You want your government small and non-intrusive? Well try this one on for size! Jan Brewer, the same Republican governor who tried to make racial profiling legal in her state of Arizona, just signed another racially motivated bill into law. This time, Mrs. Brewer is targeting minority women electing to get a legal abortion in her state.
According to House bill 2443, it will now be a crime for abortion providers to provide the service base on the race or sex of the fetus. The explanation for the law, as stated by its supporters, is that abortion facilities are disproportionately setting up their operations in minority neighborhoods, so in an effort to curb these clinics from setting up shops, Jan Brewer’s law will allow for doctors to be sued legally for performing the procedure.
According to reporting from The Arizona Republic;
The law allows the father of an aborted fetus – or, if the mother is a minor, the mother’s parents – to take legal action against the doctor or other health-care provider who performed the abortion. If convicted of the felony, physicians would face up to seven years in jail and the loss of their medical license.
The ruling would be totally ridiculed and frankly called racists if the law made the language more direct, like saying any physicians performing abortions for minorities can face up to seven years in jail if convicted, so the wisdom at play here, is to put these physicians on notice – having them second-guessing any decision to offer the service to those minorities women requesting it. A physician knowing they can end up in jail or fined if a case is brought against them, will reconsider performing this service to minorities.
Conservatives place great emphasis on their love for small government. Yet, not small enough that it won’t dictate what you can or cannot do with your own productive organs.
From what I read from the Arizona Republic site, the law was being introduced because of an implication that abortions are being performed for women who do not want to continue the with pregnancies because they do not like the race or the sex of the child.
So the questions are now–what study was done to make this determination?;what woman would admit this to their doctor as the reason they’d want to have an abortion?; and finally, is this not a patient/doctor confidentiality and an intrusion into a woman’s privacy to now have a ‘selection jury’ that will ascertain why a woman wishes to have the procedure done?
It sounds like the bill was introduced only to make it look like Ms. Brewer was on the case with her anti-abortion stance. It sounds ridiculous
@AZDem – Your question is answered in the included link for The Arizona Republic.
Where did you find “that abortion facilities are disproportionately setting up their operations in minority neighborhoods, so in an effort to curb these clinics from setting up shops, Jan Brewer’s law will allow for doctors to be sued legally for performing the procedure”? I live in AZ and haven’t heard anything about this before – I’ve only seen it as a way to limit abortion and move the state one step closer to outlawing it altogether. That’s bad enough, but I haven’t seen it as a way to make it difficult for any race to get an abortion.