The Michigan legislature is considering a pair of bills that would criminalize coercing a woman to have an abortion, a policy that has been pushed for years by anti-choice lawmakers.
“Coercive abortion laws like these are the byproduct of a decades long public and political campaign to market that anyone who seeks an abortion does so because she’s confused, misled or coerced,” Shelli Weisberg of the ACLU of Michigan told MLive.com.
While a requirement of the bills addresses women who are forced into terminating a pregnancy, that measure does not mention women who are forced into carrying a pregnancy to term. Opponents of the proposed law say that shows the real agenda behind such legislation.
“These bills are one-sided in that they criminalize only coercion to terminate a pregnancy rather than evenhandedly covering the whole array of reproductive coercion,” Mary Pollock, government relations coordinator for the American Association of University Women of Michigan, told MLive.com.
Anti-choice legislators, however, have said that is a separate issue and could be addressed in other legislation.