Digby has a couple of posts up that make an obvious point....if abortion is murder and a woman has an illegal abortion, what is the penalty? Digby says it better than I:
"If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?"
I've been amazed that for all the years the pro-lifers have been manipulating the conversation on this subject, no one from the pro-choice side has ever brought up this obvious question. I have personally written letters to the editor to my local newspaper, written to NARAL, Planned Parenthood, columnists sympathetic to the cause and have never had a whit of interest on this most basic question a pro-lifer should be asked:
What's your plan?
The pro-lifers need to spell it out. They want every state to build more women's prisons. They want teenage girls who had an abortion rather than give birth to their own sibling tried for murder and put in prison for life. Murderers often get the death penalty. Should that be an option?
They often fall back on the "We'll hold the doctor accountable" schtick but this is the equivalent of blaming a murder on a gun, not on the person that pulled the trigger.
The time has come to hold these guys and their "Abortion is murder" rhetoric to account. I'd like to see a national campaign that starts reminding this country that within our laws, "murder" has consequences. Are we really willing as a society to put our women away for life?