Newsweek article.

[sofiaviolet]

How Much Jail Time?


When I think about abortion, I think of its social causes and effects, about why individual women have or don't have abortions, about what I would do if I became pregnant or if abortion were to be criminalized. I've never actually given much thought to the legal ramifications of criminalizing abortion (jail time? fines? for doctors? for women?).

Neither, apparently, have the people on the anti-abortion side of things.

Comments

[looneyluna.livejournal.com]

There was a NY Times piece in the magazine about 8 months ago that looked at El Salvador where abortion is criminalized and the impact upon women's lives. Doctors are supposed to call the police if they suspect a patient has had a back alley abortion, and doctors providing the abortion can be jailed. It a was truly frightening glimpse at the reality that some women face.

In contrast, there was a piece in the Atlantic Monthly that discussed that despite all the rhetoric about wanting to ban abortion, the conservatives in power don't really want that to happen because it would destroy what is possibly the most polarizing issue in American politics and thus negate abortion being a rallying point for the religious right. Let's hope this is true. I'd rather endless debates than lack of choice.

The only thought I've given to the criminalization though is that I would protest and work with the cause to get abortion legal again, but I never really considered until the article about El Salvador that people would be jailed. It makes one take pause.

[sofiaviolet]

The people up top who are pulling the strings may not really want abortion criminalized, but the people for which that's a rallying point definitely do. And it's the ordinary people that make me worry.