I just went and read the text of the bill itself, to verify the contents of the article you link to.
You'd expect that something this momentous would get more than a sentence in the bill itself, but no. Just a single, almost offhand comment in paragraph 42 of the bill.
Remove the word "forcible" from the bill, and you still have issues to deal with, but at least it doesn't have the potential to redefine the very nature of a heinous crime.
i want to emphasize that this is a terrible, terrible bill, but...
going by the article you linked to, and a quick skimming of the bill text, i think saying that it's ‘redefining rape’ is misleading. it's saying that certain categories of rape are to be treated differently than others for certain legal purposes (availability of government abortion funding), but, although that is awful, it's not defining the other cases out of the ‘rape’ category. it's entirely possible that i'm misreading something, though.
η: take a formally analogous (although of course morally radically different) case: suppose that the federal government decides to provide citizens with property insurance. suppose further that, by legislation, this insurance doesn't cover property loss due to theft except in cases of ‘armed robbery’. we wouldn't say that that bill was ‘redefining theft’ in a way that excluded kinds of theft other than armed robbery.
Okay. What you're saying looks like it makes sense until you look at what those "certain categories of rape which are to be treated differently than others for certain legal purposes" are.
They want to limit the government funding to cases of something called "forcible rape," and "acts of incest for minors," and "cases where the woman's life is in danger as certified by a doctor."
There's a few problems with that:
- There is no federally agreed-upon definition of what "forcible rape" actually is. States may choose to define that term state-by-state, but some states haven't defined the term at all: The term "forcible rape" is not defined in the federal criminal code, and the bill's authors don't offer their own definition. In some states, there is no legal definition of "forcible rape," making it unclear whether any abortions would be covered by the rape exemption in those jurisdictions.
- Many rape cases, including many statutory rapes, are non-forcible; people wouldn't be eligible to receive any federal funding for an abortion in these cases.
- The people who would probably need federal funding for abortions the most probably wouldn't get it under this law--cases of incest (for those over 18), most statutory rapes, rape via drug or alcohol, rapes of people with limited mental capacity (mentally disabled people, the elderly), and many date rapes wouldn't be covered under this new definition.
So, if you're a mentally-disabled 34 year old living at home with your parents, living off of disability checks and getting health care with federal funding, and your abusive father drugs you and forces you to have sex with him, and you get pregnant, you're not going to be able to abort the baby unless a.) somebody realizes you're pregnant in time to get a legal abortion and b.) you can convince somebody to pay for said abortion out of pocket. And if you can't, and end up having the baby, then what the heck will happen with the baby--since you obviously can't take care of it and you'll probably be abused when pregnant, and the baby has a pretty high chance of being born with some serious issues? I think that's a pretty bad idea to exempt cases like this from federal funding, wouldn't you say?
The other problem I have with it is that even if you chose to use your own money for an abortion (which I believe that anyone should be allowed to do), if the money were saved via a HSA, you wouldn't be able to use the HSA money to get an abortion under this law. And if even you just paid for it right out of pocket, you still wouldn't be able to claim expenses for it on your taxes as a medical deduction.
I understand that many people don't want to support what they view as a moral wrong with what they see as their money. But if these folks get to opt out of providing taxpayer funding for what they see as a moral wrong, why can't I opt out of providing taxpayer funding for something I see as a moral wrong (for example, the death penalty)? Simple: everybody thinks *something's* a moral wrong they don't want to fund, and pretty soon there's not much funding for anything. If you've got another suggestion, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
i grant all your bullet points, and recognize that they're terrible things, but i'm still not really convinced that any of them constitute ‘redefining rape’. in the absolute worst case, this law has the impact of ending all rape-related federal abortion funding. that would seriously suck, but i don't see any evidence that it would do that by denying that any of the rapes involved were in fact rapes.
the law doesn't say ‘rape = forcible rape’ it says ‘only forcible rape gets funding. we won't tell you what forcible rape is.’ there are a lot of reasons why the latter is bad law and bad policy, but it's still not the same as the former.
really, my only point is that saying that the bill is ‘redefining rape’ is inaccurate. that doesn't mean that i think anything about the bill is even remotely okay.
In my opinion, the redefinition of rape that is occurring is not actually a textual redefinition. It's the fact that if we start saying that some rape gets abortion funding and some rape dosen't, it qualifies all of the latter as in some important (and totally non-legally-defined) way not "worth" the funding, because it's "not as bad." It's not redefining rape as "only the forcible kind." It's redefining rape as "a crime our country speaks out against only when it fits into some poorly-defined category." Given how difficult it has been to get legal definitions of rape into the books at all in some places, this is a major step backward that redefines the way the country legally thinks about rape as a crime.
I see your point, but I think it's rather semantic. I agree with seishonagon below: Maybe we're not redefining the word "rape," but we are redefining "which of the things that we call rape are going to be allowed to receive funding."
