Jill Morrison, Amanda Marcotte, and Bean write about the new TRAP law in Wisconsin, this one an "informed consent" provision. The provision is tied to the state's mandatory 24-hour waiting period, which accomplishes nothing other than make it more difficult for poor and rural women to obtain abortions. In itself, this new "informed consent" provision is mostly silly; it's not as draconian as, say, the proposed Idaho law, and aside from giving anti-choice prosecutors a basis for harassing abortion providers it's not clear what the practical affects of the new provision would be. What it does is provide another example of the fundamental sexism that runs throughout the American pro-life movement and the irrational regulations they favor. Ob-gyns, of course, are not required to obtain "informed" consent when carrying a pregnancy to term, although it is, if anything, more likely that this would be the result of coercion. We don't have such regulations about women who choose to become mothers because it wouldn't make any sense; absent physical coercion, we should assume that adults are capable of making their own judgments. Rather, the assumption is that women are defined by being mothers, and that a woman who chooses to end a pregnancy therefore can't really understand what she'd doing. Hence, the extent to which abortion laws (up to and including excluding women from punishment for what is allegedly a serious violent offense) simply assume that women are not rational agents, and the fact that they might have different values than James Dobson can be adduced as additional evidence of their irrationality. The only useful thing about Kennedy's appalling opinion in Carhart II is that at least he made this explicit; the Wisconsin law is just another iteration. --Scott Lemieux
