Abortion foes think women need parenting

Imagine being in your mid-30's, you've been out on your own for a decade or more, and suddenly a significant life decision is taken out of your hands and given to a Justice or State Legislature. That is what could happen to women IF anti-abortion advocates have their way.

Encouraged by Justice Kennedy's "whose you daddy" comments in an anti-abortion decision by the Supreme Court last month, abortion foes are working to pass tough new counseling and informed-consent laws intended to harass women seeking abortions. Don't think for a moment that anti-abortion advocates care a wit about women -- they don't. They only care about controlling women's lives.

The New York Times reports:

For many years, the political struggle over abortion was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by opponents of abortion.

But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same.

The majority opinion in the court’s 5-to-4 decision explicitly acknowledged this argument, galvanizing anti-abortion forces and setting the stage for an intensifying battle over new abortion restrictions in the states.

Abortion rights advocates who have been asleep at the wheel need to wake up and smell the coffee. It's past time to make the case for why this kind of thinking is not only offensive to women ... but dangerous to women's lives!