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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 5/17/19

The GOP Is on the Road to Mass Lockups for Women Who Have Miscarriages

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Who is going to monitor all those pregnancies, and examine the women and the remains of their miscarriages to make sure there wasn't a drug or self-inflicted injury involved?

Who is going to make sure that women who are pregnant are immediately brought to the attention of the authorities if they're reluctant to do so themselves?

When Governor Mike Pence proudly signed Indiana's abortion restrictions in 2016, women across the state noted that it required that miscarried fetuses (along with aborted fetuses) be "interred [buried in a cemetery] or cremated," no matter whether the pregnancy was six or sixteen weeks along when the miscarriage happened.

It led to a movement across the state called "Periods for Pence," in which women tweeted or called the governor's office to tell him when their periods had started and ended, so the state wouldn't mistake a normal menstrual period for a miscarriage.

The press treated it as funny at the time; nobody's laughing now.

The Republicans could borrow the name from Saudi Arabia for their police who scour the streets looking for badly behaving women; the "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" would hire a few million upright "Christian" men who would each take responsibility for monitoring the menstrual cycles of 50 or 100 women.

Like in Saudi Arabia, it would be a real job-creator, boosting the economy while ensuring public morality.

Thanks to the internet, each woman who's the ward of a particular commissioner could use modern technology to keep it all simple; like the Saudi Absher app that women use in that country to obtain a man's permission to leave the house or date, American women could simply swipe "period started" and "period finished normally" when those events happen.

This way, the commissioners could limit the unpleasant work of physically checking women's uteruses or showing up with a pregnancy test to only once a year (more frequently for "high-risk" women, less frequently for "low-risk" ones).

No doubt Facebook could help out with a handy algorithm based on women's online activity.

My wife Louise and I have had three children and one miscarriage, which was an emotionally gutting experience. It pains me to even write this article, and particularly to present the idea above.

But if the GOP keeps going down this road, this very well may be where we end up.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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