Life Imitates Art, and Not in a Good Way

Charles Coleman Finlay had a story up on Futurismic last year in which not only abortion, but miscarriage, is a crime: "Your Life Sentence."

And damned if some nutty state representative in Georgia hasn't introduced a bill requiring investigation of all miscarriages. This law not only out-and-out prohibits abortion as "prenatal murder," it intends for authorities to make absolutely certain that any miscarriages occurred through no fault of the woman in question. I'm sure any indication that the woman had been drinking or smoked any dope would be enough to charge her with a crime, and it doesn't take any imagination at all to figure out just how far this would go. (Skip your vitamins? Exercise too vigorous? Engage in too much sex while pregnant?)

I found this proposed law so unbelievable when I read the post about it on Daily Kos that I actually read the damn bill itself just to be sure. I note as an insight into this man's mind that the bill only uses the term miscarriage once and puts it in quote marks. The actual words he uses are "spontaneous fetal death."

The law is reprehensible on abortion rights; just stopping right there it's completely extreme and blatantly unconstitutional. And it's not likely to pass; it's just red meat rhetoric. It's not even the most unusual; the proposal in South Dakota that would allow justifiable homicide as a defense to killing a doctor who performs abortion probably takes the cake for that.

But less extreme bills are passing every day. There's an ongoing assault on women by the people Vonda N. McIntyre calls the "Compulsory Pregnancy" brigade. That term really nails it, because given that they're also opposed to contraception and sex education, compulsory pregnancy for any woman who has sex is exactly what they have in mind.

This battle ought to be over. But a look at the Congressional Republican effort to defund Planned Parenthood demonstrates just how bad the situation is.

I saw a note from Charlie Finlay on Facebook in which he observed that a lot of US publications rejected his story because they found it "unrealistic." Oh, I wish it were.