STUPIDITY: GOP lawmaker wants to stop “one-year-olds” from getting abortions
Anti-choice extremists have gone from claiming there’s a movement to abort babies after birth, to claiming that babies are getting abortions.
In Missouri, state legislators were debating an abortion ban, and whether it should include exceptions for rape and incest, only for one state Senator — one who aims to become Governor — to argue that Democrats are trying to give abortions to one-year-old infants.
Senator Bill Eigel was addressing an amendment that would have allowed abortions for child rape victims.
In case anyone reading this was served as poorly in sex ed classes as Senator Eigel seems to have been, a pregnancy in a one-year-old child would be an incredible, unprecedented biological anomaly, and likely fatal if allowed to proceed.
This came as Senator Doug Beck offered an amendment that would only permit abortion to protect the health of a rape victim aged 12 or under. Senator Eigel didn’t like it. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported:
“You want to bring back the institution of abortion so that kids can get abortions in the state of Missouri,” Eigel said to Beck. “A 1-year-old could get an abortion under this,” Eigel said.
Since the Supreme Court destroyed the precedent of Roe v. Wade, the far-right has gone out of their way to block exceptions, even to save lives. One Texas woman was forced to leave her state to seek medical care, with courts refusing her an exception.
As for pregnancies in preschoolers, the youngest known pregnancy was carried by a child of only five years, in 1939 in Peru, was suspected to be the product of a rape by her father, and ended in a c-section. The pregnancy was discovered at seven months gestation when the parents believed their child was suffering a tumor, and medical professionals believe it wouldn’t have happened without a rare hormonal misfire, according to Bionity.
Aside from that one exceptional case, the next-youngest known pregnancy was at age eight and is followed by a series of cases in children between the ages of nine and 11. Many of these cases happened in much more recent years, and many are recorded in the U.S., such as the South Carolina 10-year-old who gave birth in 2006.
The cases tend to have two things in common: the children were raped by someone much older, and none of them was a one-year-old infant.
Morally speaking, the former commonality reinforces how damaging it is to force a child to carry a pregnancy, and practically speaking, the latter commonality shows how uninformed and unfit Eigel is to be making medical decisions for any woman or pregnant person.
