BOISE, Idaho — A lawmaker in Idaho plans to propose a bill in the state legislature that would criminalize abortion as first-degree murder, with the exception of risk to the life of the mother.
Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, told reporters this week that he believes abortion needs to be prosecuted for what it is: murder.
“I think Roe v. Wade is a disgrace,” Foreman told East Idaho News. “It lies in the face of the U.S. Constitution, our Constitution here in Idaho, and it just lies in the face of common sense.”
Under his soon-coming legislation, both the woman who seeks out the death of her unborn child and the abortionist who murders the baby would be charged with first-degree murder.
“People find themselves, in many cases, with unwanted pregnancies and the easy answer is to just terminate the baby,” Foreman said. “We’re looking at killing innocent kids, and it’s not up to us to just kill it to solve someone else’s personal problem.”
Some lawmakers have criticized his plan, stating that the government has no business telling a mother what she should do with her body.
“From a woman’s standpoint, how dare somebody else decide what I should do with my body?” Sen. Cherie Buckner-Webb, D-Boise, stated. “From a constitutional standpoint, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions, including her decision to have an abortion.”
But Foreman contends that abortion is not what is done to the woman’s body, but her child’s. It is not the mother who is killed, and she does not have a right to say that someone else should die.
“She can’t decide to take life away from somebody else,” Foreman outlined. “This country’s been saddled with this nonsense long enough, and that’s why I’m responding to the wishes of my constituents and bringing this legislation forward.”
“I’m not telling any woman what to do with her body; I would be completely against the government telling a woman or anyone else what to do with their body, but that logic is flawed when they use that,” he added to KBOI-TV.
Foreman’s bill would have no exception for rape or incest as he believes that the baby should not be punished for the crimes of his or her father.
“We are still faced with looking at the death of an innocent child. Why should the child pay for the sins of the person who committed the rape or the incest?” he asked.
As previously reported, in an introductory lecture to his course on obstetrics in 1854, Philadelphia Dr. Hugh Lennox Hodge explained that if a woman were to come to a medical doctor in pursuit of an abortion, “he must, as it were, grasp the conscience of his weak and erring patient and let her know in language not to be misunderstood that she is responsible to her Creator for the life of the being within her.”
“So low, gentleman, is the moral sense of community on this subject. So ignorant are even the greater number of individuals, that even mothers in many instances shrink not at the commission of this crime, but will voluntarily destroy their own progeny, in violation of every natural sentiment, and in opposition to the laws of God and man,” he said.
“The procuring abortion is ‘a base and unmanly act,’” Hodge also said, quoting in part text from a court ruling of his day. “It is a crime against the natural feelings of man, against the welfare and safety of females, against the peace and prosperity of society, against the divine command ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is murder.”
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