prison time for women who get an abortion.

[brawndolicious]

saw this debate on another forum and it was pretty interesting.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20010696/site/newsweek/

How Much Jail Time for Women Who Have Abortions?
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek

Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It's as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: "I've never really thought about it." "I don't have an answer for that." "I don't know." "Just pray for them."

You have to hand it to the questioner; he struggles manfully. "Usually when things are illegal there's a penalty attached," he explains patiently. But he can't get a single person to be decisive about the crux of a matter they have been approaching with absolute certainty.

A new public-policy group called the National Institute for Reproductive Health wants to take this contradiction and make it the centerpiece of a national conversation, along with a slogan that stops people in their tracks: how much time should she do? If the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal. But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.

"They never connect the dots," says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. "We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion," June recalled. Chet Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts. "How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?" June says.

Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into "victims" of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time. Such a view seemed to be a vestige of the past until the Supreme Court handed down its most recent abortion decision upholding a federal prohibition on a specific procedure. Justice Anthony Kennedy, obviously feeling excessively paternal, argued that the ban protected women from themselves. "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon," he wrote, "it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."

Even with "no reliable data," he went on to conclude that "severe depression and loss of esteem can follow." (Apparently, no one has told Justice Kennedy about the severe depression and loss of esteem that can follow bearing and raising a baby you can't afford and didn't want.) Luckily, there still remains one justice on the court who has actually been pregnant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg roared back with a dissent that called Kennedy's caveat about regret an "anti-abortion shibboleth" and his opinion a reflection of "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution - ideas that have long since been discredited."

Those ancient notions undergird the refusal to confront the logical endpoint of criminalization. Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It's murder, but she'll get her punishment from God. It's murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It's murder, but the penalty should be ... counseling?

The great thing about video is that you can see the mental wheels turning as these people realize that they somehow have overlooked something central while they were slinging certainties. Nearly 20 years ago, in a presidential debate, George Bush the elder was asked this very question, whether in making abortion illegal he would punish the woman who had one. "I haven't sorted out the penalties," he said lamely. Neither, it turns out, has anyone else. But there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can't countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can't have it both ways.

This isn't about whether abortion is right or wrong, there's good reasons and there's bad reasons.  this topic is about if abortion is illegal then there has to be some sort of punishement.  How do you think people who participate in hypothetically illegal abortions should be punished?

If the religious right considers abortion like murder, would it be punished in the same way?  Maybe it could depend on if the fetus is 5 months old?  then you get into a gray territory because the woman has a certain time limit..  Legally, I don't think a fetus is born until it completely exits the womb, it CAN breathe when it's head and chest exit though so then it could vary depending on the way the abortion was done.

So I'll ask the question again: If abortion were illegal, what do you think the punishement for it should be?

[FlameOfCallandor]

If it were illegal I think a good punishment is 500 hours of required community service. Ideally at a place that helps kids.

[Mandark]

This is actually a good question to ask anyone who wants to criminalize abortion.

If a fetus isn't the equivalent of a whole human life, then the (potential) mother should get to make the decision.

If it is, then abortion is murder, and should be punished accordingly.

Simple.

[brawndolicious]

foc, that's a good punishement but how would that help stop abortion?

[Madrun Badrun]

well the thing with making it illegal, would make it so it was illegal to practice abortions, and I'm sure there would be away to to make a law just to punish the doctors and not the women, or do little to the woman.

anyways I say chop their heads off like in faust!

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm pro choice, and loved how the video showed just how idiotic most dogmatists are

[close]

[Madrun Badrun]

foc, that's a good punishement but how would that help stop abortion?

because the punishment isn't a deterrent for the women, it's a deterrent for the doctors.

[brawndolicious]

because the punishment isn't a deterrent for the women, it's a deterrent for the doctors.

well I'm sure the doctors don't have an office set up where they hand out their cards.  and most likely it wouldn't be by doctors.

[Madrun Badrun]

because the punishment isn't a deterrent for the women, it's a deterrent for the doctors.

well I'm sure the doctors don't have an office set up where they hand out their cards.  and most likely it wouldn't be by doctors.

but thats all these people want, you can't completely remove something illegal from society, but making it illegal would severely cut down on abortion rates.  And then if it does happen, it would be the community the decides the girls fate, such as shunning her to make her see gods way; these people want to live a century or two in the past and they're stupid enough to think they can get that.

[brawndolicious]

but thats all these people want, you can't completely remove something illegal from society, but making it illegal would severely cut down on abortion rates.  And then if it does happen, it would be the community the decides the girls fate, such as shunning her to make her see gods way; these people want to live a century or two in the past and they're stupid enough to think they can get that.

you can't completely stop it but I'm saying expecting the community to punish her is wrong.

[Madrun Badrun]

Of course it is wrong; but thats what they want.  This documentary is very narrow and cuts into the debate in such a way as there are no rational answers, but you have to remember these people aren't rational; they still use gods will as an argument.  All they want is a return to a time that had strong Christian, community, family values and it's not going to happen and there will always be the pro life people and debate on abortion because there will always be people who want those values, but it's a waste of peoples to time to try and convince them otherwise and it's a waste of there time to try and get it.  Of course there wrong in thinking the community would be a better judge than the law, we've seen what this leads too and it's not good, nor is jail time; it's a choice society has made what is the least evil: abortions, community punishment, or making it illegal.  Society has made it's choice and the more we give these people attention the more we think that abortion is a debate; it's not.

[brawndolicious]

but IGNORING them, what do you think should be the legal punishement for doing an abortion if it were made illegal?  you can't rely on a community to punish them.  assume the punishement is for somebody who lives in a desert in the middle of nowhere.

[Madrun Badrun]

but thats what i'm saying, you can't just take a slice out of the debate and look at it on it's own, so there is no real answer at how women should be punished by law.  what if's are pointless. 

[brawndolicious]

the link above is what started the debate on the other forum.

the point isn't really whether the religious right COULD look a mother in the face and tell her she's charged with murder.

I think if they did it like 2-3 times, forced birth control may happen.  the point is, if abortion is illegal then you've taken away the mother's reproductive rights so you can also do that.

[$till LegendaryU2K]

 I think women who have an abortion, should not go to prison, neither should people put them down, or cast them or or reject them. They have done wrong, yes, but forgive them, depart from them, and let GOD deal with them, period.

 

[xnikki118x]

What I don't understand, is how the accidental death of a fetus in say, a car accident, can be involuntary manslaughter. If I plowed into a woman who was 6 months pregnant and killed her baby, I could go to jail. Yet abortions are okay.

I'm not against abortion. I don't like how some women use it as a form of birth control, and I don't think it's the answer to "oops lulz forgot my pills again", but it needs to be legal and safe for people who really need it. So yeah, I'm pro-choice.

It just interests me how for like accident victims, fetus = life and for abortion fetus =/= life.

[brawndolicious]

What I don't understand, is how the accidental death of a fetus in say, a car accident, can be involuntary manslaughter. If I plowed into a woman who was 6 months pregnant and killed her baby, I could go to jail. Yet abortions are okay.

It's probably because causing a miscarriage takes away the woman's right to decide.