From civil rights to abortion law, the '60s was the era of demanding rights.
This has been the decade of pulling them back again.
Why is it that whenever Missouri is in the news these days, it is for being
a stubborn 50 years behind modern society?
Missouri's Republican-controlled Legislature is poised to pass one of the harshest abortion laws in the county next week when lawmakers return to the state capitol for a last-minute special session.
GOP lawmakers called the session to try to override several of Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon's vetoes. At the top of the list: A bill that would force women seeking an abortion—including victims of rape and incest—to wait 72 hours between their first visit to a clinic and the procedure itself.
You can see why that would need a special session. You wouldn't want some carefree, tricky rape victim to slip through the cracks of decency while Missouri lawmakers momentarily had their backs turned.
Naturally, the state Republicans pushing for the veto override don't see any problem with creating a 72-hour window in which a woman from their state cannot get an abortion for any possible reason. It's only three days, after all, and the only stated intent is so that the woman (for example, the rape or incest victim) can contemplate whether or not she is certain that her needs ought to override the purely religious convictions of state lawmakers (presuming those are the true religious convictions of state lawmakers—as we've seen, there are plenty of fervently "pro-life" lawmakers who nonetheless are happy to encourage and support abortions for their own wives or secret mistresses). There's no pretense of a medical reason for it: it is, indisputably, a religious law. We are not supposed to do that sort of thing in America—religious law is very bad, when practiced by the zealots of other countries—but we do, and we do it very often, and it's Christians and Republicans doing it every time and condemning the rest of us for having a problem with it.
Jump below the fold for more.
(As we've said before, American Taliban is exactly what we should call it. The same insistence that the rights of women are second to the religious beliefs of menfolk they have never met, whether it be their legislators or the people who have hired them to work at the hobby shop. The same condemnations of art and science that contradicts the Chosen Truths. The same conviction that the other religions of the world are creeping into the woodwork, and will overtake us all if we do not adhere rigorously to the correct religion. Yes, yes, while providers of abortion are constant and explicit targets of violent religious zealots operating with the oft-winking assistance of the political arm of the movement, we should be very glad the zealots are not generally killing great swaths of other Americans with similar zeal, at least not on a regular basis, but those that consider our home-grown religious zealots to be of any higher caliber than the other ones might ponder on how great that gap would truly be, if the zealots ever found themselves in positions of similar power.)
Where were we? Ah, right—the Missouri would-be law that says you must schedule a second appointment three days after the first in order to actually obtain your desired medical procedure, because a Missouri godbotherer demands you be officially required to pretend to contemplate their own point of view. Three days may sound like a mere inconvenience, but it is coupled with a series of previously passed and equally spuriously premised laws that have left only one abortion-providing medical clinic in the entire state.
Democrats and reproductive rights advocates who oppose the bill say that a three-day waiting period is burdensome to women who don't live near St. Louis, the location of the state's only abortion clinic; those women would have to make two trips out of town in order to have an abortion or stay in St. Louis for several nights. The law, opponents say, would pose an extra hardship for women who can't afford to miss several days of work.
As with all similar anti-abortion restrictions, the resulting problems are easily worked around if you are wealthy enough or sufficiently careered; the obstacles are intended to be worked around if you are, say, an office-seeking Republican who really needs his secret mistresses to keep childless, but are intended to be very difficult to work around if you are a woman who must work for a living, or for whom travel to the one specific clinic in all of Missouri that can serve you would be difficult. Staying three days in St. Louis for your required period of religious pre-penance is not realistic, so that means two trips. Even assuming you could arrange for the necessary day off work for the first appointment, you would still need another day off for the second. The costs are therefore roughly doubled—and the intervening three days will delay the procedure from the magical first trimester to the second, for some percentage of women, which is no doubt a purely unintended consequence.
As for why there is no exception for rape or incest victims, the lawmakers are blunt. It is because of Religious Conviction, and nothing more.
[T]he Missouri bill does not include an exception for women who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest—one reason why Nixon vetoed it. But Elmer tells Mother Jones he never considered adding such an exception.
"I believe that life begins at conception," he says. "And I'm not to discriminate against any life because of how it was conceived. I don't disregard the significance of the tragic events that those women suffer from. But we're still weighing that against the right of the unborn child to live…We're asking all mothers just to give it another 48 hours to think about what is it they're doing when they kill their unborn child."
It really is as simple as that, and they are not trying to hide it behind any issues of supposed medical safety or "concerns." It is because the American Taliban demands a tribute from all women under their domain. Nothing more, and nothing less. You are required to consider the tenets of their religion for three days, and it will be considered a crime against the state if you do not.