Maybe because the word "rape" is used in both circumstances it gives people the impression that there is no redefinition going on because the words being used are literally the same. Imagine if we chose instead to use two phrases: "assists" and "denials," and said we'd pay for assists only. That makes it clearer what's actually happening--except for the problem that not using the word "rape" obscures the fact that both the "assists" and the "denials" are actually parts of the *same problem,* which is the most salient point, and that is exactly what the politicians who craft legislation like this would like everyone to forget about.
And it's about more than just funding, I think. It's about which crimes are going to be a part of our national discourse on gender-based violence (because rape, whether the victim is a man or a woman, is gender-based in each instance).
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I just went and read the text of the bill itself, to verify the contents of the article you link to.
You'd expect that something this momentous would get more than a sentence in the bill itself, but no. Just a single, almost offhand comment in paragraph 42 of the bill.
Remove the word "forcible" from the bill, and you still have issues to deal with, but at least it doesn't have the potential to redefine the very nature of a heinous crime.
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going by the article you linked to, and a quick skimming of the bill text, i think saying that it's ‘redefining rape’ is misleading. it's saying that certain categories of rape are to be treated differently than others for certain legal purposes (availability of government abortion funding), but, although that is awful, it's not defining the other cases out of the ‘rape’ category. it's entirely possible that i'm misreading something, though.
η: take a formally analogous (although of course morally radically different) case: suppose that the federal government decides to provide citizens with property insurance. suppose further that, by legislation, this insurance doesn't cover property loss due to theft except in cases of ‘armed robbery’. we wouldn't say that that bill was ‘redefining theft’ in a way that excluded kinds of theft other than armed robbery.
no subject
They want to limit the government funding to cases of something called "forcible rape," and "acts of incest for minors," and "cases where the woman's life is in danger as certified by a doctor."
There's a few problems with that:
- There is no federally agreed-upon definition of what "forcible rape" actually is. States may choose to define that term state-by-state, but some states haven't defined the term at all: The term "forcible rape" is not defined in the federal criminal code, and the bill's authors don't offer their own definition. In some states, there is no legal definition of "forcible rape," making it unclear whether any abortions would be covered by the rape exemption in those jurisdictions.
- Many rape cases, including many statutory rapes, are non-forcible; people wouldn't be eligible to receive any federal funding for an abortion in these cases.
- The people who would probably need federal funding for abortions the most probably wouldn't get it under this law--cases of incest (for those over 18), most statutory rapes, rape via drug or alcohol, rapes of people with limited mental capacity (mentally disabled people, the elderly), and many date rapes wouldn't be covered under this new definition.
So, if you're a mentally-disabled 34 year old living at home with your parents, living off of disability checks and getting health care with federal funding, and your abusive father drugs you and forces you to have sex with him, and you get pregnant, you're not going to be able to abort the baby unless a.) somebody realizes you're pregnant in time to get a legal abortion and b.) you can convince somebody to pay for said abortion out of pocket. And if you can't, and end up having the baby, then what the heck will happen with the baby--since you obviously can't take care of it and you'll probably be abused when pregnant, and the baby has a pretty high chance of being born with some serious issues? I think that's a pretty bad idea to exempt cases like this from federal funding, wouldn't you say?
The other problem I have with it is that even if you chose to use your own money for an abortion (which I believe that anyone should be allowed to do), if the money were saved via a HSA, you wouldn't be able to use the HSA money to get an abortion under this law. And if even you just paid for it right out of pocket, you still wouldn't be able to claim expenses for it on your taxes as a medical deduction.
I understand that many people don't want to support what they view as a moral wrong with what they see as their money. But if these folks get to opt out of providing taxpayer funding for what they see as a moral wrong, why can't I opt out of providing taxpayer funding for something I see as a moral wrong (for example, the death penalty)? Simple: everybody thinks *something's* a moral wrong they don't want to fund, and pretty soon there's not much funding for anything. If you've got another suggestion, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
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the law doesn't say ‘rape = forcible rape’ it says ‘only forcible rape gets funding. we won't tell you what forcible rape is.’ there are a lot of reasons why the latter is bad law and bad policy, but it's still not the same as the former.
really, my only point is that saying that the bill is ‘redefining rape’ is inaccurate. that doesn't mean that i think anything about the bill is even remotely okay.
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Maybe because the word "rape" is used in both circumstances it gives people the impression that there is no redefinition going on because the words being used are literally the same. Imagine if we chose instead to use two phrases: "assists" and "denials," and said we'd pay for assists only. That makes it clearer what's actually happening--except for the problem that not using the word "rape" obscures the fact that both the "assists" and the "denials" are actually parts of the *same problem,* which is the most salient point, and that is exactly what the politicians who craft legislation like this would like everyone to forget about.
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