When GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said there should be “some form of punishment” for women who end a pregnancy earlier this week, criticisms came flying from the left and, most tellingly, from the right.
Indeed, to propose criminalizing women is even for abortion opponents a sensitive area that’s largely avoided. Movement advocates prefer to talk about the protection of life, not punishment. “We have never advocated, in any context, for the punishment of women who undergo abortion,” said the right-wing Susan B. Anthony List.
As Trump backtracked, presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich also rejected the idea. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate response and it’s a difficult enough situation than to try to punish somebody…abortions shouldn’t be punished,” he said.
Yes on Sunday morning Kasich told on ABC’s This Week that it is up to the states to decide on punishment. Regardless of his beliefs, that stance creates an opportunity for states to create laws that punish doctors or women as they see fit.
“We’re going to leave this up to the states to work this out the way they want to,” said Kasich.
George Stephanopoulos pleaded for him to provide more details, including on whether he’d support punishments for doctors. Kasich refused to answer.
“Today, I’m not. I’ve just told you how I feel about it,” Kasich said, eager to cut off the discussion.
WATCH: @JohnKasich declines to take position on punishing doctors for performing abortions https://t.co/fbAUqbbd1x https://t.co/ujCzTjSUNl
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 3, 2016
In 2013, Ohio lawmakers approved various restrictions on abortion, including much tighter regulations on clinics that offer the procedure. One of those restrictions are mandated transfer agreements with hospitals that come into play when serious complications arise and patients need to be taken to the ER. As reported by ThinkProgress, it’s not actually necessary to have a specific agreement with a hospital to get patients admitted.
“Transfer agreements have nothing to do with patient safety, because if there is an emergency an ambulance will take the patient to the nearest hospital, and that hospital will treat the patient because they are required to under federal law,” Kellie Copeland, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, explained in a past interview. Over-regulating abortion clinics is a popular anti-choice strategy that’s spreading rapidly throughout conservative states. But Ohio’s law goes a step further by forbidding public hospitals from entering into transfer agreements, and now half of the clinics offering this procedure have closed, according to published reports.
While on This Week, Kasich briefly discussed transfer agreements as he tried to move away from the topic. “I’ve been very careful about making sure that we don’t pass something that’s going to cause a constitutional conflict,” said Kasich. “And I think we’ve behaved there and conducted ourselves appropriately.”
Punishing abortion has been a constant and difficult issue for politicians to address. Meanwhile, around the world, many women are sitting in prison for the crime of abortion. In El Salvador, women live under one of the harshest abortion bans in the world and are routinely prosecuted for illegally ending a pregnancy. In the United States, women have also been prosecuted for attempting to end their pregnancies. In 2011, Jennie Linn McCormack was charged for taking abortion-inducing medication. She was charged under an obscure 1972 Idaho law stating it’s illegal for a woman to perform her own abortion.