Salon: Indiana Pro-Life Bill a ‘Reproductive Jim Crow Law’

March 16th, 2016 5:20 PM

The pro-abortion crowd always been extreme. They have to be extreme to hold the position that taking innocent life is legitimate. However, Bob Cesca of Salon.com has critiqued Indiana’s new pro-life legislation using language that is arguably out of place even at a NARAL board meeting.

According to Cesca, HB 1337, a pro-life bill recently passed by the Indiana legislature: 

authorizes an entire menu of grotesquely unconstitutional anti-choice TRAP(Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, as well as new forms of authoritarian, misogynistic devilry, each of which could be defined as reproductive Jim Crow laws. [Emphasis added]

From here, Cesca continues to sound the pro-abortion the alarm at full blast. “First and foremost, HB 1337 requires that women who undergo the procedure must also pay for...the burial or cremation of the fetus.”

For Cesca this is a “macabre notion of paying for a mini-funeral for what amounts to, in most cases, a microscopic clump of undifferentiated cells.” [emphasis added]

He then raised the tired cliché about pro-lifers not giving sperm rights before conception.

This raises an interesting thought: Given that sperm constitutes half the genetic material of human life, should legislators also require half-funerals every time men in Indiana have orgasms? Of course that’ll never happen because laws like HB 1337 are as much about oppressing women as they are about rescuing every zygote.

Considering that half of the children murdered by abortion are girls, and pro-lifers want those girls to live, one wonders how Cesca can charge pro-lifers with “oppressing women.”

Next, Cesca claims that the law’s ultrasound requirements are Republican conspiratorial attempts to intimidate and scold women.

It also mandates that women listen to the fetal heartbeat before proceeding with an abortion. As we’ve discussed for several years now, this is pure intimidation. It’s about Republican men asserting control over the bodies of women — scolding and intimidating them by proxy, while also rubbing women’s noses in their own alleged participation in infanticide.

Or it could be attempts to give women the most information they can possibly have on a decision that will change their life forever. Doesn’t the choice in “pro-choice” assume an informed choice? Such questions would be asked by journalist, but apparently one was not on the scene when this article was written.

Finally, Cesca reveals the most terrifying aspect of HB1337: it “forces women to carry pregnancies to term, even if the fetus is seriously deformed or disabled.” [emphasis mine]

The law says that people can’t be aborted for being unfit. How awful.

With his alarmism finished, Cesca was left with no recourse but to wonder how Republicans were able to get this law passed without alarming the nation [emphasis mine]:

The real political action continues to occur unnoticed while nearly all attention is focused on presidential politics.Without a Pied Piper named Sanders, Obama or Clinton to follow, state and local matters tend to go by unnoticed, partly because state politics aren’t sexy or compelling enough (though they should be), and partly because social media doesn’t reward state political stories with retweets, likes or shares. It’s difficult to put into words how unforgivable this is.