Let's add masturbation, menstruation, & SIDS

this may be the stupidest thing i've ever heard.

Measure on illegal abortions heads to governor

Utah just secured its spot at #2 on my list of Places Never to Go. (#1, for those of you keeping track, is still Texas.) They're outlawing miscarriage.

The Salt Lake Tribune article linked above makes a good effort to including both the language of the bill and some of its (unintended?) implications in a limited number of inches. I think the blogosphere (see Jezebel, Feministe, RH Reality Check, and even Dan Savage) has done a better job of exposing the actual meaning of this legislation.

Utah wants to prosecute women who "intentionally, knowingly, [or] recklessly" cause the death of their unborn children. It started with the case of a 17-year-old woman who paid a man $150 to beat her up when she was seven months pregnant in the hopes that she would lose her baby. Ok--that was probably a stupid decision on her part. I tend to think it would do more good to examine the societal structures that made this poor girl feel it was better to pay someone to injure her than to carry a baby to term, which I suspect are the same structures that led an unmarried 17-year-old to become pregnant in the first place (abstinence-only sex education, limited access to contraception, the devaluation of everything about a women except her sexuality....you get the idea).

Even if you're not going to examine the underlying structures (and work to fix them), you at least have to admit the fact that miscarriage is a natural phenomenon. As many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, for any number of reasons. To criminalize "reckless" behavior that results in a miscarriage could be to criminalize drinking alcohol, playing contact sports, walking down stairs without holding onto a railing, and staying in a domestic violence situation with an abusive partner because you are unable to leave. To criminalize "reckless" behavior that results in a miscarriage could also be to criminalize any of these actions, and others, in which a woman engages when she doesn't even know she's pregnant. The majority of miscarriages take place in the first trimester, and the majority of women are well into that period before they find out they are pregnant.

How will Utah determine whether a woman engaged in criminal behavior without investigating every miscarriage in the state? Any woman who loses her baby could potentially become the target of a criminal investigation, and that while she is going through what is already an emotionally devastating experience.

I get that the main intention of the bill is to punish women for procuring illegal abortions, which are an outrageous enough attack on the autonomy of women in themselves. (If legal abortions were more readily available and less violently contested--and if the underlying societal structures that make so many women feel the need to obtain them were not in place--this wouldn't even be an issue.) But inherent to that sentence, and as Jill from Feministe points out, the main intention of the bill is really to punish women.

My favorite part might be how the bill's sponsor, Margaret Dayton, actually said while arguing against lifting the "reckless" specification from the bill, "I don't think we want to go down the road of carefully defining the behavior of a woman."