A charge made by Senator Claire McCaskill that John McCain wants to jail some women who have abortions is being disputed by CQ Politics.
The KY3 Political Notebook first raised questions about McCaskill's accusation in this post on Sunday.
"This is a ticket that wants to put women in prison for having an abortion after they've been raped," McCaskill said on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
CQ's analysis concluded that "McCaskill’s claim is a highly questionable stretch of what McCain has said and done on the volatile issue of abortion." The Obama campaign is standing by the statement because McCain has said he'd like to see Roe v. Wade overturned. "Many states would criminalize abortion for women by making it a felony punishable by jail time — some even in cases of rape," an Obama spokesperson told CQ.
While that may be true, it cannot be assumed that McCain would explicitly support jail time for the women who have abortions. There's no public record of McCain ever uttering such a thing.
"The extrapolation that a Roe foe, of necessity, wants to lock rape victims behind bars is seen as twisted in the view of some Democrats who oppose abortion," reports CQ.
“I don’t think it’s a fair accusation. It’s scare techniques,” said Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, an organization that supports Democrats who oppose abortion rights.
CQ concludes: "Even if McCain had not explicitly said in the past that he thinks abortion should be legal for rape victims and even had he not explicitly stated his opposition to prosecuting women who have abortions, it takes a further leap of logic to make real the prospect of rape victims doing hard time for having abortions."
The KY3 Political Notebook agrees with CQ's conclusions.
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