For the past week, everybody in Utah has been talking about the sex-ed bill, which would have banned discussion of sexual education except abstinence in schools (even though parents can now opt their children out of sex ed if they want. Not that it makes much difference because it's already against the law for teachers to promote the use of contraceptives during Sex Ed. I certainly never saw the ol' condom-on-the-banana trick). The Sex-Ed bill was vetoed, but it was never meant to be a law, anyway. Most likely, Herbert was happy to appease moderate voters in Utah (and remember, the most populated city did go to Obama in 2008 so moderate voters do exist) while leaving his hardcore base something to feel fired-up about.
While everybody talked about that, Utah's own anti-choice, anti-woman legislation remained largely ignored.
From Trust Women Pac Red State Round-up
This past Monday, March 5th, the Utah House passed HB 461 requiring women seeking abortions to wait seventy-two hours between the initial consultation and the procedure. The bill was introduced by Representative Steve Eliason and passed by a vote of 59-11. The Utah Senate passed the bill last night, Thursday, March 9th, after just 53 seconds of debate by a vote of 22-6. It will be sent to Governor Gary Herbert who is likely to sign it into law.
But that's to be expected here in Utah...
Where you can be prosecuted for having a miscarriage. A law that only came to exist because a teenage girl did not have access to a safe and legal medical procedure.
Starting from the beginning means revisiting the case of a 17-year-old girl from Vernal, Utah, who was seven months pregnant last May, when she paid 21-year-old Aaron Harrison $150 to beat her up after her boyfriend threatened to leave her if she didn’t terminate the pregnancy.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Harrison brought the girl to the basement of his parent’s house and attacked and kicked her, leaving bruises on her stomach and a bite mark on her neck. The baby survived the assault, was born in August, and has since been adopted.
Vernal is just about as rural as you can get in Utah. It's a poor area where teenage girls are expected to get married young, are raised to believe they're nothing without a man at their regular Mormon indoctrination meetings, and do not have access to sexual education, or much of anything else. So a impoverished, perhaps minimally education young woman who definitely will not be attending college, who probably feels like she doesn't have many options, gives into an abuser's demands to abort her child, and since she can't actually have the medical procedure, she pays another man to
beat her until the baby dies.
In Utah, this is clearly a sign that Something Needs To Be Done With the Sluts. In Utah, nobody in power stops to think "How can we stop this from happening again?" and instead they want to find a way to punish and criminalize.
In June, the 17-year-old girl, whose name has not been released because of her age, pleaded no contest to a second-degree felony count of criminal solicitation to commit murder. Juvenile Court Judge Larry Steele ordered that she be placed in the custody of Utah Juvenile Justice Services until she turns 21, but she was released in October after the judge said that, under state law, “a woman who solicits or seeks to have another cause an abortion of her own unborn child cannot be criminally liable."
If the 17 year old had been prosecuted under Utah's new law, she would have received 15 years in prison as punishment for her barbaric acts. The man who coherced her into this decision will not be punished. The community that withheld vital sexual education will not be held accountable. The church that taught her to venerate men and do as they say will not be questioned. But now Utah has a way to make sure that young women like her can be held criminally liable.
And that casts a damned wide net.
Planned Parenthood closed its clinic in Vernal, Utah 10 years ago. Three clinics offer abortions in Utah -- all located in Salt Lake City, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Vernal. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for sexual and reproductive health in the United States, 93 percent of all Utah counties have no abortion provider.
...
Every day in Utah, 12 teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant. Chlamydia is the number one most reported communicable disease in the state, according to the Utah Department of Health. In 2007 there were 5,721 newly reported cases; 3,748 of those cases (66 percent) were diagnosed in individuals between the ages of 15 and 24. In Utah, you’re more likely to get chlamydia than chicken pox or the flu.
This stranglehold on Utah women is only going to get worse. In Utah, it's not a GOP strategy. In Utah, it's personal. In Utah, it's the same attitude and mindset that allowed the LDS Church to throw all its weight behind Prop 8. Misogyny and homophobia go hand in hand, and the predominately Mormon men and women in the Utah legislature have a very vested interest in controlling sexuality and promoting the hetero-normative ideal.
Now, Utah wants women to wait 72 hours between initial consultation and the abortion procedure.
A woman in Vernal would have to find a way to travel to Salt Lake City for an appointment with one of only three providers (she's not going to have an easy time getting an appointment because Salt Lake providers do not just serve Utah). Once there, she will have to have the means to board herself for a full three days, and that's money on top of the fee which is already quite cost prohibitive. Then of course, she'll need time to recover after the surgery, turning what should be a simple out-patient procedure into a minimum of a week of hotel costs as well as the gas for the 350 mile round trip.
And Vernal is one of the more "civilized" rural areas in Utah, and certainly much closer to Salt Lake than many other of the tiny towns and townships that dot the state. The 72-hour waiting period is the harshest in the nation, and its specifically designed to shut down the traffic to Salt Lake City. They can't close the clinics or murder the doctors, but they can do their best to turn our dot of blue into an island, as inconvenient and costly as traveling to California for the procedure.
The saddest thing about the Sex-Ed bill is that it's not that far away from the current situation in Utah where sex ed is far, far from comprehensive. Where girls and young women are already at high risk for pregnancy and STDs. The scariest thing is that it's not going to get any better here. They're not done and they won't be until abortion is outlawed in all but name only and men hold our fallopian tubes in the same grip as the purse strings.
The protesters who rallied at the State Capitol thought they were fighting to hold on to the minimal sexual education they had. Meanwhile, their daughters and sisters and mothers and aunts and best friends lost critical ground in the battle for their own autonomy. Other states may be falling in line with the GOP's strategy, but Utah has been proudly bearing the banner for years now.