Yesterday, Donald Trump spoke the words that anti-choice activists have always feared. He said that women should be punished with jail time or possibly worse if they get an abortion. Those words, once widely known and understood, could expose the underlying fraud of the anti-choice position and doom their movement to a fringe position in American politics.
For anti-choice activists, imposing criminal penalties on a woman getting an abortion is the logical extension of their view that life begins at conception. Under the common law, the unlawful taking of a human life is a homicide. Thus any act that causes the termination of a pregnancy is a homicide. By this reasoning a woman is soliciting a homicide when she seeks to terminate a pregnancy and, as with any other person who solicits a homicide, should be subject to sanction.
For years anti-choice activists have been hiding behind several façades. They talk about making abortion illegal but shy away from talking about what the legal penalties for that "illegal" act should be. They do this even though they know that merely stating that something is illegal is meaningless unless there are penalties for the illegal act. When pressed to actually discuss penalties, they only talk about penalties against doctors that are hired to perform abortion. They never discuss penalties against the woman seeking the abortion.
And the reason is simple. Publicly stating that a woman who gets an abortion must be jailed, or worse, is articulating a position that is abhorrent to most people. We saw that yesterday when there was an outcry from all sides of the political spectrum and all sides of the pro-choice debate in response to Donald Trump statement that women should be punished for getting abortions. People were aghast at the idea and even the most staunchly anti-choice zealots refused to embrace the idea.
Now that the extreme reality of their position is out in the open let's keep it there. Let's force the anti-choice activists to be true to their convictions. Because when they are forced to say what they really feel virtually all support for that movement will fade.