Prosecutors won’t enforce abortion ban

If Virginia enacts a law banning abortions, the commonwealth’s attorneys for Fairfax and Arlington counties will not enforce it.

That’s the message Steve Descano, the chief prosecutor for Fairfax County, and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who has that role for Arlington County and Falls Church City, brought to a fundraiser for Repro Rising Sept. 22 in Mason District.

“We are fighting for fundamental human rights,” said Tarina Keene, executive director of Repro Rising Virginia. “We must have access to our own bodies.”

“If push should come to shove, in the worst-case scenario, your last line of defense is your local prosecutor,” Descano said. “If there’s an abortion ban, there would be criminal penalties associated with that.”

Any woman who has a miscarriage would become a suspect in a crime, Descano said. “Police are going to pull her trash. In the dead of night, they’re going to be looking for liquor bottles, they’re going to be looking for pill bottles, looking for anything to show that this wasn’t a miscarriage.”

Police would interrogate her and her intimate partner, he said. “They’re going to be getting search warrants for her cell phone and emails to see if she said anything that might make her liable for a crime. They’re going to go to her doctors and nurses and try to get her records to see if there’s anything they can hang on her.”

If they do find something, all that intimate information would be aired before a grand jury, and if they think she committed a crime, it will all be aired again in court, where a prosecutor is going to “try to put her behind bars.”

”But if a prosecutor doesn’t go along with that, it’s never going to happen,” Descano said. “The police aren’t going to waste their time on cases I’m not going to prosecute.”

It’s critical to elect people that will protect reproduction rights, he said. “Every election from here on out, abortion is on the ballot.”

“I don’t believe I was elected to charge a woman with a felony because she doesn’t want to carry her baby to term” or “to imprison a 13-year-old incest victim or force her to give birth while she’s still in middle school,” said Dehghani-Tafti.

“Any state that relies on its criminal laws to regulate abortion will probably be a state that enacts the most restrictive laws possible,” Dehghani-Tafti said. “We’re talking about 15 weeks right now, then it’s going to be eight, and then it’s going to be conception, and then it’s going to be no abortion even in the case of rape and incest.”

“Even if you’re anti-abortion, you should not be criminalizing it,” she said. “The criminal justice system is not a scalpel, it’s not surgery. The criminal justice system is a blunt chainsaw that rips through families.”

The cliché about abortion is that an irresponsible young woman is using it for birth control, she said. In reality, it’s often a married mother of three who can’t afford to have a fourth child. “If you prosecute her, what happens to the other kids? You’re now tearing the family apart.”

“We need to trust that women know what to do with their bodies.”