http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1148.shtmlDo you remember the Fugitive Slave Act? It criminalized not only slaves who'd escaped to non-slave states, but also anyone who helped them flee. That law has troubling echoes in a new law, passed by the Republican Senate and House, that will make it illegal to transport a girl from a state requiring parental consent to get an abortion in another one.
The Fugitive Slave Act forced individuals who did not believe in slavery to collaborate in maintaining it. In states that had banned slavery, it compelled law enforcement officials to return escaped slaves to their masters, and coerced ordinary citizens into supporting this process. It isolated slaves from outside assistance, by threatening to imprison anyone who would help them escape.
Isolation is also the goal of the benignly named Child Custody Protection Act, which will become law if the House and Senate work out their differences. It targets girls who already feel they cannot talk to their parents without risking disaster. It leaves them on their own, because those who might have tried to help them will face jail if they do. Whether a sister, an aunt, a grandmother, counselor, or friend, anyone could be imprisoned for intervening to help. Meanwhile, the same Senators who backed it voted down an amendment that would have increased support for programs offering contraception and sex education -- including abstinence education. Minors are also excluded from the FDA's recent ruling allowing non-prescription sales of the "Plan B" morning-after pill, so the goal seems to be less to prevent teen pregnancies than to punish them.
The House version goes further still, allowing parents to sue doctors who perform these out-of-state abortions. Both bills let the states with the harshest anti-abortion laws (and the least social support for women with children) control the actions of citizens in states with fewer restraints. They trample core federalist traditions, letting states with the most draconian laws impose their will on others. They even raise the prospect of similar federal or state laws prohibiting adult women from traveling to overcome state abortion bans-like a bill now pending in the Ohio House that bans abortion without exception, while making it illegal to transport or help women of any age to receive abortions in other states. This would seem to violate numerous judicial decisions affirming the right to travel and prohibiting one state from unilaterally extending its laws to another. But with Bush's recent court appointments, all sorts of longstanding precedents risk being subordinated to a hard-right ideology.
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the article ends with this:
The Fugitive Slave Act sought to isolate slaves through legal threats against their would-be emancipators, including those who'd help them once they'd reached so-called "free states." Escaped slaves were not even allowed to argue their story in court. The Child Custody Protection Act would erect similar walls around the lives of the young women it targets, silencing their voices and overriding their choices. In the name of honoring the primal community of the family, the act would isolate young women from all other possible supportive communities who might advise or help them to not have a child before they were ready. More than anything the law is about control. Not the reasonable control by which we as parents stop our children from touching a hot stove or running into the street, but a more insidious control by which we would force them to bear children when they're unwilling. A new generation of young women will have to live in the cage of this imposed choice for the rest of their lives. Their children will bear the burden of resentment. This new law now extends that cage throughout the country, and, by making criminals of those who would help, will require the rest of us to participate in maintaining it.
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there it is again - controlling the female
with the help of our Congress
the race of men need a smack down (along with the women who support this crap)
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