They’ll Have To Throw Their Daughters In Jail

by digby

Jumping off the shocking article in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine about the criminalized abortion doctrine in El Salvador, Eric Zorn has begun an interesting dialog about why anti-choicers don’t logically insist that women be tried for their crime? The usual answer seems to rest on the idea that women are so dumb or brainwashed that they don’t know what they are doing so they can’t be held liable for their crime.

I can see how that might have played in the years before Roe when it much more common to infantilize women. But I suspect they are going to have to completely turn back the clock to at least before WWII if they want to pull that off. Nobody is going to buy that women are all just victims of the “culture of Roe” and can’t be held responsible for what they do. There are going to have to be prosecutions.

Zorn suggests that this be used against the forced pregnancy extremists the way that “partial birth” was used against the pro-choice movement and I agree. By using the extreme argument you expose the illogic of their most cherished delusion: that from the moment of conception, the fetus has the full rights of every other human being. Once they are forced to face the full implications of that argument they lose. In arguing this with a pro-lifer, Zorn said:

Your own logic locks you into prosecuting women who seek abortions for murder. You write of such women as “secondary victims” and hem and haw about transition periods and the ineffectiveness of coercion because you know how utterly unpalatable such prosecutions would be for the vast majority of Americans who do, in the end, see, feel and sense a real distinction between an embryo and, say, a one day old baby.

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