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nagasvoice.
Utah is criminalizing women who get abortions AND SUFFER MISCARRIAGES!
http://bit.ly/CriminalMiscarriage
This is bad. Among the comments at that link, somebody tries to explain it was amended to deal with cases like that of a 17-year-old who paid somebody to beat her until she miscarried. Well, duh--what do you think will happen when you criminalize abortion?
Secondly, down at street level, it doesn't honestly matter what they thought they were doing in the statehouse. What will matter is how it gets interpreted and enforced. If somebody wants to enforce this law against those women who come to a hospital with accidental miscarriages, then they can. It doesn't matter that it wasn't intended that way. Laws get torqued out of all recognition all the time in enforcement, and not by cops or DAs at the bottom, but for higher level prosecutors and mayors and all sorts of people with political axes to grind. Same reasons as these right-wing guys voted for this stuff in the first place.
Maybe Utah citizens could think about electing sane people for a change? As the Amplify site notes:
...Utah is not a state known for its legislative sanity. This, after all, is a state that recently made headlines for proposing to honor gun manufacturers on Martin Luther King Day and for considering the elimination of 12th grade to cut back on education spending.
Well, it just got a whole lot worse.
Utah just became the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages, removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions, and assumes women are "guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child" if a pregnancy ends after "intentional, knowing, or reckless" behavior.
This law:
* defines legal abortion as a procedure "carried out by a physician or through a substance used under the direction of a physician." Anything else that terminates a pregnancy is now defined as illegal abortion - including miscarriages.
* states that "The killing or attempted killing of a live unborn child in a manner that is not abortion shall be punished as...criminal homicide."
* removes existing immunity from criminal prosecution for women "who seek to have or obtain an abortion" or "upon whom a partial birth abortion is performed."
* applies the legal standard of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act of the [pregnant] woman" as punishable as Criminal Homicide...
But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It doesn't punish individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.
This is all about PR. The state legislature backed off their proposal to eliminate 12th grade when it was ridiculed in the national press. Dropping a year from high school led to "perception problems" -- because of The Onion! -- but national media has been silent when the state enacts one of the most dangerous abortion laws in U.S. history. That silence ends right now.
It's time for everyone to hear about Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law. The media must to cover it. We must to start conversations all across the country about what this means for women and girls in Utah - and what this precedent means if (or, more likely, when) other states follow suit. (A similar case in Iowa should be all the warning we need.)
nagasvoice.http://bit.ly/CriminalMiscarriage
This is bad. Among the comments at that link, somebody tries to explain it was amended to deal with cases like that of a 17-year-old who paid somebody to beat her until she miscarried. Well, duh--what do you think will happen when you criminalize abortion?
Secondly, down at street level, it doesn't honestly matter what they thought they were doing in the statehouse. What will matter is how it gets interpreted and enforced. If somebody wants to enforce this law against those women who come to a hospital with accidental miscarriages, then they can. It doesn't matter that it wasn't intended that way. Laws get torqued out of all recognition all the time in enforcement, and not by cops or DAs at the bottom, but for higher level prosecutors and mayors and all sorts of people with political axes to grind. Same reasons as these right-wing guys voted for this stuff in the first place.
Maybe Utah citizens could think about electing sane people for a change? As the Amplify site notes:
...Utah is not a state known for its legislative sanity. This, after all, is a state that recently made headlines for proposing to honor gun manufacturers on Martin Luther King Day and for considering the elimination of 12th grade to cut back on education spending.
Well, it just got a whole lot worse.
Utah just became the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages, removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions, and assumes women are "guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child" if a pregnancy ends after "intentional, knowing, or reckless" behavior.
This law:
* defines legal abortion as a procedure "carried out by a physician or through a substance used under the direction of a physician." Anything else that terminates a pregnancy is now defined as illegal abortion - including miscarriages.
* states that "The killing or attempted killing of a live unborn child in a manner that is not abortion shall be punished as...criminal homicide."
* removes existing immunity from criminal prosecution for women "who seek to have or obtain an abortion" or "upon whom a partial birth abortion is performed."
* applies the legal standard of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act of the [pregnant] woman" as punishable as Criminal Homicide...
But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It doesn't punish individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.
This is all about PR. The state legislature backed off their proposal to eliminate 12th grade when it was ridiculed in the national press. Dropping a year from high school led to "perception problems" -- because of The Onion! -- but national media has been silent when the state enacts one of the most dangerous abortion laws in U.S. history. That silence ends right now.
It's time for everyone to hear about Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law. The media must to cover it. We must to start conversations all across the country about what this means for women and girls in Utah - and what this precedent means if (or, more likely, when) other states follow suit. (A similar case in Iowa should be all the warning we need.)
