Ever since five minutes after Roe v. Wade was ruled on in 1973, the forced-birthers have been running a giant slut-shaming campaign against both married and unmarried women. Women who have sex, they say, must pay the price. Women who get pregnant, in their view, should be held hostage by their bodies for nine months.
Of course, it’s outrageous when Donald Trump says women who obtain abortions should be punished, which would require prosecution on some charge. Under a firestorm of objections, this front-running GOP candidate for the presidency has now twice retracted his punishment remark made in an interview with Chris Matthews.
But let’s get real.
All across the nation, today, right now as I write this, women are being punished for seeking a medical procedure that the highest court in the land says should be legal, though it mucked things up with the Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling.
For 39 years, poor women have been punished by the Hyde Amendment that—in 33 states—cuts them off from Medicaid funding for all but relatively rare cases of abortion.
They are punished by egregious situations like that in South Dakota. The state has only one abortion clinic, in Sioux Falls, in the southeast corner of the state—staffed by doctors from Minnesota.
A South Dakota woman is punished because she must get state-directed, face-to-face “counseling” that discourages her from obtaining an abortion, counseling that includes false information about the psychological and physical effects of abortions.
Once this information is delivered, she is punished by being forced to wait 72 hours before the procedure can be performed. To make this even more of an onerous punishment for women who live far away, the 72-hour wait does not include weekends or holidays.
A South Dakotan who gets her health insurance from the state’s exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act is punished by only being allowed to get coverage for abortions when her life is endangered or her health is severely compromised.
Women are punished because South Dakota bans telemedicine for the performance of medication abortions. In other words, a woman must come to the clinic to take a pill.
In an effort that forced-birthers openly admit is meant to shut down abortion clinics, South Dakota punishes women by mandating standards for the facilities, including corridor widths, that do not apply to outpatient clinics that perform other far more risky medical procedures, like colonoscopies and certain kinds of cosmetic surgery.
South Dakota isn’t alone. Other states—Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Wyoming—also punish women by having just one clinic performing abortions.