South Dakota’s Gov. Mike Rounds (a Republican) recently signed a bill banning abortions in nearly all cases, including rape and incest. Though this bill will be opposed and hopefully overturned before its induction on July 1, this law is a bad omen of things to come and threatens the 33-year-old decision of Roe v. Wade.
For the life of me (haha), I cannot understand how laws of this kind can be legal. First of all, South Dakota’s bill does not even have an exception in rape or incest cases. Therefore, if some 18-year-old girl is raped, she not only has to live with this horrible experience for the rest of her life, but she also has to go through nine months of pregnancy and birth (unless, of course, the ’emergency’ contraception techniques that the law promises work) and raise the child of her rapist.
With ridiculous rules like these, I bet that one day there’s going to be a law which states that girls have to marry their rapists because it’s against God to have sex without being married. Now, with so many conservatives screaming for tougher laws against pedophiles and rapists, wouldn’t they think that South Dakota’s bill is utterly clashing with their other views?
Of course they don’t, and I’m not surprised. Because these people are crazy, neoconservative, religious fundamentalists who are only against abortion because they think that unwanted baby Billy will have to spend eternity in Limbo.
As much as they call abortion ‘murder’ and bring in doctors to ‘prove’ that fetuses feel pain (we might as well say that tobacco fights cancer), the only baby they truly care about is baby Jesus. To argue with these people, one should never use logic, but instead use religion itself.
Limbo actually no longer exists because the pope recently abolished it (yes, he can do that). So now we no longer have to worry that aborted fetuses will be floating in space for all eternity. But now where do the fetus souls go? It seems that no one wants them. This points out the hypocrisy that religion constantly demonstrates and anyone who uses it as a factor in determining law is just a plain idiot.
You know what, if religion plays such a big role for anti-abortionists, they should just simply talk to their daughters and work it out through the family. If an impregnated girl has strong religious values, she certainly doesn’t have to get an abortion, but another girl who holds different beliefs should be allowed to do what she wants. This country is not a theocracy and any law based solely on religious morals is grossly unjust.
Of course, we know the arguments of why abortion is just and I won’t repeat them, because what really fascinates me is why this is such a heated issue in the first place. The reason why is that there are women who are pro-life.
The fact that there are female pro-lifers lets people think that this is not an issue of female liberty. I find it interesting that many women are contributing to their own subjugation.
This is analogous to the early 1900s, in which female organizations actually campaigned against the 19th Amendment. I never heard of Jews having their bags packed before the Gestapo came, or of African-Americans finding the back of the bus more comfortable.
I believe there is this problem because girls are given the impression that they are inferior since their birth. Little, inadvertent hints, like constantly seeing commercials of women cleaning dishes, or in other traditional roles, are damaging to a child’s psyche.
Look at the new Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito. He actually ruled that women must obtain permission from their husbands before having an abortion. Judges like these should be ignored and shunned from society. It’s because there are so many women with this inborn inferiority complex that men like Alito are able to rise so high in the government.
Society has allowed pro-life nonsense to grow out of proportion. We’ve been giving pro-lifers too much respect. People who believe in fetus souls and the inferiority of women do not deserve the privilege of intelligent debate. This is a time that calls for much more than simple protesting and talking with Larry King. South Dakota’s decision is a scary thing and must be fought against with as much fervor as the Civil Rights movement.
David Syatt is a first-year literary journalism major. He can be reached at dsyatt@uci.edu
