This poster is making the rounds over at tumblr, and making them fast (it had 19,018 notes when last I checked, and of those perhaps 3,000 were added in the last few hours).
And while that might seem inflammatory, it does in fact express what happens when one tries to be philosophically consistent with the view — endorsed in the current (2012) platform of the Republican Party — that an “unborn child” has a “right to life.” One concludes that a woman pregnant as the consequence of rape must be forced to carry that child to term.
The practices endorsed in the illustration above might seem like satire, but the are the consequence of consistency. and their result is cruelty (as is so often the consequence of consistency in “moral reasoning.”) I see no reason to concede that anyone willing to endorse a “no exceptions” rule for abortions has so much as the slightest shred of decency or humanity in them.
If the forced-birthers win in American politics, we will see practices like these and worse. And don’t expect that they will stop there. Expect this: women of childbearing age will be forcibly pregnancy tested at points of exit and entry to the United States. If pregnant upon exit and not upon re-entry (and no baby in tow), expect prosecutions for their presumptively having had abortions abroad.
I disagree with the last bit about testing for international abortions. Because the rich and wealthy would then be slightly inconvenienced and the anti abortion folk never would want to bother their ‘moral’ master with such details. Anti abortion laws would be targeted directly and only at the poor and wretched. Escape clauses for the rich and well to do, including enforced ‘privacy laws’ that only benefit them is more likely. It would more likely to become illegal to make public evidence that some very public anti folk had one.
Obviously we’re speculating about the future here, and you might very well be right. I entirely agree that there would be loopholes for the rich and well-connected to take advantage of, but suspect that they would be structured more narrowly so as to benefit real elites (who will likely always be able to procure abortions through concierge medicine or the rules will be structured to provide the rich with an out for leaving the country (e.g. on private aircraft) that will exempt them from the bureaucratic harassment to which the rest of us will be subject. The forced-birthers will want to crush anything (like, say, a cheap flight to the UK) that is too easy for mere middle-class people to avail themselves of.