Font ResizeEvery year or so, it seems, a Utah legislator decides to take on abortion. This time, it's Rep. Carl Wimmer, who wants to close a "loophole" in the state's law, which holds that a woman cannot be charged for trying to arrange an abortion.
At the same time, anti-abortion forces in Washington, D.C., want to force low- and medium-income women who get federal insurance subsidies to use their own money to buy separate policies that cover elective abortion.
Does anyone remember that under state and federal law, abortion within the first trimester is legal and has been since 1973? Utah tried to outlaw abortion in the early 1990s, and several years and more than $1 million in taxpayer money later, a federal judge threw the law out.
And what happened to the idea that a woman has the right to make her own decisions regarding reproduction?
Abortion has long been a wedge issue, but it's looking like it might turn into an actual wedge to dislodge laws that repeatedly have been upheld in federal court.
That said, I do not disdain those who have deep religious or ethical reasons for opposing abortion. A wise colleague in that camp explained her thinking to me just the other day, and I came away respecting even more her faithful, principled stand.
But there are very few women, I believe, who make a decision to have an abortion lightly or carelessly. And making that decision is their constitutional right.
Let's get down to which
Wimmer's bill is based on a single episode involving a 17-year-old Vernal girl whose boyfriend reportedly bullied her into getting rid of her fetus, and she paid a man $150 to beat her into a miscarriage. (The child survived and is in foster care.)
The man went to prison and the girl pleaded no contest to solicitation to commit murder. But just last week a judge ordered the girl released from custody because a woman cannot be prosecuted for attempting to arrange an abortion.
Calls to the Herriman Republican on Friday went unanswered, but Wimmer has said the dismissal was a example of "a few instances ... where the law, or interpretation of the law, fails society. This is one of those times."
Wimmer wants to allow prosecutors to charge a woman who arranges an illegal abortion with criminal homicide. He also wanted to allow the death penalty for such a crime; the bill was amended to strip that ironic clause.
Back in D.C., anti-abortion forces persuaded the House to forbid low- and middle-income women from using federal subsidies to buy insurance that covers abortion.
The same forces are pressuring the Senate to abandon its plan to allow abortion coverage in federally subsidized policies, even though only private money would be used to cover the cost of the procedures.
It's telling that two interim committee members who voted against Wimmer's proposal this week were women: Sen. Ruz Robles and Rep. Christine Johnson, both Democrats.
What about poor women, abused women, they ask, or those who can be coerced by their men. And what about the girls enrolled in Utah public schools that must only offer abstinence-based sex education?
Johnson also notes that, at least in Utah, men seem to drive the anti-abortion train.
"I would never presume to try and legislate policy, behavior and health care governing a man and his body," she said. Nor, she added, would she presume to judge another's lives and choices.
Some women make the painful decision to end a pregnancy -- and the hurt may linger for life.
But it is a choice, legally and ethically, that they are entitled to make.
