In honor of the great state of Texas moving one step closer to ending access to abortion by passing a law that will close all but 5 women’s health clinics in the state and unconstitutionally prohibit abortions after 20 weeks, I thought I’d bring back a list of questions (originally posted at Ms.) that so-called pro-life people seem to have trouble answering. It’s almost as if they haven’t carefully examined their own philosophy.
1. How many years do you consider to be a fair prison term for a woman who has an abortion?
2. How many years for a doctor who performs one?
3. How will you know for sure whether a woman has had an abortion or a miscarriage?
4. Where will the state get the money necessary to prosecute one-third of all women for this crime?
5. Forty-two percent of women who have an abortion have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s $10,830 for a single woman with no children, if you’re counting). When women are forced to have children they cannot afford to raise, will those children become wards of the state or simply new Medicaid recipients? Where will the state find the money necessary to support them?
6. Will you be willing to watch your wife die in front of you when her life is threatened by an unsafe pregnancy that no one is allowed to do anything about? Your daughter? Or are you aware that abortions will always be available for those who can pay for them and therefore know that the law doesn’t actually apply to you?
7. Will rapists have to pay child support to women who are forced to have their children?
8. Will the child of incest be in the custody of its rapist father or the father’s teenaged daughter, his mother?
9. 18 percent of women in America who have an abortion are teenagers. Will they be forced to drop out of high school to raise their children or will the state provide free childcare? While they are pregnant, will you force them to go school or allow a lying in period during which the state pays for a tutor?
10. Will upper-class white women be prosecuted as vigorously as other women who have abortions? You are aware that upper-class white women have abortions, aren’t you? 1 in 3 of all women do. All women, including the anti-choice ones. AKA your friends.
I’ve got a few more questions for the Texas Lege in particular:
1. How much of the taxpayers’ money do you estimate you’ll be spending defending a law in court that you know to be unconstitutional?
2. What are you going to do about the more than 12,000 kids already in foster care in Texas? Are you seriously not aware of the hypocrisy of rejecting an amendment to HB2 that would have added funding for the Adoption Assistance Program, which provides financial assistance to families that adopt children in the foster care system?
3. What are you going to do about the 26%–that’s one in four–children living in poverty in Texas?
4. What are you going to do about the fact that Texas ranks 44th in child welfare?
5. Have you ever seen a tampon? They are very lightweight and do not make good projectiles.
What questions do you have? Add them below!
What do you think?