Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is really scary. From Nick Bauman’s arti­cle:

With this leg­is­la­tion [the “No Tax­payer Fund­ing for Abor­tion Act”], which was intro­duced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans pro­pose that the rape exemp­tion [which would allow fed­eral funds to be used to pay for abor­tions in cases involv­ing rape or incest] be lim­ited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out fed­eral assis­tance for abor­tions in many rape cases, includ­ing instances of statu­tory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For exam­ple: If a 13-year-old girl is impreg­nated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qual­ify to have Med­ic­aid pay for an abor­tion. (Smith’s spokesman did not respond to a call and an email request­ing comment.)

Given that the bill also would for­bid the use of tax ben­e­fits to pay for abor­tions, that 13-year-old’s par­ents wouldn’t be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health sav­ings account (HSA) to pay for the pro­ce­dure. They also wouldn’t be able to deduct the cost of the abor­tion or the cost of any insur­ance that paid for it as a med­ical expense.

And there is more:

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.

It’s a good thing that, as the Editor’s Note says, House Repub­li­cans responded to “an onslaught of out­side pres­sure” by decid­ing “to remove the con­tro­ver­sial forcible rape lan­guage” from the bill, but that the ques­tion of that lan­guage should have arisen in the first place is deeply, deeply trou­bling. It’s one thing to dis­agree on whether tax­payer mon­eys should be used to pay for abor­tions – not that this dis­agree­ment does not have pro­found con­se­quences on the real lives of real men, women and chil­dren, but espe­cially women and chil­dren – but it is quite some­thing else to try to roll back the def­i­n­i­tion of rape and re-eastablish, re-enshrine, male het­ero­sex­ual enti­tle­ment so that a woman’s say­ing “no” is not enough to hold respon­si­ble and account­able for rap­ing her a man who dis­re­gards that no, whether he uses force or not.

“The term ‘forcible rape,’” the arti­cle points out,

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.

As Lau­rie Levenson, a for­mer assis­tant US attor­ney and expert on crim­i­nal law at Loy­ola Law School in Los Ange­les, puts it:

This is a bill that could have a dra­matic effect on women, and lan­guage is impor­tant. It sure sounds like some­body didn’t want [the excep­tion to cover] all the dif­fer­ent types of rape that are rec­og­nized under the law.

In other words, it sounds like the peo­ple who wrote this bill were try­ing to move US law a lit­tle bit closer to the only log­i­cal con­clu­sion to which the anti-choice posi­tion can ulti­mately lead, which is that it is irrel­e­vant how a woman’s preg­nancy occurred. Since the life which began with that preg­nancy is, accord­ing to this posi­tion, a fully human and fully inno­cent life, then there ought to be no excep­tion which would allow the end­ing of that life through any form of out­side inter­ven­tion. If try­ing to enshrine that idea in the law is not an open dec­la­ra­tion of war on women’s sex­u­al­ity and bod­ily auton­omy, I don’t know what is.

Tagged Reproductive Rights

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