What a sick, twisted irony it is – that the Arizona Supreme Court approved a virtual total ban on all abortions just days after former President Donald Trump suggested that states, not the federal government, should decide abortion issues.
That was obviously a ploy by Trump. It was a pathetic effort to appease some angry voters for his stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with several justices. Those justices made possible the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
The April 9 Arizona ruling is now being challenged, thankfully, in lower courts of the state.
Since that decision, many voters are so angry that even many devout Republicans are vowing not to vote for some Republicans, including not even Trump.
The Arizona Supreme Court, in a vicious throwback to the Darkest of Dark Ages, revived an 1864 anti-abortion law that should remain forever dead. This new, stupid, unbelievably cruel dictate decrees that virtually all abortion procedures will now be illegal in Arizona. The only exception is in a case when a pregnancy would endanger the life of the woman.
It is mind-boggling, downright disgusting, that women and girls impregnated by a rapist or by a family member (incest) must carry the pregnancy to term! Anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy, including doctors, could face prison terms of two to five years.
Up until this sadistic, cruel decision, women in Arizona could obtain an abortion for up to 15 weeks into a pregnancy.
Already some women have suffered and died in the 14 or so states that have draconian restrictions on abortion. Some doctors, fearing legal backlash, have told women whose lives are threatened by a dangerous pregnancy to wait out in the parking lot or go back home until they are deathly sick before returning to a clinic or hospital for health care.
Many Arizonans are scurrying to stop the revival of this crazy, vicious law by pressuring the Arizona Legislature to pass a reasonable abortion-protection bill in the November election.
It’s understandable many Americans are opposed to “abortion on demand,” but this Arizona law, like many others proposed or approved throughout the nation, is so antediluvian that it defies description.
This is what President Joe Biden said:
“Millions of Arizonans will soon live under an even more extreme and dangerous abortion ban, which fails to protect women even when their health is at risk or in tragic cases of rape or incest. This cruel ban was first enacted in 1864, more than 150 years ago, before Arizona was even a state and well before women had secured the right to vote.”
Well, women have the right to vote now! And let us hope they rally with righteous anger and vote decisively against this harsh and hopeless ruling and against any and every attempt in every state that threatens to carry women and the rest of us back into the Dark Ages.
Four of the seven members of the Arizona Supreme Court voted to reinstate the 1864 law. One voted against it; one abstained; another recused himself. Two of the four in favor of the decision are up for retention by voters this November. Let us hope that women – and men! – toss the antiquated dunderheads off the Court.
