By JOHN YOUNG
Donald Trump caused a stir when during the election campaign he stated that women should be prosecuted for having abortions. He quickly reversed that statement.
Most people strongly opposed to abortion regard it as the taking of innocent human life, and insist that it should be illegal, with severe penalties for doctors who perform abortions. But what of the mothers? If a woman chooses to have an abortion isn’t she in the same category as doctors who perform abortions?
Should one even go further and say that the mother is behaving worse than the abortionist because it is her own baby that she is having killed? As a mother she above all others should protect her baby. So her offense, it seems, is worse than that of the doctor who does the abortion.
Most in the pro-life movement reject the idea that the mother should be punished. But are they consistent? They say that the law should forbid abortions and punish doctors who perform them. To be logical, shouldn’t they go further and say the mother also should be punished by the law, and indeed more severely than the abortionist? Shouldn’t they agree with Trump’s first statement and go even further?
In finding an answer to this question, let us first look at the different attitudes to abortion of the abortionist and the woman. The contrast between the two positions throws light on the question of whether both abortionist and the woman should be punished by the law.
For the abortionist the killing of babies is a job. He earns a living by this means, and it can be a very lucrative job. If he devotes himself to the killing of preborn babies, he can become wealthy. Instead of devoting himself to the healing of the sick, which is what his profession is about, he devotes himself to the killing of the most helpless human beings.
The mother, on the other hand, when faced with the choice of either having her baby or having it aborted, is usually in a state of anguish. Often there is tremendous pressure from a husband or boyfriend or others to choose an abortion. Not infrequently the boyfriend will threaten to leave her if she has the baby, a threat which is often carried out when the mother chooses life for her baby.
So we have this situation. Worldwide many millions of preborn babies are put to death each year. Since murder is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, these children are murder victims. In some places the law allows them to be killed right up to birth.
That is an appalling situation. These children have a right to life, so the law should see abortion as what it truly is: murder. But it is the abortionists, not the mothers, who should be punished.
It may be objected that some women are quite callous about having their babies aborted: They show no remorse and see abortion as a convenient way of solving a problem. Shouldn’t these women be punished by the law?
But such women are very few, nor are they always as callous as they appear to be, but are sometimes pretending to an indifference which they don’t really feel. In any case, they are very much in the minority.
The reasonable position, therefore, is to make abortion illegal (for it is murder), and to prosecute those doctors who continue to commit this crime, while showing every consideration to the women who find themselves in the dreadful situation of asking for an abortion.
Pro-abortionists will be cynical about the above comments. An argument they give against making abortion illegal is that if this were done, the next step would be to prosecute the women.
But that this would not happen should be clear from the situation when abortion was illegal. It was generally recognized then by the law that the women were victims and should be treated as such, not as criminals.
Americans United for Life has an analysis of this question by Clarke D. Forsythe on its website, in which he documents the falsity of the claim made by the pro-abortion movement that women were penalized and jailed for having abortions in the United States. The claim, he says, “has become an urban legend. It shows the astonishing power of contemporary media to make a complete falsehood into a truism.”
Writing of the almost uniform state policy before Roe, Forsythe says: “Abortion laws targeted those who performed abortions, not women. In fact, the states expressly treated women as the second ‘victim’ of abortion; state courts expressly called the woman a second ‘victim.’ Abortionists were the exclusive target of the law.”
To the question, “Are there any known cases of a woman having being indicted or tried for having an abortion in the U.S.?” Forsythe replies: “Not since 1922. There are ‘only two cases in which a woman was charged in any state with participating in her own abortion: from Pennsylvania in 1911 and from Texas in 1922’.”
If abortion is made illegal in the future, we can be certain that the law will not target the women. History leads to that conclusion, as does the position of pro-lifers, who are almost all strongly opposed to any prosecution of these women.
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