(Via Pharyngula).
Update 4/26: Jill Filipovic at the Huffington Post:
What most anti-choice organizations won't tell you is that the court's upholding of the ban will probably not protect even one fetus. It will, however, give pregnant women fewer options, and potentially complicate their health (the ban does not include a health exemption). It interferes with the ability of doctors to choose the best treatment for their patients, and turns them into potential criminals. It limits the grieving options of women whose wanted pregnancies went wrong. And because it does not use medical terminology, opting instead to rely on anti-choice propaganda language coined in the mid-90s, it gives doctors limited information about what is actually outlawed.
6 comments:
Now that was intense. My heart rate is still up, just reading and thinking and feeling about it.
I had to make the decision to take my father off life support. It wasn't easy, but he had a living will, and we had discussed it. How much worse it must be when one has the decision entirely on one's own responsibility. How much worse still if some anonymous third party tries to intervene in a most deeply personal medical decision. I understand DBB's imagined resort to violence against the kind of people who would so intervene; I hope it never comes to that for him, or for me, or for any of us.
Yes, I did my local Planned Parenthood's political database for them as my first contract computer job, nearly 20 years ago now. It was a labor of love. "Choice" means just that to me: no one should intervene in decisions of that sort; they are matters not only of women's rights, but of individual conscience, personal circumstance, and everything else the anti-choice zealots seem never to have thought about. Women who cannot choose between birth and abortion are deprived of a fundamental aspect of their own humanity.
The zealots have no right to meddle. Let me say it again: they have no right to meddle.
Yes...I had read this one too! Really brings home the personal and heartbreaking decisions that now get to be *dictated* by bad policies rather than Doctors or Individuals!
But then again - This is from the same Folks who brought us the Terri Schiavo Debacle!
The *Thought Police* are mere amateur hour compared to these busy-bodies of the world.
I read the comments of the readers of Disgusted's post. Fascinating that they seemed mostly male, they were saying the ban on partial-birth did not apply to his situation (which it does).
But it seemed there was a desire of these commenters to punish-by-baby those women who dared to change their minds about being pregnant. Do they really think women are changing their minds on a whim and nonchalantly aborting late in the process? (And if they were, do you really want these women to be mothers?)
The thing that just staggers me with this stupidly worded law is that we are scaring doctors into NOT giving us the medical care we need. ALL procedures should be available, even ones which the doctor know he will never use. You keep all the tools, all the techniques at hand. It makes you able to deal with the host of problems that come at you daily as a doctor.
Taking any knowledge, any tool, any technique away hurts all of us, not just women.
Steve, I'm so sorry about your dad. You've really been through it with your parents, haven't you? As a parent, my blood runs cold thinking that I could so weigh upon my children as to cause them distress. But it is very hard to dictate how you will die.
ellroon, thanks, but it just happened to be my lot in life. No one knows how s/he will leave this world. My parents were both wonderful people and splendid parents; I loved them, and I helped them unsparingly, not always perfectly, but as best I could. I am convinced that how life goes is more important than how it ends.
You are more courageous than I am: I did not have the nerve to read DBB's comment thread. I guess I've threaded my way through screaming, bloody-fetus-poster-waving protesters too many times in earlier years to be willing to subject myself to such people when doing so is optional. And where the f*ck are those people when the issue is saving humans from war, humans who none of us dispute are alive? There may indeed be some overlap, but IMHO there's too damned little overlap for them to claim any kind of moral superiority.
Can you tell I have no interest in flexibility or compromise on this issue?
I don't know if I could run the 'screaming, bloody-fetus-poster-waving' gauntlet like you have. I'm not that brave.
I have had miscarriages though, arriving at the emergency with blood running down my legs. So my interest is both personal history and worry for the future of my daughter and women of her generation.
The weird focus on the fetus and not the living being is bizarre and extremely sentimental in the true sense of the word. Why not work with the same energy on preventing pregnancy with really reliable birth control?
The gauntlet screamers can't answer that.
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