Glenden BrownBlog For Choice Day
It seems oddly appropriate that 2008 Blog for Choice day is the day that the Rep. Stephen Sandstrom’s slut shaming, forced pregnancy hot potato bill was handed off to the Office of Legislative Research & General Counsel - which has already rendered a negative opinion on the bill.
Sandstrom’s bill would prohibit abortion except to save the life of the mother, rape or incest - in which the victim had already filed a police report - or the fetus is deemed unlikely to survive 24 hours.
HB236 as proposed by Sandstrom is pretty much unconstitution, which the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel said in its opinion of the bill:
The United States Supreme Court has held that a woman has a constitutional right to a previability abortion without undue interference from the state. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 846 (1992). In light of this holding, the Court has declared state regulation to be unconstitutional if it has “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914, 921 (2000), quoting Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 877 (1992). Based on this precedent, there is a high probability that a court would hold that this bill unduly interferes with a woman’s right to a pre-viability abortion by providing that such abortions may only be performed under the following circumstances: where the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape and the abortion is performed before the fetus reaches 20 weeks gestational age; where the fetus has a medical condition that makes it highly unlikely that the fetus will survive more than 24 hours; or where an abortion is necessary in order to avert a woman’s death or a serious risk to a woman of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.
IOW, everything in this bill violates precedent set in Casey. Sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic, even on blog for choice day.
In Addition From Cliff: (Is this poaching?): I thought this excerpt from Salon nails the “If-I-hate-sex-with-my-(wife/husband)-then-you-can’t-have-it-either crowd.
Would YOU have sex with this?
I wish young women knew how deeply their way of life offends the right-to-life establishment and how set this establishment is on changing our lifestyle, either by criminalizing the things that make it possible (the most common forms of family planning) or filling our heads with fears and lies (abstinence-only curriculum). Today, 95 percent of us have sex before marriage, 85 percent of couples have sex once a week (decidedly not for baby making), 90 percent use some form of artificial birth control. The “right to life†movement is dedicated to stopping this.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I like my constitutional anaylsis much better since it goes to the issue at hand (and Stenberg has essentially been overturned, despite what Alito claims, so it shouldn’t be cited).
The real issue this bill deals with is parental consent, not viability of the fetus.
January 23rd, 2008 at 7:28 am
Dave - you’re right but the legislative counsel is trying to write an opinion that will move our legislators as well as that captures the constitutional issues. By framing it as a matter of parental consent, our legislators are playing emotional games, appealing to the fears of parents about adolescent sexuality, a game that resonates with a great many Utah parents. They are also buying into patriarchal stereotypes about the family - that the father is the all knowing, all important head of the household - and females - that they need guidance and cannot make be trusted to make their own decisions with intervention from more knowing and experienced persons. The best argument I’ve heard against parental consent came from Hugo Schwyzer who said that healthy families don’t need it mandated - even if they’re upset, ashamed and what not the girls in those families will communicate with their parents. By contrast, the girls whose parents are going to beat them up, throw them out, mistreat them and on and on won’t benefit from it; their parents won’t give consent, or will so severely punish the girl in question as to make her telling them a practical impossibility.