetus's rights?" ignores the point that many of these women will still attempt abortions, and therefore (using that argument) two lives become at risk or are terminated, instead of 1. That is unacceptable.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've had an abortion before, and to suggest that it somehow is "alright" and doesn't cause you mental anguish in the future in my case is a crock. It's entirely subjective, obviously but if I could, I would go back and not not have the abortion, but drag my sorry ass out of the bed and make sure I had better protection. Having had 1 child and now about to have a happy, healthy other (cross fingers) there is nothing that could persuade me to have an abortion again. Nothing. But I will walk the streets and economically support the right of any woman to have the ability to make that choice, or not.
I hope that the internet age will thwart the stupid, blinkered idiocy of pro-lifers, and help women to find networks allowing them to find safe, legal abortions abroad (hello Canada) if this horrendous local law is extended. I would definitely help support any woman making that decision.
It's unbelievable to me that these steps backwards are happening. And this, in an age when some idiot women think somehow that feminism is dead and no longer needed. You look at the names of the decision makers in that news article and they're all men. Men who have decided that they have the right to decide whether a certain type (and class, lets face it) of women will have their life chances curtailed, and for some, that phrase will be more final.
I don't know what else to say. Fight.
Oh and tell every single person you know. Online and offline.
Posted by cait at March 7, 2006 10:29 PM