First Degree Parenthood

by digby

I have a question for the innocent life crowd: how come none of the proposed laws anywhere, as far as I can tell, believe that a woman should be tried for the murder of her child if she gets an abortion? Indeed, there is no penalty in the South Dakota law for the woman at all. She isn’t even charged as an accessory. Does that make sense? She could be tried for first degree murder for leaving a newborn baby to die on a church doorstep.

Doctors are targeted by all these laws; in South Draconian it’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. We normally give people life in prison or the death penalty for premeditated murder for hire in our system.

I remember once seeing Larry King, of all people, ask this question of a “pro-life” advocate. (He wasn’t laying a trap — he really wanted to know, you could tell.) The “pro-life” advocate sputtered for five minutes. It’s a question they need to answer. They’ve laid landmines everywhere with their hyperbolic nonsense about abortion being murder and “baby killing” and now they need to explain themselves.

If you ask most pro-lifers whether they think that women should be punished as murderers they say no. If you asked if they think women should be punished by the law at all, they say no. They don’t want to punish the father either. The proposed laws target only the doctor who performed the surgery (or dispensed the drug) and for much less time than they would receive for killing a child. Now that we are moving beyond the demagoguery of the pulpit and the sidewalk and into the legal arena I think we all have a right to know how these people made these distinctions and why.

As with the arguments about rape and incest, the “pro-life” argument that abortion is murder is morally inconsistent. And if it isn’t murder, then what is it?

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