LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rechan)
Two weeks ago, I posted an article about Abortion protesters being asked "Should a woman who gets an abortion be punished if abortion was illegal?"
Many people here asked "How can they justify the woman being let go?" The protesters had no answer, but we finally have someone from the Establishment tackling this tough question. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission gives us the answer: they're mentally ill:
[I]f abortion were made illegal and he were a state legislator, Land said, "I would probably charge voluntary manslaughter for the abortionist. If [a doctor] were convicted, he would lose his medical license for two years and spend a year in prison with the first offense, and with the second offense, he would lose his medical license for life. At which point it'd be very difficult to find a doctor who'd do them."
Such a legal stance is tantamount to "ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into 'victims' of their own free will," [Anna] Quindlen wrote. "State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time."
Land doesn't deny that women who have abortions might be addled, but he, along with Yoest, Earll, and Gans, takes exception to them being described as bystanders -- or as enlightened women making free, educated choices.
"It's not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life," Land said.
You heard it here first, folks. Murder of innocent life excused because women are just too addle brained and confused. Glad we can just dismiss hard moral questions like that.