Missouri governor Jay Nixon has vetoed a stupid malevolent control-the-women anti-abortion bill.
Setting up an election-year showdown with the Legislature, Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed on Wednesday a bill that would have required a 72-hour waiting period for abortions in Missouri.
Nixon said the bill’s lack of an exception for victims of rape and incest was a “glaring omission” that was “wholly insensitive to women who find themselves in horrific circumstances.”
But even if the bill had contained such an exception, he would have vetoed it, Nixon said in unusually sharp criticism of an abortion bill.
Tripling the current 24-hour waiting period “serves no demonstrable purpose other than to create emotional and financial hardships for women who have undoubtedly already spent considerable time wrestling with perhaps the most difficult decision they may ever have to make,” the governor, a Democrat, said in his veto message.
Because guess what, women know how to think, all by themselves. They don’t need legislators trying to force them to think; they can do it on their own.
But not all legislators get that.
The Republican-controlled Missouri House and Senate approved the longer waiting period by large margins in May. Supporters said that women need more time to consider their decision and that it would reduce the number of abortions.
If women “need” more time to consider their decision (more than what?) then they will take more time. You don’t meet people’s needs by forcing things on them. How do the supporters even know women “need” more time? How do they know how much time women have already taken? What makes them think stalling is in any way about what women need? As Nixon says, it’s just a way to push women around and take revenge on them for existing.
Senate bill handler Sen. David Sater, R-Cassville, vowed to seek an override at the veto session in September.
Abortion “is an irreversible and permanent decision, and taking the time to think about the consequences is not unreasonable or a burden,” Sater said in a statement.
How the hell does David Sater know that women have not taken the time to think? How does he know he needs to force them to think? How does he know that’s any of his business?
He doesn’t. It’s just goddy bullying.
Right, because humans can only get pregnant once and siblings are a liberal lie.
It WOULD reduce the number of abortions. It would also increase the number of unwanted children these Republicans are outraged at being required to support via social welfare programs.
Can’t have it both ways, morons.
Well, you wouldn’t want women impulse-buying abortions, would you? You know how it is–some pregnant women walking along the strip mall, and they see the shiny abortions on display, and pretty soon they get to daring each other, and BAM! They all go in for abortions.
If you took those legislators at their word, they’d be guilty of profound disrespect to women. After all, their assumption is that women just waltz around getting abortions without a thought in the world, and will be struck by the gravity of their decision only after the procedure. It treats women like children, rather than self-sufficient adults who know how to make decisions. No abortion clinic is trying to railroad women through the operating room either, and they don’t argue that; the justification (so they say) is that women themselves might rush into things.
But of course, this is all just a front. They think abortion is murder; the “consequences” they think nobody is giving enough weight to is the loss of a life. But of course, they can’t write laws with those justifications (not for lack of effort), so they adopt faux-caring language that infantilizes women.
There should be a waiting period for waiting period legislation. After the initial vote, all the legislators should be forced to stay in the room for the next three days being exposed to arguments by opponents of the bill, and then vote again. What, the arguments already happened before the initial vote? I dunno, I don’t think giving legislators more time to ponder such an important decision is burdensome.
Abortion “is an irreversible and permanent decision, and taking the time to think about the consequences is not unreasonable or a burden,” Sater said in a statement.
Because having a baby is not permanent at all…
They just assume that no woman has ever given thought to how they would handle becoming pregnant.
They also assume women seeking abortions haven’t already taken the time to consider their decision.
They also assume that no woman has taken the time to think about the consequences of having a child.
Chris J, #4:
Legislating should be made a first-degree misdemeanor. Whenever a law is passed, the people who voted for it spend 18 months in prison, unconditionally. Perhaps they’ll think long and hard, and only pass legislation they feel strongly enough about to give up 18 months.
Yeah, I realize it’s not practical. But with a little tweaking, it can work. Suspend the sentences until their term limit expires, and then come up with a fair way of deciding whether to make the sentences concurrent or not. Stuff like that. And televise the trials, of course. “You have been accused of first-degree legislation–how do you plead?”
Abortion “is an irreversible and permanent decision,
So is a wisdom-tooth extraction.
These women who have to be forced to take the time to decide to have a relatively minor medical procedure because of permanent consequences are nevertheless fully capable of making all the decisions for another human being for the next 18 years without any “assistance” or even assistance whatsoever.
Can I say I’m a little uncomfortable with the positioning of abortion as a decision with great gravity:
and will be struck by the gravity of their decision
Not for every uterus-haver, no. For some, it’s quite a simple, unemotional decision, in the same way they would have a mole removed because they don’t want to give eventual cancerous birth to an 8-pound melanoma.
For some, it is a decision of great gravity, but can we stop accepting the anti-choice position that it’s always and forever a grave and serious decision? It’s a medical treatment. As noted above, it’s no more grave and serious by nature than a tooth extraction.
When we accept their framing on this, we’re conceding the ground that these Republican legislators stood on when they made this appalling piece of crap legislation. It’s only an inherently grave and serious decision if you accept their framing that ‘it’s a wee babby ain’t it so precious’. It’s a zygote, or at most a foetus.
The one pregnancy scare I had I knew IMMEDIATELY that I’d be doing everything I could to access an abortion. The thought of being pregnant terrified me. It just a scare, and I actually wasn’t pregnant, thankfully, but the reaction was immediate. I knew I didn’t want children, and I certainly didn’t want to try to finish grad school pregnant or with a child.
Most of my friends who have had abortions have not regretted those decisions, and have gone on later to have children they did want, in far better circumstances than those of the original pregnancy.
Some of these assholes won’t be satisfied until there’s a law forcing women to reflect on aborting a fetus for a minimum of 39 weeks.