GOP Senate candidate once advocated life sentence for women who got an abortion

5th September 2012

Link reblogged from GayWrites. with 87 notes

GOP Senate candidate once advocated life sentence for women who got an abortion →

Hold up. What?

Rep. Rick Berg, the Republican candidate for Senate from North Dakota, was apparently one of the few state representatives who in 2007 supported a measure that would have made any woman who got an abortion guilty of homicide and therefore punishable with a life sentence in prison. The measure would also have penalized doctors and anyone else who “aids, abets, facilitates, solicits, or incites” someone into choosing an abortion.

Although one news outlet claims that Berg’s bill contains an exception “when the life of the mother is endangered” such an exception does not appear in the bill’s text. The language of the bill quoted above creates a new homicide crime without any exceptions whatsoever. It is possible that a woman who obtained an abortion to save her life could invoke a provision of North Dakota law permitting self-defense to prevent “imminent unlawful bodily injury, sexual assault, or detention,” although even this is not certain because a life-threatening pregnancy is not “unlawful.”

Berg was quick to denounce the comments of a fellow Senate Candidate, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), when he claimed that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” Berg called the statement “insulting and reprehensible,” and “condemn[ed] them in the strongest terms possible.” But the assertion that a rape victim should be put in jail for not wanting to carry the child of her rapist is equally abhorrent. It is also largely unpopular — though the country is often split on abortion rights, 75 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in the case of rape or incest.

And now he’s running for Senate. Cool.

Romaticus

GOP Senate candidate once advocated life sentence for women who got an abortion →