Closing clinics on the basis of
"women's health" is Orwellian, to be certain. But it's only the beginning. The next step after that for the pro-life faction is to prosecute women who have abortions on a charge of murder, and to exercise capital punishment upon conviction.
Don't act so shocked.
A writer for National Review, (Kevin D.) Williamson likes to be the guy who will brashly express the crudest (and sometimes cruelest) version of his own team's deepest ideological commitments. Want an up-is-down revisionist take on American history that portrays the Republican Party as a far greater champion of civil rights than the Democrats? Williamson's your man. Looking for someone to mock a transgendered person pictured on the cover of Time magazine? Williamson will do it with unapologetic relish.
But none of that compares to what we got from Williamson earlier this week, when he took to Twitter to declare that he thinks women who have had abortions deserve to be executed for their actions. And not just executed in any old way, or by lethal injection, which is the standard in the 32 states that permit the death penalty. No, Williamson thinks women who have had abortions — along with the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff involved in the procedure — deserve to face death by hanging.
Now, the hanging bit is an almost perfect example of intentionally provocative rhetoric. (That's my preferred euphemism for "trolling.") Note how it adds an extra frisson of outrageousness to the proposal of capital punishment, given the way hanging has historically been deployed — as a uniquely public form of execution, used by governments as well as extrajudicial gangs of private citizens to inspire acute fear and intimidation. (Williamson might have just gone ahead and advocated beheadings, though of course, as another National Review author has recently argued, only a "purely evil" political organization could favor anything like that.)
Don't. act. so. shocked.
(T)hose who oppose abortion rights claim that the procedure amounts to the infliction of lethal violence against an innocent human being. If they truly believe that, then of course they also believe it should be prosecuted and punished like any other act of homicide. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Williamson controversy may be that his remarks surprised anyone at all.
Did you ask your favorite Republican what they thought of Williamson's proposal? Perhaps you should, especially if there are going be any more debates you observe among candidates, and especially if they give you the chance to offer a query.
Repealing abortion rights at the federal level would just be the first step. It would be followed by an effort to outlaw abortion on a state-by-state basis. Then those involved in the illegal procedure would have to be prosecuted and punished. At the outer fringes of the possible, anti-abortion activists hope to see a Personhood Amendment protecting fetal life added to the Constitution, or perhaps the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly expanded to include the unborn.
While Republican presidential candidates are regularly asked if they endorse their party's platform in favor of repealing Roe, they are only rarely confronted with a follow-up question about whether they also believe that women who procure abortions and the medical professionals who provide them should be prosecuted and punished for murder — perhaps even for capital murder.
Since one typically comes to favor outlawing abortion only because of a belief in its homicidal character, it's hard to see how an opponent of abortion rights could do anything other than affirm a desire to see the murderers and their accessories brought to justice. It seems the only alternative would be to look hopelessly soft on crime.
Republicans in Texas, with supermajorities in the Lege and an eager new governor in Greg Abbott, will be the first state in the nation to ban abortion, and they will dare anyone to turn them back. They have all the votes they need: five, on the US Supreme Court. And then they will go after the murderers, those dastardly criminal women who would break the law and kill their babies anyway.
This is not an exaggeration.
As a reminder, motivating your voting base by fear is something Republicans do exceptionally well and exponentially better than Democrats. It's also a very pointed note to a small handful of Democrats who think
voting for Greens is a bigger problem than
Democrats who vote for Republicans (more than 300,000 of them who voted in Florida in 2000, for anyone who doesn't wish to click the link). Or for that matter, Democratically-leaning semi-sorta-sometimes voters who mostly don't.
Thank goodness Battleground Texas is working so furiously on the latter. The former is a more internal failure, and might be remedied with some soul-searching, or perhaps even a 2016 presidential candidate along the lines of Bernie Sanders. That's a discussion for later... about one month from now.
