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No, Seriously, What the Hell is the Matter With Kansas?

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TBogg offers some choice questions for the Pervert General of Kansas, while Dr. B and the deservedly Koufax-annoited Mouse Words offer further analysis (the latter with bonus Texas coverage.)

Pro-choicers are, of course, often informed by earnest reactionaries that if we continue to remain “extremists” who fail to sufficiently pander to a minority, most of whom will never vote Democratic anyway, we will continue to suffer. Why don’t we show our spirit of compromise by signing on to a variety of regulations that don’t quite ban abortion? Well, let’s be clear about what these laws are, and what they are intended to accomplish. Like virtually all abortion legislation proposed by Republicans, bans on “partial birth” abortion are not animated by any coherent principle. There’s no moral distinction whatsoever between different methods of abortion, and as Justice Ginsburg eloquently noted in Stenberg v. Carhart, the fact that a medical procedure sounds gross isn’t really much of a reason to ban it. (While we’re at it, I propose a constitutional amendment banning the human digestive system!) What these laws are intended to do is to give the state a license to harass women and abortion doctors. And they–again, like all abortion laws–will be enforced in a grossly inequitable way. It isn’t going to be the wife of the head of the Topeka Chamber of Commerce who gets her ob-gyn’s records rifled through. Every one of these stupid laws and regulations that passes is a sacrifice of the dignity of many women, a disproportionate number of them poor women, women of color, and women in abusive relationships with partners and/or parents, for no benefits whatsoever.

And, to engage in some hopeless wishful thinking, could we please, please stop hearing about how scumbags who want to paw through the sexual histories of teenage girls are acting on High Moral Principles that we all must genuflect toward? Can every Pierre Laval Democrat and person named “A. Sullivan” have the good graces to cram the pious lectures? If this isn’t a signal for the pro-choice majority to stop listening to this crap, I don’t know what is.

*Since I can’t get a link to findlaw (or Oyez) to work for some reason, a relevant passage from the Ginsburg concurrence:

I write separately only to stress that amidst all the emotional uproar caused by an abortion case, we should not lose sight of the character of Nebraska’s “partial birth abortion” law. As the Court observes, this law does not save any fetus from destruction, for it targets only “a method of performing abortion.” Nor does the statute seek to protect the lives or health of pregnant women. Moreover, as Justice Stevens points out, the most common method of performing previability second trimester abortions is no less distressing or susceptible to gruesome description. Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Posner correspondingly observed, regarding similar bans in Wisconsin and Illinois, that the law prohibits the D&X procedure “not because the procedure kills the fetus, not because it risks worse complications for the woman than alternative procedures would do, not because it is a crueler or more painful or more disgusting method of terminating a pregnancy.” Rather, Chief Judge Posner commented, the law prohibits the procedure because the State legislators seek to chip away at the private choice shielded by Roe v. Wade, even as modified byCasey.

Indeed.

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