As pro-choice state senators like Wendy Davis (Texas) and Nina Turner (Ohio) fight their GOP colleagues attacks on women’s right to choose, a certain YouTube video is making the rounds on the Internet again. In “Asking Anti-Abortion Demonstrators an Important Question,” a man visits an anti-abortion protest in Libertyville, Illinois, and asks a few of them, “what should happen to women who get abortions if abortions were to become illegal?” To this man’s astonishment, none of them had the slightest idea! Furthermore, all five of the women interviewed seemed uncomfortable about answering this question, and came across as highly reluctant about punishing women for having abortions. Some of them actually even sounded sympathetic towards their fellow-women’s hypothetical predicaments.

The interviews all went similarly to the exchange transcribed below:

Interviewer: [asks woman standing on sidewalk and holding up a large sign if abortion should be legal]

Woman: It shouldn’t be legal.

Interviewer: It shouldn’t be legal?

Woman: No, of course not.

Interviewer: And, if it was illegal, should there be a penalty for the women who get abortions illegally?

Woman: I dunno … I dunno … I haven’t thought about that one.

Interviewer: Usually when things are illegal, there’s a penalty attached. What do you think that should be?

Woman: [looks increasingly appalled by this idea] I really haven’t speculated about it.

Interviewer: But you’ve been doing this for two years.

Woman: [lamely] I really haven’t speculated much about it.

Should we feel disturbed that people who clearly haven’t thought things through have such an outsized influence on public health policy, or relieved that the average anti-abortion ‘pro-lifer’ doesn’t spend their free time devising scarlet letters and other torments for their supposedly immoral sisters? You decide.

Here’s the video:

No wonder we’re still watching this old chestnut on abortions from 2008 five years later.

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