A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Missouri abortion law Monday after Planned Parenthood said the law would harm women by dramatically reducing the clinics available to provide the procedure. The new law, Missouri Senate Bill 370, would categorize any facility that provides more than five first-trimester abortions a month, or any second- or third-trimester abortions as outpatient surgery centers.

The law requires the facilities to meet specific state building, staffing, and health standards. These standards include regulations such as requiring that hallways at the facilities be at least six feet wide and doors at least 44 inches wide.

U.S. District Judge Ortrie Smith granted Planned Parenthood a temporary injunction after hearing the argument that the organization would have to halt abortions at its Columbia and Kansas City offices–either permanently or while expensive and “medically unnecessary” renovations were made. Ortrie will hold a hearing today, September 10, to determine if the injunction should be made permanent.

Some conservatives claim that if Planned Parenthood truly wanted abortions to be safe, legal, and rare, they would be all about supporting this bill. But what about the charges that the law does little to support safety and in reality merely puts “medically unnecessary” blocks up to women getting abortions?

This law and the conservative response to it seem like scare tactics and false advertising to me. If we really want to make abortion safe, legal, and rare, we would provide real sex education, provide condoms, and have better laws protecting women in general against domestic violence and rape. Plan B would be made more accessible especially for rape and incest victims and if an abortion has to be performed we would make it possible early in the pregnancy. I think those are the humane choices, but how do other Humanists weigh in on this issue? Do you agree that clinics should be treated like outpatient surgery centers, even if they only prescribe medication? Or do you think they should be exempted from this law because of the nature of what they do?

If abortion were illegal, how much jail time should a woman serve for obtaining one?

That’s the question being asked of anti-abortion protesters in a fascinating mini-documentary posted on YouTube. Taking place outside of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill., these series of interviews highlight an aspect of the anti-abortion crusade that in retrospect seems so glaringly obvious that I’m chagrined to admit it’s one which I myself hadn’t considered before. But I’m definitely not the only one — upon being asked how much time women should serve for obtaining hypothetically illegal abortions, protesters in the video appear taken aback, many of them stammering while admitting they’d never given it much thought. When pressed for answers as to the punishment such a crime would warrant, the ones given range from “counseling” to “pray for them.”

If you believe that abortion is murder then it follows that you should endorse severe punishment for women who undergo the procedure. However, most of the protesters seem to shy away from such a position and my guess is that most people in the broader society who identify as pro-life would as well. This logical contradiction — it’s unreasonable to argue abortion is murder but should go lightly punished — illuminates the highly emotional aspect of the abortion debate for anti-choicers: it’s a moral issue, not a rational or even practical one, and who cares about the consequences of a ban? Perhaps if we in the pro-choice camp can begin demanding answers to these sorts of very practical questions we can begin to get anti-choicers to at least consider their position more rationally, if not moderate their stance.