Admit it anti-choicers: If abortion is murder, then Trump was right

Yesterday, the celebrity who is the frontrunner in the GOP race to the presidential candidacy commented that women who have abortions should be punished somehow, and the Internet exploded. The pro-choice contingent obviously found that position abhorrent. The anti-choice right-wingers quickly distanced themselves as well, declaring that their position has never been to punish women seeking abortions, even if they achieve their goal of most (if not all) abortion being illegal. As a result, The Orange One himself backed off, “clarifying” that he “misspoke.”

If you are opposed to legal abortion and you don’t think women who have them should face legal consequences, then you are either a liar or you are a hypocrite.

It was my understanding that the majority of opposition to abortion comes from an idea in the vein of life begins at conception, a fetus is a person, therefore abortion is murder. I can’t speak for the right wing, but I am generally of the belief that if a person is complicit in a murder, then that person should face consequences for said murder. Typically in the law, an accomplice faces the same legal consequences as a principal in a crime.

So if you are opposed to legal abortion, and you are also opposed to legally punishing women seeking them, then you either don’t really believe abortion is murder, or you believe that society shouldn’t punish criminals.

This gymnastics that the anti-choice crew espouses to try to get away from the icky mental image of putting abortion-seeking women in jail is solely political, and it exposes a major problem with the concept of making abortion illegal: how to punish the women you’ve just made criminals. Making abortion illegal does not make abortion go away, and if you believe that abortion is murder, then you must believe that women who specifically ask for and pay for abortions (murder for hire?) are murderers.

But that’s the easy part. The harder part is what you do with women who, rather than seeking abortion and risking running afoul of the law, self-induce abortions in one way or another. I used to say that if abortion ever became illegal and I found myself accidentally pregnant, it’s nothing playing a few rugby matches couldn’t fix. Alcohol, drugs, an accidental fall down the stairs...

Or a miscarriage.

Make no mistake. If abortion is illegal, people getting and performing abortions become criminals, and every miscarriage must be investigated to determine whether it was a clandestine abortion. If such steps are not part of the plan, then illegalization of abortion has no teeth. Women wishing abortions can just induce miscarriages and claim they didn’t know they were pregnant or that it was spontaneous or that the fall was an accident.

Murder is a big deal. If you really think abortion is murder, you cannot believe that miscarriages (possible abortions and therefore murders) should not be investigated. If you agree with me that the investigation of miscarriages is not a good use of police resources, then you don’t think that abortion is murder.

Start being honest with yourselves.