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As we continue to see conservatives pass laws and create roadblocks to prevent or deter people from having abortions, it’s important to remember the role psychological torment plays in their schemes.
Along with outright bans, Republican lawmakers frequently use the politics of shame to keep people from undergoing the procedure.
On Wednesday, a judge overruled a small town’s requirement that fetal remains be buried or cremated. Conservatives on the all-male City Council of Seaford, Delaware, voted in December to pass the ordinance, which pertained to anyone who had an abortion or a miscarriage.
But J. Travis Laster, a vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, said Wednesday that the requirement runs afoul of state law, which requires a death record to bury or cremate remains. And in Delaware, a death record is given only for fetal remains that either reach 20 weeks of gestation or weigh more than 12.5 ounces.
“However one might view aborted remains for ethical, moral or religious purposes, they do not constitute a dead body under Delaware’s statutory regime,” Laster wrote. “Aborted remains therefore cannot be buried or cremated.”
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings sued Seaford over the ordinance in January.
“This ordinance is part of a national wave of anti-abortion policies funded by extremists who would have our country dragged fifty years into the past,” Jennings said in a statement at the time. “Left unchecked, it threatens serious, irreparable, and unconstitutional harm.”
She sounded a similar tone in a news release Wednesday.
“This ruling firmly rejects a clearly illegal and harmful attempt to nullify State law and to use dark money to return us to the Dark Ages,” she said. “It protects residents and visitors of Seaford from a cruel and frankly hateful policy.”
It’s great news that Jennings won her case in Delaware, but the rest of the country isn’t out of the woods. Several GOP-controlled states have passed similarly deranged laws in recent years, including an Ohio law that passed last year that could be a model other conservatives follow under the current ultra-conservative court.
Requiring people to finance burials or cremations for their fetuses is the extremist right’s cruel attempt at theater. It thinks forcing pregnant people who undergo abortions or experience miscarriage should feel shame. And forcing these people to pretend they were involved in killing a human is one way of doing that.