Kyle Whitmire:

Consider what the novel is about: A young woman is all but abandoned by her family, raped by her father and left pregnant by the assault. And she tries, despite all that, to have the child.

Just last week, the Alabama House passed a ban on abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detectable – roughly six weeks into a pregnancy.

And that ban would not make an exemption for rape or incest.

Consider further what that means: We don’t expect a 17-year-old woman be mature enough to read a work of fiction about brutal rape by a family member, but if she finds herself the victim of such an assault and pregnant from it, we expect her to be mature enough to carry the child to term.

And once that child is born?

Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, proposed to amend one of the abortion bills last week to allocate $1 million toward helping women and families with adoption, but that amendment got tabled because the bill’s sponsor said it would be too much trouble.

And if the woman wants to keep the child? In that case, if you want government assistance to help you feed a family, there are Alabama lawmakers who want you to pee in a cup first.

In Montgomery, truth comes with consequences, and who needs that?

Lawmakers there would rather opine about the Ten Commandments or blast Common Core, while their decades of neglect and disregard have turned the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women into a state-operated rape factory. They would rather be accomplices to brutes who learned to be prison guards from watching Cinemax than find the funds for better staff or rework the way the state deals with sentencing.

-- http://blog.al.com/wire/2014/03/when_it_comes_to_rape_alabama.html