Funerals for fetuses: Missouri bill would force painful ritual on women who abort
No, this is not a sick joke. Republicans in the Missouri House really do want to force women who have an abortion to bury or cremate the fetus at their own expense.
(Whether to bury or cremate would be 100% up to them, though; who says this state is anti-choice?)
No word on whether women obtaining a legal procedure would then have to wear black for a state-mandated mourning period.
“I’m 100% pro-life,” explained the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Hannah Kelly, a Republican from Mountain Grove. “This is a great way to honor the life of the child.”
No, it’s not. Whatever you think about abortion, this is 100% disrespectful to all involved, and at least arguably involves mandating a religious observance.
If the object of being “100% pro-life” is to convince women to make a different decision, this measure is not the way to accomplish that goal.
Instead, it seems designed to convince women that pro-lifers don’t care about them or their circumstances. If they did, they wouldn’t be punishing them by requiring a ritual that could only be painful. If such a burial were a comfort, it wouldn’t have to be mandated, would it?
As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who is strongly pro-life, wrote earlier this month, in a column headlined “What Has the Pro-Life Movement Won?,” all kinds of services and supports for women and families would have to be far stronger in a world where abortion was in all cases illegal, and “actually getting a major expansion of social services in states that might conceivably ban abortion would require a different Republican Party than the one that exists today.”
You can say that again.
“For a long time,” Douthat wrote, “the core pro-life position — not that abortion should be a little more regulated or a little more culturally disfavored, but that it should be truly forbidden in almost every case — has been a symbol and an abstraction: an idea that Republican presidents can very notionally support, a cause that judicial appointees can benefit from without directly endorsing, an ideal that Republican state legislators can invoke without having to compromise their libertarian principles to make it real.”
But if it really were outlawed completely, that would have to change radically, and then we’d see who is and is not really “100% pro-life.”
The most reliable way to reduce the number of abortions is to expand access to health care and other services, which Missouri lawmakers steadfastly refuse to do. Outlawing abortion without doing that can’t work.
Meanwhile, “forcing funeral rituals on our patients is morbid and dystopian,” said Dr. Colleen McNicholas, of Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region — our state’s last abortion clinic.
Kelly’s bill would also outlaw the post-abortion trafficking in baby body parts that she admits she has no proof is happening now. “Prevention is worth a pound of cure,” she said. Which is why some of us support the widest possible access to birth control.
