Letter to the editor: Iowa lawmakers rush in where angels fear to tread

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2429
Can women be trusted with the future of the race, or should the law be brought to bear on America's uteruses?

To the editor:

Pregnancy should not be the subject of punitive laws made because of personal views on who should be in control of women’s medical decisions.

Senate File 471 would make getting an abortion after 20 weeks a class C felony that would punish women with up to 10 years in prison. It’s part of a national attempt to ban all abortions.

I read a blogger who wrote that he did not think that this bill went far enough. His opinion was that pregnant women should be monitored for what they consume as well as their activities. So if a woman does not produce a healthy child, she could be prosecuted.

My friend’s daughter had three pregnancies that were not viable before she could conceive two beautiful daughters. She and husband found out after five months of pregnancy that the fetuses did not have a brain and would not live outside the womb.

This genetic disorder caused terrible distress to this couple, who decided to abort three times. If this law passes, mothers like this will face prison time. This is cruel and unusual punishment for women who abort after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Another consequence of this law is to make pregnant women prove that a miscarriage was not an abortion. Should we go down this road of micromanaging women’s lives? Should Iowa laws make medical decisions for others when nothing is known about the individuals involved?

Julie Stewart
Waukee

9 COMMENTS

  1. I agree entirely. Concern for the unborn is just a ruse. Banning abortion is nothing more or less than the re-institution of patriarchal sexism. It returns half the human race to the status of second-class citizens. To be sure, a woman might have to answer to the Almighty over this but to no one else. Stated simply, if it isn’t your body, it isn’t your business. Be advised that I openly and assuredly promise you that if abortion is banned, I will support and encourage any resulting clandestine abortion operations. My kind will compel you to enforce such draconian rule over this that the quality of life for all will be drastically diminished. Be prepared to quadruple your prison capacity.

  2. Please. Your letter is full of inaccuracies, which makes me think you’re either a misinformed person who hasn’t read the bill and is operating on emotion, or you read it but don’t understand it and are reacting on emotion, or you are flat out telling lies. 1. No pregnant woman will go to prison if an abortion is performed. The bill reads, “Any person who intentionally terminates a human pregnancy with the knowledge and consent of the pregnant person . . .” and “Any person” here means the doctor. If a woman goes in to have an abortion, she may have knowledge and consent, but she isn’t doing the terminating. This fact also nullifies your argument concerning miscarriage. 2. Read section 4b of the bill. This covers the situation you brought up regarding your friend’s daughter. But again, even if it didn’t, the woman doesn’t “go to prison” anyway. 3. The whole “I read a blogger” part has nothing to do with anything. You’re trying to take some random blogger’s crazy comments and glue them to anyone that would oppose the point of your letter. Otherwise, why would you include it in your letter? It’s a pure scare tactic. Here’s the bottom line: Every soul has a right to life. Period. This is not a reproductive rights issue. It’s a “every person has a right to life, (liberty and the pursuit of happiness)” issue. There is a person in that womb- a human being with value. That is the narrative. Immediately at conception, that person has DNA completely unique and different from the mother and father. At 5 weeks, a heartbeat is detected. A unique spirit is being woven inside the mother’s womb!

  3. The “it isn’t your body” is another false narrative just like saying it’s a reproductive rights issue (another false narrative). Here’s what “making decisions about my own body” means: Should I get a tattoo? Where should I get a tattoo? How many tattoos should I get? Should I pierce my ear? How many times? How about my nose? How about my belly button? How about my forehead? What kind of food should I eat? Should I consume alcohol? Should I sleep all day? Should I work out all day? Should I let my nails grow super long? Should I shower my body with perfume? Should I let myself stink? Should I amputate my finger? My arm? My leg? Should I fight in the UFC and get beat to a pulp? These are examples of “making decisions for my own body.” Now, let’s talk about the human being that’s living inside the womb. Can you do whatever you want to that body? How about this? If it were you inside that body, would you want anyone to stick up for you? This has nothing to do with patriarchal anything. It’s about sticking up for the most vulnerable human beings on the planet – children. “My kind will compel you to enforce such draconian rule” sounds like something Hitler would say as he is throwing kids in the gas chamber. So what exactly is draconian? Trying to protect innocent children or sacrificing them for selfish reasons? Easy answer to that one.

    • Please refrain from making such ludicrous and inaccurate comparisons, and please stick to the subject. As for Hitler, he prohibited abortions same as you, except for Jews, Gypsies, etc. Seems like you don’t know your history here at all. The NAZIs demanded pregnancy out of every young, fertile, German woman. They needed soldiers for the state. Apparently, you don’t take me seriously. I have been waging this battle since 1974. It is not up to you or anyone but the woman in question to make decisions about her own body. Sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong risks getting it extricated with a pair of pliers. I assume you’re an intelligent adult, so google up “draconian” yourself if you didn’t already learn that term by the ninth grade. Anyway, I wanted to post on the Facebook site today, but I’ll need to take you to task there tomorrow.

