Missouri Abortion Restricition Bill Only Worsens Effects of Intimate Partner Violence
While the press has been diverted by the flap about an abortion bill that hasn’t even been filed (the federal Freedom of Choice Act), a series of very real anti-choice bills has been winding its way through the General Assembly. Phantom FOCA deflected attention from three inane bills criminalizing “coerced” abortions. Through the miracle of legislative alchemy, they have become one bill, HB 46/434, which is in a procedural posture to strike Missouri’s most vulnerable women like an unseen timber rattler. H.B. 46/434 is a jaw-dropper, the sort of bill that is difficult to explain to people because their first response is that you must have made this up. But I couldn’t make stuff like this up. That sort of imagination is reserved for right-wing zealots. Pro-choice advocates agree that no woman should be coerced into having an abortion any more than she should be coerced into pregnancy. The rub is in how the bill’s scriveners want to define “coerced” abortion. Are you a female whose husband, ex-boyfriend, or parent beat you upon learning you were pregnant, after suggesting abortion? Are you a pregnant female whose husband or boyfriend stalked you after suggesting abortion? Are you a pregnant female unlucky enough to live with someone who would poison you in order to persuade you to have an abortion? If so, the Missouri General Assembly is on the verge of deciding that you are incompetent to make the decision about whether to terminate your pregnancy, even if your reason is to avoid bringing a child into such miserable abuse. It will make that choice for you by sending your doctor to prison for a felony if he or she knows these things and acts in accordance with your wish to end your pregnancy. In Missouri in 2007, law-enforcement authorities reported 37,215 incidents of intimate-partner violence. Statistically, a significant number of those women had to have been pregnant, because domestic violence increases exponentially during pregnancy. Instead of dealing with this problem, the General Assembly wants to further disempower women by taking from them the decision to refuse to give an abuser another victim. Real women don’t matter to the anti-choice lobby’s propaganda machine. If they can pretend that there is some groundswell of “coerced abortions” out there that legislators need to address, they achieve two objectives: (1) they perpetuate their absurd claim that women don’t really choose to have abortions but are the unwitting dupes of others, and someday they will suffer mental trauma as a result, and (2) compulsory pregnancy (for those with the fewest resources to fight back), which means they can block one more abortion. But once their children are born, Missouri women can’t count on their legislators to fund safehouses or preventive programs for intimate violence, or to provide a level of care for their (living) children to pry them from the grip of poverty. Maybe disbelief is the only response to a General Assembly with such lousy judgment and perverted priorities.
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