Mississippi Against Abortion
As of Thursday, March 8, 2018, Mississippi lawmakers passed the nation’s most restrictive abortion law of not allowing any abortions past 15 weeks pregnancy
The lawmakers of the Republican-controlled Legislature in Mississippi, passed the law that restricted abortions and made them illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The decision came down to a 75 to 34 vote in favor of the Gestational Age Act. The once 20 week ban was changed in an effort to make abortion illegal completely. The Republican Governor Phil Bryant wrote on Twitter that he “[wanted] Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child,” once the law had passed in Senate. These lawmakers are making the decisions for the women that they have no right to make, and this law made Mississippi the only state that restricts abortions as early as 15 weeks.
According to The Cut, the lawmakers only allowed for two exceptions to this rule. One being that the fetus has to have “severe” abnormality that would prevent it from surviving outside of the womb. The second exception was if the pregnancy threatened the women’s life. Women who were pregnant through rape or incest, were not exempted.
Before this “15-week” ban, the law said that it was illegal to abort after 20 weeks. But, nobody ever challenged this because the only clinic in Mississippi, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, usually would not perform an abortion that late in the pregnancy. The owner of this clinic, Diane Derzis, mentioned “it provides abortions as late as 18 weeks after pregnancy” and threatened with suing if the bill was to pass.
Katherine Klein, a coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, claimed that the organization believed the bill was unconstitutional. She also said that the 15-week time period that the lawmakers set “[have] no bearing in science. It’s completely unfounded…” She expects that the bill will be challenged, and in the end, the result would be that Mississippi will lose thousands of taxpayers money.
Other states that have attempted to strike down on abortions were North Dakota and Arkansas. North Dakota attempted to ban most abortions after a six week time period, when a fetus has a heartbeat that can be detected and in Arkansas after 12 weeks, but an appeals court was able to strike down their attempts.
The only outcome that can be expected is not that abortion numbers will go down. Instead, the “number of death and injuries to women will rise,” claims Adrienne Kimmell, Naral Pro-Choice America’s vice president of communications and strategic research. Women are now a step closer to losing their constitutional access to abortion.
This ban is hurting the victims of rape who not only were raped, but who also became pregnant, as a result. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is not supposed to come from some lawmakers; it is ultimately the decision of the women to do whatever they choose to do with their body. Bringing into the world children who could remind the victims of the pain they had to go through, and if the victims or any soon-to-be-mothers are not ready to care for another human being, that baby is going to grow up with a lot of obstacles in his or her life.
Sharon Marcus wrote in her article “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention” about how she wanted to change the way rape was understood. She proposed to understand it as a language and imagine women as “neither already raped nor inherently rapable” (Marcus). As opposed to Mary E. Hawkesworth in “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth” who understood women as already raped or already rapable. Ironically, she mentioned that she would argue that rape was real and that feminist politics must understand rape was a real fact of women’s lives.
Marcus argued against seeing rape as a fixed reality in a women’s life and shifting the view from rape and the aftermath to rape situations and prevention. Many see the act of rape as a factor of life, but that is not the case. By not allowing rape victims to abort when they choose to, only supports this view that it’s a norm for a women to be raped. It ensures that the “foundation of rape” comes from the rapist’s ability to overcome the victim, and aside from already being ‘overpowered’ they are left to deal with the difficulty of raising a baby all on their own.
It is important that people stand up against the Gestational Age Act and push for it to be retracted and proven as unconstitutional. Women do not deserve to have that liberty taken away because at the end of the day it is their body, and they deserve to have the right to make their decisions on their own.
