My Monday column and a radical idea:
A constitutional amendment in North Dakota is one public vote away from banning all abortions regardless of circumstances and without exceptions. It’s the first successfully passed “fetal personhood” amendment in American history, and if it makes it through a referendum process, it will criminalize abortion as murder (the premeditated taking of a “life”) within the borders of North Dakota. The amendment would also restrict some forms of birth control, as well as in vitro fetilization.
What continues to surprise me is how successful far-right, anti-choice activists and politicians have been with blasting away at reproductive rights at the state level. Not a week goes by without hitting an outrageous news item from a random red state that either mandates transvaginal ultrasounds, or that bans abortions after a certain period of time, or that cuts funding for family planning facilities like Planned Parenthood and the like. North Dakota has obviously swung for the fences and it’s this close to the biggest anti-choice victory so far.
Certainly it helps to have three out of every five states controlled by Republican governors, but at this point, the Republicans have all but abandoned the war against privacy and Roe v Wade at the federal level. Instead, they’ve begun to construct a legislative Berlin Wall around these red states, holding women hostage to not-so-small government conservative zealots, most of whom are white males.
Suffice to say, it’s all in serious violation of the U.S. Constitution, but the Republicans don’t care.
So perhaps gun control activists and politicians should engage in a similar process and with similar disregard for the Second Amendment. [continue reading here]