So What's The Punishment?

If abortion is to be illegal, what sort of punishment for women who obtain illegal abortions should there be?

To my astonishment, anti-abortion movement members who will take their cause to the streets haven't even thought about it. This is a fascinating video (embedding was turned off, so follow the link):

Video

Context

In a comment following a post by hilzoy, aimai casts the murder of Dr. Tiller in a stark light:

Lets get real here. There is one and only one doctor left in this country to whom a desperate woman and her family can resort if they require a late term abortion. One. That isn't an accident and its not a bug. Its a feature of a right wing campaign of violent harassment.

I've been pregnant, twice, and was lucky enough not to need an abortion. But I asked my ob-gyn, the woman I was trusting with my life and health and with that of my unborn child, whether if I ended up needing an abortion or, say, currettage if the fetus died in the womb, I could continue to rely on her care. She said, bluntly, "no." And that I would have to find myself some kind of "clinic" to care for me.

This is not some abstract problem for naughty women. Its a problem for *families*, for men and women, for fathers and mothers, and siblings and children. Because the "choice" that women are faced with in late term abortions is between death for themselves or death for themselves and the fetus.

In killing this compassionate man the right wing--yes, all of the hysterics and the anti choicers and the nice people who get squicked out by abortion but who don't get squicked out by the gunning down of an elderly doctor--have put adult women's lives at risk. And for what? The fetuses that are terminated in late abortions are almost uniformly fetuses that will not survive outside the womb.

The anti abortion movement turned poor Dr. Tiller and his patients into a caricature and into targets in order to intimidate other doctors and women from gaining access to lawful medical care. What they could not gain politically, or legally in a court of law, they chose to try to gain through out and out terrorism and int intimidation. There is simply no question about that.

Whether individual posters like x, or y, support that level of intimidation, or why they prefer violent and non violent intimidation over (say) rational discourse and polite political action, is not for me to say. I don't even really care. They have said they see nothing wrong with stalking and harassing medical professionals, and they have refused to condemn the murder. That says enough about them as people and there's nothing any of the other posters need say.

Well Said

Lacking anything coherent or useful to say at the moment about the murder of Dr. Tiller and the disingenuous response of the anti-abortion zealots, I'll let someone not similarly blocked take it away:

For eight fucking years anybody to the left of Pinochet had to kick back and watch while sensible centrists and the Coalition of the Involuntarily Committable got together and raped the country and fucked up the whole world. For eight fucking years we were told that marching in the streets with giant puppets was the most horrific form of treason imaginable, was demoralizing our troops and hurting the debate and making the baby Pope Benedict cry. Not once did I ever in that time hear Megan McArdle or any of her other sensible friends discuss how maybe, just maybe, President Bush and his administration had PUSHED us to the edge, where we HAD to make those puppets because we felt the political process was closed to us.

No, back then it was "elections have consequences" and "you lost" and "look upon my works, ye mighty, and fuck off," and anytime anybody had the temerity to say, "erm, dude, if you don't mind I'll be over here with this sign on a stick" they might as well have been plotting to shoe-bomb Air Force One the way the whiners in the nuttersphere howled and shrieked. There was none of this, "you just don't know how hard it is to be on the losing end of everything including your soul" back then. Just them, partying with Free Republic on the White House lawn, waving their big foam fingers in our faces going "nyah nyah nyah."

Now that they're out of power, natch, what choice do they have but to go shoot up church lobbies in the hopes of bagging abortion doctors for their trophy wall of American apostates? Really, what else could they do? It's not like they could vote, or convince other people to listen to them, or organize, or do any of the damn things I feel like we've been doing since before there was dirt in order to get a not-entirely-crazy in-another-life-he'd-be-a-moderate-Republican dude finally elected so a third of the country could act like Satan just put his feet up on their mother's white-clothed dinner table. It's not like they could do anything else, right? They had to start shooting.

Right?