Donald Trump Said Women Should Be Punished for Abortions. Some Women Already Are.
Donald Trump provoked outrage this week when, in arguing that abortion should be recriminalized in the United States, he said that under such a regime there would have to be "some sort of punishment" for women who seek abortions.
Trump was immediately attacked not only by pro-choicers but by abortion rights opponents who accused him of misstating the "pro-life" position and undermining the movement. Trump's remaining two Republican presidential rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, both said they disagreed with his remarks. Trump himself later attempted to backtrack.
It's true that few mainstream anti-abortion activists or politicians call for legal punishments for women who have abortions; in fact, the movement's rhetoric is centered on the idea that abortion restrictions actually "protect" women. (Some so-called "personhood" groups, which aim to give full legal rights to zygotes and fetuses and are generally more forthcoming about the anti-choice movement's goal of criminalizing all abortions, are a different story.)
But what these anti-choice advocates ignore is that some women in the United States are already facing legal punishments for abortion. This has been especially true where fetal "personhood" concepts have been snuck into the law.
A ProPublica investigation last year found that in Alabama, where conservatives on the Supreme Court are using drug laws as a testing ground for anti-abortion "personhood" arguments, nearly 500 women had been prosecuted for "chemical endangerment" of a fetus while pregnant since 2006. The goal was to build up a body of law establishing embryos and fetuses as legal "persons" with full individual rights in preparation for a challenge to Roe v. Wade; the result was women who used drugs while pregnant being prosecuted rather than treated.
Even more disturbing are recent cases in which women have been arrested for attempting - or even being suspected of attempting - to perform abortions on themselves.
Last year, a 33-year-old Indiana woman, Purvi Patel, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges that included violating the state's law against "feticide" after prosecutors alleged she had used drugs she had ordered off the Internet in an attempt to end her pregnancy. Patel got caught up in the legal system after, bleeding and in pain, she sought help at an emergency room. Patel says she had a miscarriage.
It was a similar story for Anna Yocca, a 31-year-old woman in Tennessee, who sought help from a hospital earlier this year after she attempted to terminate a late-term pregnancy using a coat hanger in her bathtub. She ended up being charged with first-degree murder, although that charge was later reduced.
In both of these cases, women facing pregnancy-related medical crises sought help, and ended up arrested. Neither was accused of violating an anti-abortion law, but their cases give a disturbing preview of what might happen if more women are cut off from safe, legitimate abortion providers and met with a legal system that views abortion as a crime.
Already, laws promoted by anti-choice groups that claim to be "protecting" women are cutting off access to safe, legal abortion providers. In 2014, one Pennsylvania woman went to jail after ordering abortion-inducing drugs for her teenage daughter. She told the New York Times that the issue was cost: Along with the $300 to $600 cost of the procedure, the closest abortion clinic was 75 miles away, and a state law would have required two separate visits, meaning either two round trips or a stay in a hotel. Again, it was a trip to the hospital that landed the mother in the legal system.
These cases are just the beginning. In 2013, attorney Lynn Paltrow and sociologist Jeanne Flavin found hundreds of cases in the years since Roe v. Wade of "arrests or equivalent actions depriving pregnant women of their physical liberty."
Cruz, Kasich, and now Trump say they want to outlaw abortion but with no legal consequences for women. Recent experience shows that that is more of a talking point than a reality. Anti-choice politicians must consider the consequences of policies that may drive more women to seek dangerous alternatives to legal abortion and of "personhood" laws that put more pregnant women in legal conflict with the fetuses they carry.
Miranda Blue is the senior researcher for special projects at People for the American Way.
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