Does Oklahoma’s abortion law legalize rape?

Tenured Radical has a really interesting post up about the latest anti-choice law in Oklahoma that requires women to undergo an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion.

If, in order to obtain a perfectly legal abortion, a woman must permit herself to be penetrated by an ultrasound probe — in whatever way, or for however long, the technician and doctor wish to do so, that seems to me to be what statute 21-114 of the Oklahoma Criminal Code defines as rape by instrumentation. This act (putting an object in a vagina, anus or mouth against that person’s will) is explicitly defined as rape in the first or second degree.
Coercing a woman into being raped with an object, for whatever reason, is, in fact, rape: this was first established in State v. Rusk (1979), which transformed the legal and popular view of what counted as forced sex by defining as rape any unwanted sexual intercourse, even if a man believed that a woman ought to give it up in return for the drinks and dinner he had purchased earlier in the evening. And by the way? Although it has been technically invalidated by Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Oklahoma still has a sodomy statute on the books too.

What do you think?

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