Women Imprisoned for Miscarriage
Women imprisoned for miscarriage: Is this possible? YES.
Check out this article about a new Utah law against women in the works. This one has just GOT TO GET YOUR ATTENTION!!! Seriously….You should lose sleep over this one.
Quote from the Salt Lake Tribune, “The Senate on Thursday approved HB12 on a vote of 24-4, criminalizing a woman’s “intentional, knowing, or reckless act” leading to a pregnancy’s illegal termination.”
Here’s the deal. A woman allegedly chose to have a man beat her up in order to force a miscarriage to happen. This apparently appalled the Utah Senate and the House so that they began developing this bill, which dictates that a woman cannot be charged if she gets a legal abortion, but she CAN BE CHARGED WITH MURDER if she performs any kind of reckless act that leads to a miscarriage, what they are calling an “illegal termination.”
This is so screwed up on so many levels….
The Salt Lake Tribune journalist makes a very good point in discussing the circle of violence that occurs in domestic violence scenarios. The number of women who return to their husbands or boyfriends after a violent act has been committed by that “significant other” is tremendous and it was mentioned that a return on the woman’s part when pregnant or who gets pregnant afterward, could be considered a reckless act leading to getting beaten up again, having a miscarriage as a result and then being put in prison for murder. How about that? Another example of punishing victims.
There is a sort of psychological turmoil that abused women go through that others should not attempt to judge. There is also a potentially extreme emotional struggle that a woman goes through after experiencing a miscarriage, sometimes experiencing a terrible state of depression, and these are the women who will be called into question, during these already difficult times, to determine if they did anything that may have caused their miscarriage. Nice, eh?
Those who are opponents of gender equality do not play fair.
I have so many analogies and thoughts that could be shared here…. But I think this story should be horrific enough. If you have to watch a man’s head get sawed off, you don’t need any kind of descriptive narrative to increase the impact of that experience.
I am hoping that all who read this story, via one of the links in this blog or just read this blog alone, have some sort of recognition of the way that this states so boldly how insignificant the rights of women are in the minds of so many in America….and anyone familiar with a number of other countries that are well-known for oppressing women…well, in many of those countries their daily abuses are so significant in percentage of occurrences upon women that they are not living under the veil of lies that creates in American women the belief that we are already treated as equals… We need to wake up and stop this.
Check it out. Research it. Look at the different news stories. Make phone calls. Write about it. Do something…whatever you know how to do at this particular moment in time.
Maybe you will end up pregnant, on vacation in Utah, and slip on some ice, miscarry and go to jail. Then you would wish you had at least tried…. Never going to happen? Maybe it will and maybe it won’t. Maybe it will happen to your daughter, niece, friend, mother, cousin… Who knows….
We need to stand up and speak out. Women must support women if we don’t want the injustices to continue or worsen. Clearly, conditions for women, at least women in America, will worsen if we do not act.
