State Representative Terri Proud (R-Tuscon) wrote an email saying she believes women who want to terminate a pregnancy should be made to watch a video of an abortion as part of their "procedure." Add to this legal absurdity the political conservatives across the country, busily passing laws allowing women to be shamed and (in Texas) legally raped with prods before an abortion can take place, and the calculated attack on law-abiding citizens becomes terrifyingly clear.
If Rep. Proud and other political conservatives believe such tactics of intimidation are righteous, we should soon expect a whole slew of new state laws that punish citizens who apply the law, but whom Christian Conservative politicians find immoral. If you don't have the votes to overturn legislation you don't like, shame and terrify and otherwise make life wildly difficult for the law-abiding enemy instead. Brilliant!
Here are a few new groups they can try to terrorize when they run out of women to torture:
Why not force gays and lesbians to watch heterosexual pornography before they get hitched in the handful of states where they can legally marry? Maybe by watching men and women having sex, gays and lesbians will realize the error of their sinful ways! (Of course, we'd also have to make straight couples watch gay porn before they get married to be completely fair, but who said anything about fair?) How morally straight is that?!
Abortion and homosexual marriage can be just the beginning! Contraception in any form according to the Catholic faith and others is morally wrong, so let's force men to watch vasectomies performed without anesthesia before they get snipped so they repent! Let's make the 46.6 million Americans who smoke watch a time-lapse, graphic video showing addicted smokers dying of lung cancer, and include pictures of their blackened lungs before they can buy a pack of Marlboros! Let's force the over 90,000,000 million obese in the U.S. to watch autopsies performed on a series of morbidly obese men and women before they can buy Twinkies at the 7-11. Genius!
Gosh, there sure are a lot of legal actions that need cleaning up by our self-appointed moral compasses. Good thing we have them around.
Like too many things it seems in the U.S., something only becomes truly important when it becomes personal. You can be against contraception, until you want to have sex and don't want to get pregnant. You can be against abortion, until you're your niece is date raped after drinking a little too much at a party on campus. You can be against abortion until they say you'll die if you try to take the fetus to term. And you can be against abortion until you realize your stance against affordable contraception made it impossible for a woman you employ to protect herself and now she's pregnant and can't afford to raise a child. And you can be against contraception and abortion as a conservative because you (as a taxpayer) don't want to be on the hook for paying for it, until you see that the amount it costs to raise a child is far greater. And you can be against government subsidies for women's health groups such as Planned Parenthood until you realize women who are denied access to healthcare fall to preventable illnesses that cost the health care system millions every year.
Now, think about your 15-year-old daughter who just told you she's pregnant. She has her whole life ahead of her, and she's not ready to be a mother, and you don't want to raise another child. This happens in the best of families every single day. She's 4-weeks along by the time she gets up the nerve to tell you. She feels like her entire world has exploded. Do you want her sitting through a video of an abortion? Do you think she should be forced to have an invasive procedure that doctors refer to as legal rape? Should she be told to go home and "think about it" before having the procedure? Unless you were born without a heart, you'd want to save your daughter from any additional pain.
Personally, I can't imagine what it is like to walk a foot, let alone a mile, in the shoes of a woman who has made the decision to terminate a pregnancy. No one, except for her, can truly imagine how emotionally and physically painful the decision and process is. My heart goes out to her and to all women who have legal abortions every year. It doesn't matter if I agree morally with what legal choices they've made, I respect their rights as citizens to make them.
To politicians and citizens: If you don't like abortion, make it illegal. Don't rationalize your actions as saving unborn lives when you don't seem all that interested in the millions of other lives in the US that seem to need your "moral" guidance. Trying to make the process of pregnancy termination more painful, scary and time consuming is, at the very least, appallingly un-Christian of you.