  4. First of all, by looking at the order of the replies above, it looks like I’m talking to Nick in my first response. I am not. I was completely talking to Julie. Nick, your response wasn’t online when I read Julie’s letter and replied to her letter. It must have been waiting for moderation while I was typing my first response.

    I normally don’t reply to articles or letters because I’m a busy man. That’s one of the reasons I do not have Facebook. I don’t have time for it. So I won’t be seeing anything on any Facebook account. It’s only when I see completely inaccurate, false narrative letters like Julie’s that someone must respond. “Why not me?” I ask. My arguments in my two previous replies cannot be broken and are completely logical, yet you still come back with the “make decisions about her own body” comment as if the child inside of her is a cancerous tumor or something and not an independent, unique human being with its own DNA and own beating heart (which is FACT and cannot be denied). One thing about this topic that makes it tough for some people to say what I’ve already said is the fact that it is easy to sound “anti-woman”. I would argue that it is the male who is most responsible for this entire problem. It is the male who typically makes the decision to be intimate with the female out-of-wedlock, or at the very least, is in a position of power and persuasion that leads to the intimacy. It is the male who gets the female pregnant and leaves her alone and helpless. It is the male who typically makes the decision to not man up and marry the mother of his child and help raise the child and be a loving, responsible father and husband. No offense to those males who have married and become responsible fathers and husbands. Kudos to you, but this isn’t about you. My question is this: Why is it so difficult for some people to fight for the woman in a way that makes her feel like she will have complete and total support in either raising the child or in finding a loving family for the child? Maybe it’s because “that’s the hard way.” The “easy way out” is to have the child murdered. Let’s call it what it is: child murder (by a doctor who, ironically, takes an oath upon becoming a physician to “do no harm”)! “Abortion” and “reproductive rights” and “making decisions for my own body” (as if abortion is no different than having surgery to remove cancer- Really?) — each of these is a typical leftist play on words used to replace the true terminology because they know what the true terminology is, and they know if they used the true terminology (child murder), they’d never be able to get away with something so “draconian.” Yes, that word can be used in different contexts, Nick. Draconian: (of laws or their application) excessively harsh or severe. If the majority of methods of child murder called “abortion” are not excessively harsh and severe, I don’t know what is. I challenge any child-murder proponent (ie: pro-abortionist) to look up the different ways that an abortion is carried out. Anything that involves the dismembering of, crushing the head of, cutting of into pieces, suctioning, poisoning in a way that burns off the outer layer of skin and takes one hour to kill, (and other methods I won’t go into) is excessively harsh and severe. This is all true. This is all fact. This is why I used the word “draconian.” How human beings can be okay with this happening to other human beings at their most vulnerable stage of life is absolutely mind-boggling, and sadly it ultimately leads to a culture of death and the devaluing of life at all stages. But what do you expect when you blindly accept evolutionary, Darwinian, socialist thinking? This type of thinking is what leads to the perverting of the U.S. Constitution in a way that creates a “right to murder a pre-born child” and calls it “reproductive rights.” Lastly, how can you say Hitler prohibited abortions and just three words later say, “except for . . . ?” If there’s an exception, then I guess he didn’t prohibit abortions! And if you could step outside of yourself and listen to the way you say certain things and the way you sound, the Hitler comparison is not so ludicrous. Your way of communicating has a certain violent-sounding nature to it.

    • Dude, there is one thing you completely refuse to see. It doesn’t matter one bit just how human, developed or how separate an entity the fetus is, the fact remains it resides in the woman’s body. If it isn’t your body, it’s none of your darn business: period. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. It’s still none of your darn business. It won’t matter whether or not abortion is outlawed. Women will still have abortions. It doesn’t matter to me what you call me, how you feel about me or just how much you disagree with me. I don’t really care. I’m not going to let you enslave half the human race again by using the pretext of saving the unborn. I just don’t care. My heels are dug in, and I’m not giving in one inch. If you succeed in outlawing abortion, you will not only make outlaws of millions of women who chose to remain emancipated, you will also make outlaws of millions of men like me. I tell you openly, plainly and with no apology, I will assist and defend any woman who opts to terminate her pregnancy even if that means breaking the law. I’m not arguing points or positions. I’ve already crossed that Rubicon. I’m telling you flat out just how it’s going to go down. Mind your own darn business! –Nick L. Eakins, Proud Socialist, Humanist and Proponent of Darwinist Theory

  5. Point #1: Nick, this has absolutely nothing to do with “enslaving women.” I’m quite amazed that you are equating a position of valuing life, which includes women, by the way, with promoting slavery — of women, in this case. Again, I would argue that if far more men started taking responsibility for their actions regarding this issue, as stated in my previous reply, women would actually not even think about having their child killed. We should be rallying around this idea of what can we do to help boys become real, humble, Godly men instead of what can we do to get rid of this child. I think it’s safe to say that most women who become pregnant out-of-wedlock would rally around the real, humble, Godly man idea. So the law itself is only part of the issue. Boys being raised to be humble, Godly men is the root of the issue. Ultimately, this is how you eliminate abortions.

