Time for abortion on demand?

GOP presidential candidate leader Donald Trump has called for criminal punishment for women getting an abortion. Second place candidate Ted Cruz has started a "Pro-lifers for Cruz" coalition co-chaired by Troy Newman, on record calling for execution of abortion providers and treating aborting women as murderers.

While neither is unlikely to implement these ghoulish prescriptions should either become president, it's time to push back to a signature culture war issue of the rapidly disintegrating Republican Party.

What both promote about abortion, could, in the mind of some religious fanatics, be applied to any medical help for life threatening, or life impairing medical condition. In our relatively sane society we punish parents who refuse such medical care for their powerless child. Are principled religious folks lobbying to maintain the growth of an unwanted fetus (regardless of the reason) in contravention of a woman's right to control her reproductive health, any different from similarly principled folks who believe God doesn't want them to destroy the cancerous tumor He planted in their body? How would Ted Cruz react if some of those zealots lobbied to prevent him doing that as a desecration of God's Will? I suspect he'd claim the imaginary God he worships is OK for excising the cancer his benevolent God chose to give him.

We've come too far saving thousands of women from botched back alley abortions since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. But we're inexorably sliding backward as heartless states drastically eliminate abortion providers. Those legislators and governors are oblivious to the reality that unsafe abortions rise inversely too the decline of safe and accessible abortion providers. Their perverse effort to eliminate abortion disproportionally affects the poor who can't travel long distances to find one of the dwindling facilities. The rich merely tap into their discretionary wealth to get services that should be fully available to all.

Abortion on demand should be a plank in a national health care system that this backward country still doesn't have. Abortion must be completely divorced from all religions as a matter of critical public policy. Any religion working to limit abortion through legislation should lose their tax exempt status. They have one right when it comes to abortion: preaching against it to their followers.

Trump appears devoid of a single religious bone; his loony call to criminalize women who abort is pure pandering to his ignorant, angry followers. A President Trump would likely forget he ever mentioned the subject. Cruz has 206 religious bones, every one in his body. As a Dominionist, Cruz believes it's his duty to gain the presidency to impose delusional Evangelical concepts on our secular society. Neither Cruz nor Trump would bring America to a just point where abortion is available to all on demand from a humane society.