A bill in Michigan seeks to fine anyone who tries to coerce or pressure anyone into having an abortion. That’s okay. In fact, it’s great. On the surface. But think about it in the larger context. This law does not seek to punish or discourage anyone who tries to force someone not to get an abortion. This is not about protecting choice. This is about further stigmatizing and demonizing abortion.
It’s outright hypocrisy and it gets even worse:
And to take the hypocrisy even further, Michigan happens to be a state with strict parental notification laws for minors seeking abortion. So while it could soon become illegal for parents to attempt to pressure their daughters into having abortions, it is well within parents’ legal rights to force their daughters to continue an unwanted pregnancy. This type of tactic seems to be a hot trend right now in anti-choice legislation: nationwide, we’ve seen proposed laws claiming to provide women with greater ability to make informed decisions, to ensure increased safety of clinics, to prevent abortions due to the race or gender of the fetus. They are the kind of laws that sound almost inarguable, unless we look at them in a larger context. When one specific action or procedure is the subject of intense legal scrutiny, that scrutiny reflects a bias.
Emphasis added because that is flat-out horrible. And absolutely hypocritical.
You can’t just say that pressuring someone to have an abortion is wrong but that outright forcing them to have a baby is okay.
Don’t think for a second any of these bills requiring extra ultrasounds, biased counseling and stricter clinic regulations are to protect people who want abortions. They are all about making it more difficult to access abortions, no matter the cost. Anti-choicers who think otherwise are, at best, deluding themselves, and at worst, completely disingenuous.
^
Being pro-choice means allowing someone to make their own reproductive decisions, period.
