Pro-life = Pro-torture

by digby

Gosh I’m so glad the culture wars are finally over and we can all relax and finally deal with the important stuff. Kate Sheppard spells out how great it all is:

According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than 900 anti-abortion measures have been introduced this year alone in state legislatures across the country. At the federal level, House Republicans have advanced legislation that attempted to redefine the meaning of rape for the purposes or abortion law and sought to whittle down the already-narrow exceptions in which federal funds can be used to pay for the procedure.

The good news is that most of them haven’t taken effect yet. The bad news is that this is what we can expect:

So far, only Nebraska’s fetal-pain law, which passed in 2010, has taken effect. The others are expected to be implemented next year. But already women have been affected. Thirty-four-year-old Danielle Deaver of Grand Isle, Nebraska, told The Des Moines Register the painful tale of how, at 22 weeks, her water broke prematurely. The fetus, she and her husband learned, wouldn’t be able to develop lungs and would die at birth. But because of Nebraska’s new law, Deaver’s doctor would not perform an abortion. Instead, she had to wait to give birth, then watch for 15 agonizing minutes as her underdeveloped baby slowly slipped away—an experience Deaver described as “torture.”