Ignore new ad, SD women are victims of abortion, not criminals

Like we don't have enough lying, false-fear spreading pro-abortion ads filling South Dakota airwaves right now. Here comes NARAL Pro-Choice/New York with a new website and political action committee announcing the launching of a new anti-McCain deceptive ad campaign in six swing states and South Dakota. Here it is. The PAC behind this is called Winning Message Action Fund which is an "issue advocacy organization that educates voters about consequences of the movement to ban abortion."

Let's see… what are the consequences of banning abortion? 

First, the unborn are allowed to live. Second, the exploitation of women by those who profit into the hundreds of millions a year from abortion stops. But this ad says, no, women will go to jail. If this worries you, reading this will cause your fears to subside. Basically, even long prior to Roe, there is no documented case since 1922 in which a woman has been charged in an abortion in the United States. The following are highlights from Clarke Forsythe's article, "Why the states did NOT prosecute women for abortion before Roe v. Wade." …

The political claim—that women were or will be prosecuted or jailed under abortion laws—has been made so frequently by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW over the past 40 years that it has become an urban legend. It shows the astonishing power of contemporary media to make a complete falsehood into a truism.

For 30 years, abortion advocates have claimed—without any evidence and contrary to the well-documented practice of ALL 50 states—that women were jailed before Roe and would be jailed if Roe falls (or if state abortion prohibitions are reinstated).

This claim rests on not one but two falsehoods:

First, the almost uniform state policy before Roe was that abortion laws targeted abortionists, not women. Abortion laws targeted those who performed abortion, not women. In fact, the states expressly treated women as the second “victim” of abortion; state courts expressly called the woman a second “victim.” Abortionists were the exclusive target of the law.

Second, the myth that women will be jailed relies, however, on the myth that “overturning” Roe will result in the immediate re-criminalization of abortion. If Roe was overturned today, abortion would be legal in at least 42-43 states tomorrow, and likely all 50 states, for the simple reason that nearly all of the state abortion prohibitions have been either repealed or are blocked by state versions of Roe adopted by state courts.

What about prosecuting women for self-abortion??

As Villanova Law Professor Joseph Dellapenna, author of the encyclopedic book, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, has demonstrated, “in the entire history of Anglo-American law, it appears that the only woman to have been charged with a crime for self-abortion was Margaret Webb—in 1599.”…

As researcher Paul Linton has pointed out, “[a]lthough more than one-third of the States [including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming] had statutes prohibiting a woman from aborting her own pregnancy [self-abortion] or submitting to an abortion performed on her by another, no prosecutions were reported under any of those statutes.”

South Dakota law considers a women the victim an abortion, not a criminal.

South Dakota (1924): “She does not, by consenting to the unlawful operation, become an accomplice in the crime. She should be regarded as the victim of the crime, rather than a participant in it.”

Under Initiated Measure 11, even if a mother seeks an illegal abortion, her intent to kill her baby is not prosecutable under Initiated measure 11. The focus is on the abortionist. But even here South Dakota doctors need not worry, IM11 was carefully written to leave out the language of negligence. Under IM11 a doctor would have to knowingly disregard medical standards to save the life of the child to be criminally prosecuted.

Wendy Long at the National Review has written a good rebuttal to the deceiving ad and made some pretty key connections to Barack Obama. Check it out. 

HT: Jill Stanek