Michigan’s Extreme Anti-Abortion Bill Leads the Nation in Batcrapcraziness
It must be hard to be a state these days. Everyone around you is always doing crazy stuff to get attention, and you really have to compete to get noticed. Well, not content to be a nice midwestern state any longer, Michigan is now gunning to become one of the cool kids by passing an insanely restrictive abortion law. Yeah, why let Arizona have all the fun? As we speak, they are busily ramming a huge bill up into our collective uterus that, if passed, would basically guarantee that most of the abortion clinics in the state would have to shut down. Hey, go big or go home, right?
The 60-page bill was introduced just last week by Republican Representative Bruce Rendon and contains all matter of horrors. For starters, all abortions after 20 weeks would be criminalized—no exceptions for victims of rape or if the fetus has a severe anomaly, like it is missing a brain or a spine. Wait? Oh, nevermind it’s pointless to even try to understand how that is a good idea because it’s not. There is a very narrow exception made if the mother’s life is at risk, but simply her health and/or future fertility is not reason enough to allow an abortion. Well, how very pro-life indeed. Oh, it’d also make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion. Geeze, make that definition vague enough and you might be able to start prosecuting doctors for being overly enthusiastic in telling patients that it’s totally safe to get an abortion…This lovely bill would also require that health centers that perform more than six abortions in a month be equipped with surgery rooms, even if they don’t do surgical abortions. Just in case someone needs an emergency appendectomy while they’re waiting, I guess? Makes TOTAL sense to spend a shit-ton of money you don’t have to create a room filled with expensive equipment that you’ll never use and have to jump through a bunch of hoops and pay to have the facility licensed.