This week in "anti-abortion laws hurt everyone"

A proposed bill in Utah would make it illegal to have a miscarriage. Not just an abortion-caused termination of a pregnancy. "This creates a law that makes any pregnant woman who has a miscarriage potentially criminally liable for murder."

Or, as Dan Savage put it:

If every miscarriage is a potential homicide, how does Utah avoid launching a criminal investigation every time a woman has a miscarriage? And women have a lot of miscarriages: one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage. And how is Utah supposed to know when a pregnant woman has had a miscarriage? You're going to have to create some sort of pregnancy registry to keep track of all those fetuses, Utah. Perhaps you could start issuing "conception certificates" to women who get pregnant? And then, if there isn't a baby within nine months of the issuance of a conception certificate, the woman could be hauled in for questioning and she could be indicted for criminal homicide if it's determined that she intentionally or accidentally induced a miscarriage. Of course, lots of women miscarry before they even realize their pregnant... so Utah will have to pass another law, one that compels all sexually active women—actually, let's just say all women, Utah, since some sexually active women claim they're chaste—to come in for mandatory monthly pregnancy tests...

Or you could, you know - radical thought here - trust women to handle their own pregnancies and only prosecute those cases of clear assault or abuse that are already covered under existing laws. Crazy talk.

And this, via Feministing: The cruelty of Nicaragua's extreme abortion ban is undeniable in the case of Amelia (an alias), a 27-year-old woman with cancer. Passed in 2006, the law criminalizes abortion, even if the woman's life or health is at risk. Amelia, who has a 10-year-old daughter, needs to have an abortion so she can undergo treatment for the cancer, which may have metastasized in her brain, lungs and breasts.

I can't imagine being pregnant and then learning that this very pregnancy is keeping me from getting the medical treatment that would save my life. Or that this treatment would inevitably kill the baby I was pregnant with. In effect, this law is sentencing this woman - a mother to an already living child - to death.

I have an idea, law - get the hell out of her way. Maybe she'll decide to forego chemo and deliver a possibly healthy baby at the expense of her own life. Maybe she'll opt for treatment, lose this baby (either to abortion or radiation), and live to have more healthy children. Maybe, law, it's none of your business.

So, when I say that I'm opposed to government intervention into reproductive rights because it's too complex an area for any law to be adequate... do you see what I mean?