re: #152 Mattand

Is this really true?

I mean, I wouldn’t put it past the GOP, given how batshit they are about women and sex. But this would be out there, even for them.

It’s debatable, goes back about a year.

As much of the nation focuses on the Steubenville gang rape story, your failed Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI) was busy protecting rapists’ rights. Buried deep in the latest Fetus Rights Bill (aka, Sanctity of Human Life Act , H.R. 23: To provide that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization), wherein feti are given more rights than the women carrying them, is a section that will allow a rapist to sue his victim in order to stop her from getting an abortion, specifically if she were trying to get an abortion in a state that allows them while she lives in a state that does not.

Section 2(2) states, “The Congress affirms that the Congress, each State, the District of Columbia, and all United States territories have the authority to protect the lives of all human beings residing in its respective jurisdictions.”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones summed up the impact of this intentionally vague subsection, “In fact, if this bill were passed and the Supreme Court upheld it, I’ll bet that a rapist could go to court and sue to prevent his victim from getting an abortion. He’d argue that the fetus was legally a human being, and the court has no power to discriminate between one human being and another. He’d probably win, too.”

Yes, the rapist can sue to stop the abortion caused by the rape he perpetrated upon an unwilling female. Laura Beck at Jezebel points out, “Her rapist could theoretically sue to stop the abortion from happening, and probably win.”

So, it’s shit legislation but the important bit is the proposed language, which basically amounts to a vague personhood amendment of sorts. However the analysts are going massively out on a limb with their “probably win” scenarios. They’re willing to assume the courts will okay a raft of crap to empower rapists, which the courts don’t exactly have any history of actually ever doing. There’s assumptions about prior restraint on a woman’s freedom of travel, when civil courts rarely and criminal courts almost never ever deal in such proscriptive measures. There’s assumptions that the courts will completely toss out Roe vs. Wade and there’s assumptions about rapists having standing to bring such suits in the first place.

In any even, Paul Ryan is trash whose intent is pretty obviously to increase abortion restrictions if not outlaw abortion entirely, but it’s not like he authored any language that explicitly referenced rapist fathers, or fathers at all for that matter.