If Abortions Were Made Illegal, How Much Jail Time Should A Woman Get for Having One?
That’s the question Anne Quindlen asks in her column:
Aug. 6, 2007 issue - Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”
You have to hand it to the questioner; he struggles manfully. “Usually when things are illegal there’s a penalty attached,” he explains patiently. But he can’t get a single person to be decisive about the crux of a matter they have been approaching with absolute certainty.
It’s not a facet of the abortion debate many people give thought to, so it’s really not fair to accost someone on the street and ask them a question like this without giving them a bit of time to think of it. It’s also hard to tell how many good answers to the question this amateur documentarian left out. It’s easy to just leave the good stuff out in order to make your point.
Regardless, the obvious answer to the question is: The woman should be charged with premeditated murder and sentenced with whatever punishment is associated with that in the jurisdiction she’s being tried in.
Abortion is, in fact, murder and no amount of biological gerrymandering, emotional rhetoric about rape and molestation or semantical arguments about who is and is not “a person” are going to change that.
