Anti-Choicers are Closet Communists

By Ema , The Well Timed Period. Posted April 22, 2008.

Anti-choice leader Leslee Unruh and her merry band of totalitarian terrorist masters are back with a new, and improved, plan intended to make pregnant women wards of the State. [Tormenting the people of South Dakota is just an added bonus.]

Unruh is a long-time anti-choice activist, and was a leader in South Dakota's recent failed attempt to outlaw abortion. She's been in trouble with the law for her anti-choice extremism; she ran the Alpha House, a "Crisis Pregnancy Center" which was investigated in 1987 after allegations that Unruh was bribing clients into giving up their babies for adoption. The 19 charges -- which included five misdemeanors and four felonies -- were dropped after the Center pleaded "no contest" and paid a fine. Unruh went on to found the Abstinence Clearinghouse, one of the country's leading abstinence-only indoctrination organizations. She continues to sit as President of the Clearinghouse.

The Abstinence Clearinghouse claims "to promote the appreciation for and practice of sexual abstinence (purity) until marriage through the distribution of age appropriate, factual and medically-referenced materials." But Unruh's version of "factual and medically-referenced" is apparently a loose one -- she has claimed that masturbation is "the first step to sexual addiction," and the group maintains the position that self-love is dangerous (to their credit, they do not claim that it causes hairy palms or blindness).

Unruh really catapulted herself to anti-choice fame when she led the push to outlaw abortion in South Dakota. She failed, but she's back at it again -- and this time, the anti-choice organizations she's working with are taking a cue from the Commies and sending Big Brother directly into your bedroom.

The comrades have collected nearly 50,000 signatures to place the Orwellian An Act to Protect the Lives of Unborn Children, and the Interests and Health of Pregnant Mothers, by Prohibiting Abortions Except in Cases Where the Mother’s Life or Health is at Risk, and in Cases of Rape and Incest (.pdf) initiative on the Nov. 4 South Dakota ballot.

As a rule, when a piece of legislation claims to "protect" your interests and health you need to promptly head for the hills and find a suitable cave to hang out in, secure in the knowledge that the intent of such a law is to inflict as much damage on you as a mob of your fellow citizens can get away with.

Exhibit A, the proposed South Dakota initiative and the nine ways it "protects" the interests and health of pregnant women:

1) Creates a make–believe biology.

The initiative decrees fertilization as the start of a pregnancy and a fetus as being separate from his or her mother, as a matter of scientific and biological fact [uterine wall, placenta, umbilical cord, and amniotic membranes be damned].

Of note, the initiative defines "pregnant" as having a living unborn child within the pregnant woman’s body, throughout the entire embryonic and fetal ages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and child birth, and "unborn child" (and "unborn human being") as an individual living member of the species homo sapiens throughout the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth (emphasis mine).

This means that patients with a Fetal Demise In Utero or those with a blighted ovum or a molar pregnancy are not, in fact, pregnant. Heh, let's see these patients try to get an abortion, seeing how they're not even pregnant to begin with.

I mock but I shouldn't. Other than cases of rape or incest, this initiative only allows abortions for patients in danger of death or organ failure. Which means women who, say, miscarry but are not yet acutely hemorrhaging or those who are not fortunate enough to present with a ruptured ectopic will simply have to wait a bit until their condition destabilizes enough to put them in the "at death's door/danger of imminent organ failure" category. There's just nothing funny about debasing people in need of medical care!

Fortunately, the initiative actually prohibits abortions even for those patients on the brink of death or organ failure, so it's not like the stable patients have that much to complain about. More on that in a bit.

2) Bans all birth control.

Nothing in section 2 of this Act prohibits the prescription, sale, use, or administration of a contraceptive medicine, drug, substance or device, if prescribed, sold, used, or administered prior to the time when it could be determined that the woman is pregnant through conventional medical testing, and if the contraceptive measure is prescribed or sold in accordance with manufacturer instructions.

See more stories tagged with: reproductive justice, abortion, anti-choice, pro-life, pro-choice

Ema writes for The Well-Timed Period.

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