Trying to be creative
Visceral Instinct said:
Would anyone like to explain the logic of the idea that abortion is wrong because a 'child' has the right to live, but not if you were raped?
It's a matter of
appearances being more important than
principles.
"Abortion is murder!" they cry. But they also don't like to be seen as misogynistic. They don't want to be seen as hostile to rape survivors.
And that's
all it is.
To the other, at least they're
trying to be creative. Republicans just failed, last month, in their effort to
redefine rape.
More accurately, what they did was try to exclude certain kinds of rape from the rape and incest exceptions to the pro-life policy.
To wit: Give a twelve year-old girl some booze, maybe smoke a joint with her, and then have sex with her while she's too loaded to coherently say no.
Under the law, this is statutory rape, at least.
She gets knocked up? Well, according to the failed Republican plan, that wouldn't have counted under the rape and incest consideration. Or, as Nick Bauman put it for
Mother Jones: "Rape is only
really rape if it involves force."
As a result, a young girl pregnant through statutory rape not only would not be able to receive public assistance for the abortion, her parents would also be forbidden to use a tax-exempt health savings account. Nor would they be able to deduct, as a medical expense, any personal financial costs spent on that abortion.
"This bill takes us back to a time when just saying 'no' wasn't enough to qualify as rape," says Steph Sterling, a lawyer and senior adviser to the National Women's Law Center. Laurie Levenson, a former assistant US attorney and expert on criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, notes that the new bill's authors are "using language that's not particularly clear, and some people are going to lose protection." Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes. "There are a lot of aspects of rape that are not included," Levenson says.
As for the incest exception, the bill would only allow federally funded abortions if the woman is under 18.
The bill hasn't been carefully constructed, Levenson notes. The term "forcible rape" is not defined in the federal criminal code, and the bill's authors don't offer their own definition. In some states, there is no legal definition of "forcible rape," making it unclear whether any abortions would be covered by the rape exemption in those jurisdictions.
Try this argument:
It's not rape if you're wearing tight jeans.
Italy, 1999;
Australia, 2010; also Seoul, 2008.
This is apparently what counts, for conservatives, as reconciling the gap between appearance and principles. They don't want to be seen as hostile to rape survivors, so they just want to change what constitutes rape.
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Notes:
Baumann, Nick. "The House GOP's Plan to Redefine Rape". Mother Jones. January 28, 2011. MotherJones.com. February 12, 2011. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/republican-plan-redefine-rape-abortion
Stanley, Alessandra. "Ruling on Tight Jeans and Rape Sets Off Anger in Italy". The New York Times. February 16, 1999. NYTimes.com. February 12, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/16/world/ruling-on-tight-jeans-and-rape-sets-off-anger-in-italy.html
Shears, Richard. "You're not guilty of rape: Those skinny jeans were too tight to remove by yourself, jury rules". Mail Online. May 1, 2010. DailyMail.co.uk. February 12, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor...ose-skinny-jeans-tight-remove-jury-rules.html
