Shall we be honest here? The real reason behind the whole push to force women to have an ultrasound before having an abortion is to drive up the cost of the procedure so that women cannot afford them. That they are also shaming women and forcing further emotional and psychological trauma and torture on women is something that is just a positive side benefit as far as those religious zealots out there are concerned.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has decided to defend his support for the “Women’s Right to Know” Act and the requirement that women undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion with “You just have to close your eyes.”

Talk about not only driving the creep factor way up, but now Corbett honestly sounds like a rapist. In fact, much of the way these transvaginal ultrasound mandates have been defended have sounded just like men who are actively raping women. Maybe doctors should defend the need to have routine prostate exams by telling men that it won’t hurt much, you’ll actually get pleasure from it, and ‘just close your eyes and think of England’.

The bill would require doctors to perform an ultrasound, which means a transvaginal ultrasound if the woman is in the first trimester, offer her two personalized copies of the image, and play and describe the fetal heartbeat before she has an abortion. Apparently, these men think that women are so stupid that they do not know the moral, ethical or personal implications of what they are doing.

Corbett even stated that “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes. As long as it’s on the exterior and not the interior.”

The Huffington Post noted that:

Even if the woman opts to “close [her] eyes,” as Corbett suggests, the doctor will have to turn the ultrasound image toward her face, give her two signed copies of the printed image, describe the number of heartbeats per minute and tell her if that’s normal or not for a fetus of that age. She then has to wait 24 hours and bring all the signed paperwork and both ultrasound images to her abortion doctor in order to have the procedure legally, and the doctor has to repeat to her the age of the fetus.

Patrick Murphy, a Democratic candidate for Attorney General, said that Corbett’s comments were offensive and that “It’s bad enough that Governor Corbett wants to force women to get an unnecessary and invasive procedure as a means of getting a government permission slip to undergo legal medical care. It’s worse yet that he wants to shame them by shoving an ultrasound screen in their face. But it’s unthinkable that he would so casually dismiss this by advising women to just close their eyes.”

Pennsylvania was the site of one of the worst cases of illegal abortions in the nation in recent memory. A doctor was eventually arrested for providing poor women with horrifying abortions that left many women scarred, infertile, and even dead. He is the kind of abortion provider that men like Corbett want to drive women back to with all of these restrictions on abortion, contraception, and this war on women.

Making abortion illegal or harder to get does not stop it. It just makes it torture. . .that is, if the Republicans were not already trying to make it torture and the doctors into their proxy torturers.