While the inclinations that fuel my writing generally revolve around literature, the subject of this post and the intensity of its consequences are such that indifference to it is a luxury we cannot afford. I may live across the world from Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, but that does not mean that these abortion bans do not affect me, and every other woman in the world. What conservative law-makers intend to do through criminalizing something that ideally should be a woman’s right, is that they are permanently casting away women’s rights, stagnating any progress and trying to create general disagreement among the people of the nation they have sworn to uplift.
On the 15th of May, “The Alabama Human Life Protection Act,” an act that virtually legitimizes misogyny and racism in the United States of America, was passed. Under the bill, women who undergo an abortion post six weeks of pregnancy can be held “criminally culpable or civilly liable” for homicide. The act bears only two exceptions – if the fetus has a lethal anomaly, or if the pregnancy poses a threat to the mother’s life.
As Hillary said, “women’s rights are human rights.” Banning abortion is essentially depriving a woman of her rights. The deeper you look into this issue, the more you find that apparent ‘pro-lifers’ are not really for saving children and human lives, they are pretty much just ‘anti-women’. The proof of this lies in the fact that nowhere in the bill does it mention how women who are forced to carry out a full term pregnancy against their will, are going to be supported with respect to raising the child that they were not even prepared to have. The bill states that if a woman does undergo an abortion the doctor carrying out the procedure will receive 99 years of jail time. All this for the six-week-old fetus that has a “heartbeat”, because they want to ensure that children grow up unwanted and uncared for. How come the bill does not ensure the father of the child contributes to the child’s life?
It is extremely disturbing to look under the façade of pro-lifers to find that they essentially want to, through this abortion ban, target minorities. The abortion bans have gone beyond women’s rights too, they are a discriminatory policy because factually African-American women are three or four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than the American woman. Law-makers are conscious of this.
How can an eleven-year-old rape victim be required to carry out a full term pregnancy? Can this be deemed humane at all? People may hide under the drape of religion to justify being pro-life but is fanaticism really what we as a society are going to fall victim to?
This obstructive regulation’s not just primary, but its profoundly only purpose is to strip the public of their rights because conservative law-makers will always have the means to facilitate their wives, their daughters and their paramours having abortions.