The latest Donald Trump controversy is relevant to me. Why? Because I’m a young woman, and a strongly pro-choice one at that. A couple of weeks ago, Trump stated that under his ideal system, in which abortion is banned, women who get abortions would be punished. “There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump said in response to a pressing question from Chris Matthews of MSNBC. When asked what kind of punishment this would be, Trump continuously repeated, “That I can’t tell you. That I can’t tell you.”
Matthews and I seem to have been stumped by the same question: How do you actually ban abortion, once it is illegal? How are you supposed to enforce this policy without risking anyone’s health in the process? According to Trump, punishment for the woman who received the procedure is the best method of enforcing the ban. Of course, as is the case with a lot of Trump’s policies, this hasn’t always been his position. In 1999 he claimed to be “very pro-choice”. Recently, though, he’s changed that opinion. He claimed that women who obtain the procedure should be punished, and that’s a horrifying statement for a number of reasons.
First, an abortion is a medical procedure. The nationwide ban of an operation that does not hurt the person receiving the procedure, in this case the pregnant woman, is uncalled for. If it’s something she chooses to have, in a free country she should be able to get it without repercussions. The woman likely didn’t make the choice to be in that situation in the first place; otherwise, she wouldn’t be in an abortion clinic. The only thing she’s trying to gain from the operation is her life back, and instead she would theoretically be punished because of one mistake that a man was definitely involved in too.
As a young woman who has thankfully never found herself in that position, I believe that if an abortion is a woman’s main option and she chooses to use it, she is only trying to do what is best for herself. Not to mention, if abortions are entirely illegal, the only procedures available would be far less safe than ones performed in legal clinics. From his statement, Trump believes that women should be punished for taking the issue into their own hands and fixing it in the way that they felt was best, even if the only available way was to obtain a potentially dangerous illegal abortion. That is, he thinks they should be penalized for using their agency at so high a cost, even when the high stakes make it clear that she was desperate.
And this is just the pro-choice side of things. Whether or not you are someone who agrees with abortion, the idea that the woman herself should be punished for it is in no way justified and is definitely misogynistic. She was already in a situation where she felt the need to preserve her own life that she had ahead of her. Why would anyone want to take that away further post-abortion, even if they disagree with the abortion that she had?
I know a lot of people who disagree with abortion as a whole, but I don’t think any of those people would say that a woman who wants an abortion has committed a crime by having an unwanted pregnancy, or that she deserves a less safe abortion as opposed to one performed in a safe environment by a qualified doctor. It’s clear that Trump hasn’t considered how a woman might feel in that situation, or at least, he didn’t consider it until sometime after he said, “There has to be some form of punishment.”
Soon after the statements about punishment, Trump posted an announcement on his website that in the case of someone obtaining an illegal abortion, it would be the doctor or the person who performed the procedure, not the woman, who would be punished by the law. He completely went back on what he said, and that’s no surprise considering the backlash. Even known opponents of abortion, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, openly condemned Trump’s original statement about the punishment. Kasich summed it up: “Of course women shouldn’t be punished.”
For once, I agree with Ted Cruz: “Once again, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he hasn’t seriously thought through the issues, and he’ll say anything just to get attention.” That’s been Trump’s campaign in a nutshell. He has supporters that say “We like him because he tells it like it is!” and so he thinks that in order to keep them, he has to make comments that ignore the reality of the policies he’s proposing.
Many of Trump’s supporters like him because they think he’s the only one who has the guts to be radically tough on certain issues (like suggesting that we should “take out [terrorists’] families”), but my opinion is that he’s actually the only candidate ignorant enough to hold these views. This includes his recent suggestion that women who receive abortions should be punished. Even though he took back the statement, he’s already revealed that he doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose, even in retrospect. As a young, college-age woman who wishes for other women to live their best lives, I don’t accept what Trump said, and I hope the majority of voters don’t either.