Trump reveals Republican Party’s true views on abortion

Read the full op-ed published by the San Francisco Chronicle on April 6, 2016.

by: Susan Gluss

Donald Trump is an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party. It’s not just that he’s ruining their chances to win the presidency. It’s also that he has exposed the party’s hypocrisy on abortion.

When Trump said women should receive “some form of punishment” for getting an abortion if the procedure was banned, conservatives were quick to denounce his comments. Ditto the right-to-life advocates.

But Trump’s comment reveals the truth about the Republican Party’s antiabortion juggernaut.

Laws in 38 states now allow a person to be charged with homicide if she or he is deemed responsible for the unlawful death of a fetus, according to a Guttmacher Institute report by analyst Andrea Rowan released last fall.

Not all of these laws clearly exempt the pregnant woman herself from being charged, writes Rowan. “These laws are even being used to pursue women who are merely suspected of having self-induced an abortion, but in fact had suffered miscarriages.”

In Indiana, a young woman named Purvi Patel is now serving 20 years of a 46-year prison sentence — the first woman to be convicted under Indiana’s feticide law for ending her own pregnancy.

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