Alabama: Women Are Not Rational Moral Agents
By 
Emily Atkin has a good piece about the fact that Alabama has passed a law stating that 1)an abortion is a violent felony potentially worthy of life imprisonment, and 2)the person most responsible for the abortion should not be sanctioned at all:
But you can see their twisted logic. Most abortion opponents probably don’t regard women who get abortions as criminals, but rather victims—not just of a broadly permissive society, but of a specifically godless doctor. It is much easier to see a medical professional as morally depraved, and deserving of consequences, than a pregnant woman. She didn’t know any better! She was brainwashed! She’s just hysterical!
Too many Americans still think of abortion as a medieval procedure in which a white-coated doctor stands at the edge of an exam table, armed with clamps, ready to pry a nearly fully formed baby from a woman’s womb. This is not reality. About a quarter abortions in the United States are so-called medication abortions, in which the woman takes one or more pills to induce an abortion, usually prior to nine weeks of gestation and in the comfort of their home. And most surgical abortions, which require a doctor and occur in a clinic or other medical setting, are not being done to viable fetuses. More than 90 percent of abortions in the United States are performedat or before 13 weeks of gestation. (The earliest a fetus can survive is after 20 weeks, and the odds are extremely low until 25 weeks.)
But even if all abortions were surgical abortions performed by doctors, Alabama’s choice to punish the doctor and not the patient would still be cowardly. They’re not just trying to mask the horror of punishing women by punishing their doctors instead; they’re trying to guilt women into submission. We are taught, from a young age, to suppress our own needs if they might burden other people. So whereas we might be willing to get an illegal abortion at the risk going to jail ourselves, we’d be less willing to do so if it put our doctor at risk.
The idea that women are not people enough to be held responsible for their actions is among the most atavistic of the many misogynist impulses that underlay all anti-abortion legislation.