No one can say Wisconsin Republicans haven’t always made it perfectly clear how little they think of women and their right to high-quality, private health care.
The party panders relentlessly to the extreme anti-abortion movement by crudely crashing around in the middle of the most personal decisions women ever have to make with their families and their doctors.
Still it was unsettling to learn that as soon as the election was over Republican legislators immediately began working behind the scenes on legislation to push Wisconsin even deeper into the dark ages on women’s health.
Wisconsin Right to Life calls the top legislative priority it is drafting with Republicans the Fetal Pain Prevention Act.
The irony is, while claiming to prevent medically unproven—and unprovable—pain to undeveloped fetuses, these radical abortion opponents would cruelly inflict real pain on living, breathing human beings.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 guaranteed a woman’s right to end a pregnancy in the first two trimesters and even in the third trimester if the woman’s life or health were in danger, hard-core opponents have tried many different ways to make it nearly impossible to ever end a pregnancy.
More than 40 years later, many of their tactics have worked. Clinics have closed. Medicaid won’t cover most abortions for the poor. The Supreme Court allows ugly harassment of emotionally fragile women entering clinics, calling such vicious, in-your-face assaults “counseling.” Doctors haven’t just been intimidated. They’ve been murdered.
Although they claim to be motivated by love, the tactics of anti-abortion activists toward those who disagree with them in the heartless laws they write look a lot like hate.
Remember when Wisconsin was proud to be much more progressive than violent, ignorant states in the deep South that used brutality and terror against citizens they considered less than human?
|
|
Now Wisconsin Republicans are using a Mississippi law as a model to try to ban almost all late-term abortions even before the third trimester, after just 20 weeks.
There is something fundamentally dishonest about Republicans intentionally creating delaying tactics such as mandatory waiting periods, unnecessary medical procedures and reduced access to clinics and then using that as an excuse to outlaw abortions claiming the fetus has become developed enough to feel pain.
The difference between forbidding abortions except to save the mother’s health or life after 20 weeks instead of 24 might seem minor, but there’s an obvious malevolent intent behind that one-month shift.
Many tragic birth defects to a developing fetus do not show up before 20 weeks, according to medical authorities. That means many of the women abortion opponents want to stop from terminating their pregnancies were happily looking forward to giving birth until something went horribly wrong.
Forcing that woman to carry a doomed pregnancy to birth seems unnecessarily cruel not only to her, but to a fetus that could experience severe pain with no real chance of life.
Abortion opponents often dismiss such concerns as frivolous vanities by shallow people merely annoyed by the idea of giving birth to a less than perfect child. It’s the opponents who are shallow and ignorant of everything that can go wrong in childbirth and the very real trauma it can inflict upon families.
Yes, many of us know wonderful families who incorporate a child with Down Syndrome and almost visibly expand the unconditional love of every family member.
But pain, suffering and death involving a child are usually not nearly so beautiful and inspiring.
In my own wife’s family, long before abortion was ever a legal possibility in this country, a child was born who not only was labeled severely retarded, but also was blind and deaf.
She was in a state institution her entire life, which sadly continued well into adulthood. There was no way to teach her to care for herself. There was no way to communicate with her. Early on, the family was told the only sensations her caregivers would ever be able to tell she was experiencing were pain and fear.
Everyone who knows me and probably most of those who read me know I am a caring person and that empathy for other human beings is a powerful motivation behind how I view and engage with the world.
When our own family was young, we would occasionally visit that child as she was growing, not that she would ever know. I wish I could say I felt there was some point. Or some point to the facility where she was warehoused for decades.
In a democracy, we are all free to hold whatever religious beliefs we choose as long as we do not harm other people.
Writing religious laws to force women to give birth no matter what the cruel consequences may be to those women or their families clearly crosses that line.
