Abortion is legal in the U.S. and has been since 1973. It is a necessary procedure to allow women to have control over their health and reproductive rights. No one should be allowed to make this private medical decisions for any woman. Those decisions should remain between a woman, her family and her health care providers.
Anti-abortion advocates have settled for the next best thing. If you can’t make abortion illegal, just make it impossible to get by intimidating doctors to quit performing the procedure and harass abortion clinics into closing. Fewer doctors and fewer clinics mean less availability of reproductive services to women.
Those extremists who set the tone for hate and violence should not be the socially acceptable group. They should be equated with other hate groups, such as the KKK. Belonging to and supporting these groups should be shameful. Being a patient, clinic employee or doctor should not be shameful.
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Anti-abortion extremists operate in the open and get away with these actions all the time. Little seems to be done until severe acts of violence occur. This must stop, and it looks like the Obama justice department is stepping up to enforce the relevant laws in this matter.
No one, pro-choice or pro-life, likes it that abortion procedures have to exist. Those who are legitimately pro-life and want to find ways to reduce as many abortions as possible and take part in a real debate are free to do so, and this is a legitimate debate. But when a culture of intimidation and violence is allowed to continue, that is where they cross the line.
Doctors and other providers should be able to train for and perform abortions in medical practice without fear of harassment and being murdered. Women should not be subject to harassment and made to feel shame about something that is a private medical concern. It is not anyone’s business except the patient and doctor when a decision about having the procedure must be faced for whatever reason.
Women are not second class citizens whose only job is to be incubators. No embryo or fetus has or should have more value as a human life than the woman carrying that embryo or fetus. A woman should be and currently is able to choose to terminate a pregnancy based on her own needs, beliefs and ability to make informed decisions.
The anti-choice movement and government should not be permitted into these private decisions, which should stay between women, their physicians and health care providers, and their families. No group should be allowed to intimidate women and health care providers of abortions because they violate a family’s privacy rights and the privacy rights of the doctor-patient relationship.
Narrowly looking at family planning clinics as abortion clinics neglects the fact that they provide much needed health screening services (PAP smears and breast exams) to millions of women who can’t afford to receive this care through the usual doctor’s office setting.
Demonizing birth control as a form of abortion and not permitting sex education are beyond ridiculous, let alone illogical, in preventing abortions from unwanted pregnancies. Abstinence only does not work as a form of birth control.
How is it that these anti-abortion extremists and their associated groups can call themselves pro-life? They murder people and harm others in the attempt. They are death penalty proponents. How do these beliefs constitute protection of life?
Once these babies are born, extremist groups no longer care about them. These babies may become children on Medicaid and food stamps, and part of a class of people these extremists detest. The extremists don’t want to provide any assistance to families to feed, clothe, shelter, provide medical care for and educate these children.
If the family is already in poverty, this child may die in infancy because our infant mortality rate is significantly higher within our poor population than it should be, given we are the richest country in the world. Our overall IMR is unacceptably high no matter what demographic of the population to which a woman belongs. How do these actions constitute protection of life?
A woman may need to seek a late pregnancy abortion because continuation of the pregnancy is threatening her life or harming her health permanently. What if she already has a husband and children to care for? How can a mother choose to give up her life and responsibilities to her living children to die during a pregnancy?
She may have cancer that can’t wait for the baby to be born before she starts treatment that would surely seriously harm or kill the fetus. If she waits, she will die. The fetus may be severely deformed or will be born with a fatal disease that will painfully kill the child after its birth. She may be carrying a dead fetus and her obstetrician may refuse to induce labor to allow her to deliver it at the time of demise. An abortion of the dead fetus would allow her and her family to go forward with the funeral and grieving process.
The woman in question may not be a woman at all, but a girl of age 10 or 11 who was raped and didn’t tell anyone until the pregnancy had progressed too far for an early pregnancy abortion. Is the child’s life of less value than the fetus she carries?
None of these situations is my choice. The point is no one should have the right to make these extremely difficult choices for anyone else. The abortion health care services needed to serve women who have made these tough decisions should be reasonably available to them without intimidation, harassment or fear.
Women in America have the right to a safe and legal abortion. Strategies and tactics that take away the availability of a legal abortion performed by a physician trained in the procedure must be removed as obstacles to women seeking reproductive services.
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