5 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Arizona's 1864 Abortion Law. – Heather Cox-Richardson

   As always HC-R brings in the historical context. Why or why don't we have journalists with college degrees in History. The old Arizona law was about much much more than abortion.

   In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men. 

   The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning. 

   In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.” 

   The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.

   The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.

   Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control. 

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   1. Everyone should know this. Thanks for the post.🙂

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   2. 1864 only gets them part of the way to their real destination:  1789.

      (At least that is where Samuel Alito and Clanrence Thomas want to go minus, of course, that pesky stuff in Article I, Section 2 about Thomas only being 3/5 of a citizen.)

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      1. Off the topic you are discussing but wanted to thank you for your input the other day re trump having an aneurysm.

          

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2. If he keeps losing 10% of MisTruths™️ value every day it’s going to be a penny stock before the jury is seated for the Stormy trial. 
    

   

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