Tennessee Pol: Just Because Bill Would Let Us Kill Women For Having Abortions Doesn't Mean We *Would!*
Rep. Jody Barrett's 'Death Penalty For Abortions' bill didn't even make it past committee.
Last week, Tennessee state House Rep. Jody Barrett did what many likely thought was impossible — he advocated for an anti-abortion bill so obviously repugnant that even other Tennessee Republicans wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot-pole.
Abortion is already illegal in the state, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or lethal fetal abnormalities, meaning that these are people who are totally fine with forcing a 12-year-old rape victim to give birth to her father’s baby, even if that baby will not survive outside of the womb because its brain is outside of its head. That is what passes for a good time, as far as Tennessee Republicans are concerned. But Barrett’s bill, which would have classified abortion as criminal homicide, a crime punishable by death in the state, went a little too even far for them, as not even one single member of the subcommittee was willing to support it or speak in its favor.
Well, either that or they saw the recent poll showing high levels of support in the state for allowing abortion for medical reasons like fatal fetal anomalies or for victims of rape and incest, or the 2024 Vanderbilt University poll showing that 52 percent of Tennesseans consider themselves pro-choice.
This, of course, came as a great disappointment to Rep. Barrett and the “crowd of loud, mostly male pro-life activists from Tennessee and surrounding states” who came to support its passage.
Rep. Barrett has since complained that the bill did not pass because it was unfairly characterized as a “death penalty for abortions” bill, just because it would have allowed abortion patients to be sentenced to death.
“The fear tactic of calling it a death penalty bill was just as effective at scaring actual pro-life people as it was the others,” Barrett said, adding that it was an “insulting” characterization of his bill. Barrett believes that whether the bill could have resulted in execution was irrelevant because it was not likely that it would.
“There’s only one female on death row in Tennessee, and she’s been there since 1996,” Barrett said. “We’re not going to execute women. We don’t have the stomach for it.”
Sure! Tennessee will execute a likely innocent man and refuse to allow him to have his DNA tested against crime scene evidence, but a lady? Never! Except in the case of the aforementioned Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. Pike is currently suing to stop her own execution on the (not wrong) grounds that the state’s method of lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment due to a medical condition she suffers from. The state recently switched from a three-drug cocktail to a single dose of pentobarbital, which is known to cause a “flash pulmonary edema, described as sudden frothy fluid in the lungs,” but because Pike suffers from a clotting disorder, it would cause her lungs to fill with a “bloody frothy fluid.”
If the state of Tennessee has the stomach for filling one woman’s lungs with a “bloody frothy fluid,” it seems fair to say that it probably has the stomach to execute another woman for having an abortion. But even if that were not the case, the surest way to ensure that women are not executed for having abortions is to not make having an abortion a crime that is punishable by death. I might not think that a whole lot of people want to go around stabbing people in the face for funsies, but that doesn’t mean I’d vote to make it legal to do so.
“In a room of 1,000 people, if 999 of them killed an unborn life, they would be charged for it. Why would that one not,” Barrett said, noting that the actual penalty would be determined, like in murder cases, by “what they could charge, what they could prove and how the judge sentences.”
During the trial, Barrett said, the defense could bring up factors like rape or incest, in the way someone else might claim self-defense, but there would be no explicit exceptions because “all unborn lives would be treated as victims” and someone would have to stand trial.
And, again, Tennessee does not have exceptions for rape and incest in its abortion ban.
During a press conference on Thursday, Republican Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland) explained that “We don’t punish mothers here in this state. We’ve been very clear about that. We did away with abortion by saying, look, a doctor could get arrested for killing a baby, a doctor could lose their license, a doctor could be sued.”
“So we try very hard to make it clear we’re against abortion, but we’re for families. We’re for children, and we’re for these mothers that are going through an extraordinarily difficult time, so that they have the resources that they can be supported,” he added.
No, they’re not.
But these fellas are a pretty good representation of the two primary anti-abortion-rights camps — the “women are evil sluts who must be punished by being forced to give birth against their will or put in prison” camp and the “Women are stupid and vulnerable to being manipulated by evil doctors who just want to perform abortions for funsies, or as tribute to their lord and master, Satan” camp.
That is the camp that Laura Messick, executive director of a fake clinic in Tennessee, who also opposes the bill, belongs to. Messick fears that such a bill could make people see that they actually do hate women.
“I don’t think that it helps our cause,” Messick said of the bill. “I don’t think that it helps us promote, especially among people that may not hold the same attitude that we hold about life, our actual priorities.”
It is, however, probably a whole lot more honest, re: their “actual priorities.” After all, if you believe abortion is murder, you necessarily believe that those who have abortions are murderers. The reason they try to transfer the “evil” to doctors is because they know that no one wants to say that a woman who doesn’t want to be forced to give birth against her will is an evil murderer who should spend the rest of her life in jail. They know that would be a turn-off for people, and they are correct.
Jody Barrett is a monster, but he’s not a disingenuous monster. At least he has the “courage” to be honest about his terrible beliefs. Personally, I hope that more follow in his footsteps so that more people can see what the “actual priorities” of the anti-abortion rights crowd actually are.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Jesus fucking Christ that was some hardcore shit
The "life or health of the mother" one has become a lot more real to me since I learned I had a bicornuate uterus, a congenital birth defect where the top half of my uterus was missing and my fallopian tubes were connected to two horns instead, and I had an extra seam down the middle that cut it in half. Any pregnancy would have had an extremely high chance of miscarriage, and if it didn't miscarry, would have probably killed me in an earlier century.
Mullerian duct defects are not uncommon, impacting around 1% of women in one way or another, but most women don't find out until they try to get pregnant and keep miscarrying over and over again. Again, in an earlier century, we'd have been labeled "barren" and if one did manage to have a pregnancy stick, would have likely died in childbirth.
Anyway, once you find out you have this specific defect, a hysterectomy is automatically covered by insurance, so that's nice.