VA Gives the Game Away With Rape Exception for Ultrasound Bill

Lindsay Beyerstein March 1, 2012

So, the Virginia forced ultrasound bill passed with an exception for rape victims. Think about that for a second.

The anti-choicers swear that ultrasound laws are about informed consent, not about humiliating and inconveniencing women who want abortions. Supposedly, women are too dense to understand that they’re aborting an embryo or a fetus without visual aids.

So, if this were about informed consent, as opposed to throwing arbitrary barriers between a woman and her right to choose, you’d think a woman would need to see her ultrasound no matter how she got pregnant. The ultrasound looks the same no matter what, and it’s not like rape makes women smarter. If any woman needs to see her ultrasound, everybody needs to see it. Unless the ultrasound is a punishment disguised as a public service.

The rape exception proves that the anti-choicers only interested in punishing women for having sex. Rape victims didn’t consent to sex, so they’re treated as a separate and more deserving category of abortion-seekers.

SPECIAL DEAL: Subscribe to our award-winning print magazine, a publication Bernie Sanders calls "unapologetically on the side of social and economic justice," for just $1 an issue! That means you'll get 10 issues a year for $9.95.

SUBSCRIBE FOR $1/ISSUE

Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted. Her stories have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Her photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times’ City Room. She also blogs at The Hillman Blog (http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/hillmanblog), a publication of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a non-profit that honors journalism in the public interest.