Chipping away at our rights one county at a time
by digby
David Ferguson at Raw Story shares this lovely holiday story:
Women in Ft. Wayne, Indiana will not have access to legal abortions as the solitary physician who performs the procedures is forced to temporarily suspend operations by anti-choice legislation. According to the Ft. Wayne News Sentinel, Dr. Ulrich Klopfer will continue to practice, but only at his offices in South Bend.
Women who need abortions will “have to drive another 100 or 200 miles,” Klopfer told the paper. “That will add to their cost and hardship.”
Through a series of byzantine rules designed for the purpose, they managed to catch him in a bureaucratic reporting error (he failed to send forms in triplicate or some such nonsense) and that was it. And then they claimed that the doctor was somehow responsible for a child molester being allowed to roam free. It’s a depressing story of anti-abortion liars gleefully and proudly manipulating the law to circumvent the constitution. It’s becoming a right wing specialty.
And to those who believe that the “right to life” zealots aren’t really trying to outlaw abortion in all cases, regardless of the circumstances, think again:
“It’s heartbreaking to learn that a 13-year-old became pregnant and now must live with the pain of an abortion for the rest of her life, but it’s doubly heartbreaking that Dr. Klopfer’s failure to report the abortion may have allowed the girl’s molester to walk free,” said a press release from Allen County Right to Life director Cathie Humbarger.
[…]
Humbarger admitted to the News-Standard that her group’s success is a temporary gain, but called it “tremendous news for desperate mothers and babies vulnerable to abortion. Our goal has been to make Allen County abortion-free.”
They would make 13 year old molestation victims bear their rapists children. They are so blinded by their zeal to outlaw abortion that they actually believe it’s worse for a little girl to have one than to require her to give birth to her own sibling.
I don’t traffic in the words good and evil — they have a little too much religious absolutist baggage for my taste. But if it did, I know into which category I would put this.
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