    Point #2: What are the requirements necessary for an outside observer to step in and stop something from happening? For example, if you walked out the door and heard a neighbor child screaming from an abuse of some sort, and you turned and looked and saw the child getting severely beaten or having its arms cut off, would you try to intervene or just say, “It’s none of my business.” If you knew a child was being starved to death, would you try to intervene or just say, “It’s none of my business.” This happened recently in Des Moines with a teenage girl. If an abusive, violent act was happening to an adult on the sidewalk as you drove by, if it was happening to you, would you want someone to intervene, or would you be okay with the outside observer driving away and saying, “It’s none of my business.” Honestly, Nick, if I saw something happening to you, I’d stop and intervene. I really would. This could be applied to all sorts of situations and has absolutely nothing to do with “a militarist state” and everything to do with valuing life.

    Here are the requirements: *a violent act is taking place against a human being; *the victim of the violent act is in a vulnerable and/or helpless position requiring assistance; *if an outside observer does not step in, the victim will likely suffer severe emotional and/or physical harm or death; *the victim is innocent. Surely we can agree that you should try to intervene in the above scenarios. If so, why does the location of the child all of a sudden change our reaction, i.e., the child is in the womb vs the child is in the neighbor’s house?

    Point #3: You’re trying to argue that there’s this huge difference based on location, that there’s this huge difference between a child in the womb and a child one day outside of the womb. A child in the womb is dependent on the umbilical cord for nourishment. A child one day outside of the womb is dependent on the breast for nourishment. If this nourishment is taken away in either instance, the child dies. If a doctor prevented the breast milk nourishment of the child, with the knowledge and consent of the woman, would not an outside observer have a duty to try to intervene, similar to a neighbor knowing that the next door child was being starved to death? Where your argument fails is when you equate “outside observers reasonably following their conscience to intervene to save innocent victims from a violent act” with “trying to enslave women” or “trying to create a militarist state.” Surely you see the absurdity of this reasoning.

    Nick, I don’t mean to sound like I’m calling you names. And honestly, I’m not trying to make you change your position, although, I must admit, it sure would be nice if you’d agree with me on some of the basics. The main reason I’m responding is because there are far too many people who read things like this who agree with me but, for whatever reason, are not able to argue the valuing life position effectively. I’m just giving them the arsenal to do it.

    Lastly, it is very ironic to hear a person portray themselves as so “pro-woman” while at the same time having absolutely no problem with extinguishing the life of a little girl — or boy, of course — all because of her “location.” It sure would be nice to have more humble, Godly men be bold and intervene.

    Jesus Christ saves people if they just humble themselves and believe in Him and ask to be saved, and He forgives all people if they just humble themselves and ask for forgiveness, including sinners like me.

    Including you.

    • Dude,you’re not listening. A few quick points.
      A. The decision has been made and the course set. I have stated what will go down and will say no more on this subject here.
      B. I do not believe the Bible is the word of God. I certainly do not interpret it literally.
      C. Though I believe Jesus was sent by God, I do not regard him as the same or equal to God.
      D. I believe fire insurance/hell-and-brimstone religion is one of the most hideous and evil forms of mind and social control ever devised.
      E. I am a former evangelical who has since broken his old programming from his youth.
      F. Though I do not accept the tenets of their faith, I still love and respect my evangelical and old school Catholic friends. You are not one of them.
      G. If and when I am given the opportunity, I will attempt to help others free themselves from the bondage of fundamentalism.
      H. I did my research and discovered who you were and what you were about some time ago. I fully expected you to return with one of your lengthy and non-sequiter diatribes. Know that I am not one of your students, neither will you lecture me as if I were one.
      I. This is my absolute last entry concerning the op-ed here. One last time before I lose my cool.
      MIND YOUR OWN DA## BUSINESS!

  6. Nick, there’s a huge difference between being ‘religious’ (which I’m not) and being led by the Holy Spirit (which I am). It’s not the same thing. And I can say for a fact that only God controls my mind. Man doesn’t. The world doesn’t. Culture doesn’t. Only Jesus Christ. And it’s a wonderful thing beyond anything I can put into words.

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