Abortion and adoption

(Difference between revisions)''For more information please see'': [[Adoption success stories]]  ''For more information please see'': [[Adoption success stories]]  Abortion leaves a child with no future, effectively terminating any chance that the child has at life. The mentality behind this is that no life is better than a bad one. Adoption counters this by giving an unwanted child a better chance at life. There are strict criteria for adoptive parents particularity in the USAhttp://adoption.state.gov/adoption_process/who.php, and the United Kingdom https://www.gov.uk/child-adoption/adoption-assessment. This is to ensure that any adopted child will be given a better chance at life is a loving and caring environment. As such, Adoption gives the child a possible future, Abortion terminates the future of the child.  Abortion leaves a child with no future, effectively terminating any chance that the child has at life. The mentality behind this is that no life is better than a bad one. Adoption counters this by giving an unwanted child a better chance at life. There are strict criteria for adoptive parents particularity in the USAhttp://adoption.state.gov/adoption_process/who.php, and the United Kingdom https://www.gov.uk/child-adoption/adoption-assessment. This is to ensure that any adopted child will be given a better chance at life is a loving and caring environment. As such, Adoption gives the child a possible future, Abortion terminates the future of the child.

A major point in the Pro-life argument is that unplanned or unwanted children can be put up for Adoption rather than the women opting for Abortion. With 60% of pregnancies being unintended[1],there is a genuine issue with regards to the future of these children. Abortion attempts to solve this problem with the argument that an unintended child's life will be so bad that it would be better for the child to never live at all. However, Adoption gives the child a chance at life in a better, and often more prepared, environment. Adoption also gives significant benefits to the mother of the child as well as the family that adopts. Abortion, on the other hand, can only benefit the mother and even this is questionable due to the guilt that many potential mothers feel afterwards known as Post-Abortion Syndrome.[2].

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For more information please see: Adoption success stories

Abortion leaves a child with no future, effectively terminating any chance that the child has at life. The mentality behind this is that no life is better than a bad one. Adoption counters this by giving an unwanted child a better chance at life. There are strict criteria for adoptive parents particularity in the USA[3], and the United Kingdom [4]. This is to ensure that any adopted child will be given a better chance at life is a loving and caring environment. As such, Adoption gives the child a possible future, Abortion terminates the future of the child.

Post-Abortion Syndrome often occurs after an abortion, leaving a mother with feelings of guilt and of shame. The only potential benefit is that the woman is now free of the child and can now go on with her Life. However, Adoption offers the same benefit as well as other benefits that could have a beneficial impact on the mother:

1. There is no financial impact on the Mother for choosing adoption. Pregnancy expenses are usually paid for by the adoptive family.[5]. Abortion will usually cost $490 in the USA [6]. While the NHS in the United Kingdom will cover abortions if they meet the criteria, privately run Clinics offer it from £500 (around $767).

2.The mother gets a say in what sort of family adopts their child and also has the opportunity to keep in contact with the child.[7]

3.Ethically, women may choose to end with a result that brings life and not death.[8]. Especially as adoption is more socially acceptable than abortion.[9]

Adoption gives many benefits to families who wish for a child of their own yet abortion does not serve to help these people but rather makes it harder for them to fulfill their aspirations as Adoptive rates have fallen due to the increase in abortion.[10]. The benefits are:

1.A couple, in which one of the partners are infertile, will have a chance to obtain a child that they can care for as their own.[11] In fact, 2,000,00 couples are waiting to adopt in the USA yet only 50,000 babies are put up for adoption each year.[12]

2.In the United Kingdom, to encourage adoption, adoptive parents are given access to child benefit in order to ensure that they can financially afford to care for the child.[13]

3.Adoptive parents have opened their house to a child that is not their biological offspring. This is an act of unrequited love and it is logical that they would continue this and give the adopted child all the care and attention that it would not otherwise get in a household that never wanted him/her.

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Virginia Lawmakers Agree: Banning Insurers From Covering Abortion Hurts Low-Income Women

This week, Virginia became the 21st state to restrict coverage for abortion services in the health insurance marketplaces set up under Obamacare. Over the past several years, that’s become an increasingly common tactic to restrict abortion access, as anti-choice lawmakers rush to prevent insurers from being able to cover the cost of the legal medical procedure.

Even though the measure banning abortion coverage — which was an amendment that Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) tacked onto a broader General Assembly bill — ultimately passed the legislature, it still sparked a debate that cut across party lines. Republican and Democratic lawmakers both suggested that preventing women from using their insurance coverage to pay for abortion services is ultimately a class issue, a point confirmed by women’s health advocates:

But members of both parties agree that the measure’s biggest impact will likely fall along class lines, landing hardest on some of the people the federal health-care overhaul was designed to help: working women who barely get by on their incomes.

“Those people that can afford insurance outside of the exchanges will be able to buy whatever they want. People that can’t afford to buy outside of the exchange will have to buy policies that don’t cover these procedures,” said Sen. John C. Watkins (R-Powhatan), who sponsored the bill but opposed the amendment by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R). “It just sets up a class situation, in my mind.” [...]

Cianti Stewart-Reid, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, said that the only real effect of the amendment would be to limit access for women who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to purchase their insurance on the private market.

“What it means is that women — by and large low-income but working women in Virginia — won’t have access to abortion,” Stewart-Reid said.

Abortion access is, of course, an incredibly important class issue. Of all the women who have abortions in the United States, 42 percent fall below the federal poverty line — partly because low-income women often still struggle to access affordable and reliable contraception. And when women are denied the opportunity to have a legal abortion, that greatly increases their risk of falling into poverty.

And the restrictions that state lawmakers pile on top of women seeking to have an abortion often hit low-income women the hardest. For example, 24-hour waiting periods — which force women to make multiple trips to a clinic — ultimately mean women are paying the costs for the additional transportation, the additional childcare, and the additional lost income during the time off of work. On top of the hundreds of dollars that an abortion procedure can cost out-of-pocket, that quickly adds up to be too much for poor women who are already struggling to pay the bills.

Virginia lawmakers were correct to identify the class dynamics exacerbated by unnecessary restrictions on abortion coverage. Unfortunately for the women in the state, however, their anti-abortion governor is expected to sign the legislation into law.

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Kan. abortion clinic opens in slain doc's building

WICHITA, Kan. -- A new clinic offering abortions and other women's medical services saw its first patient Thursday in the Wichita building where a slain Kansas abortion provider had practiced.

The South Wind Women's Clinic opened nearly four years after Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation's few doctors performing late-term abortions, was gunned down in his church by an abortion opponent in May 2009.

The shuttered facility was bought by an abortion-rights group, Trust Women Foundation, which reopened it as a family and women's health center offering abortions and other health care services.

"We have been working a long time, really hard to get this open to provide services to women in Wichita," said Kerry Townsend Jacob, the group's spokeswoman.

Townsend Jacob cited privacy rights in declining to say whether the first patient, a Wichita woman, had an abortion or some other medical service. She also refused to say how many appointments have been scheduled so far.

Tiller was one of the few remaining physicians in the nation who did late-term abortions, but South Wind Women's Clinic does not plan to do abortions beyond the 14th week of pregnancy.

The Trust Women Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 2010 by Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller for seven years. The foundation bought the property from Tiller's wife in August.

Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, called the Wichita clinic's opening "symbolic" for abortion rights advocates.

"For me, we are winning across the board," Newman said, a reference to scores of laws seeking to restrict access to abortion passed by Republican-controlled legislatures during the last few years.

In Kansas, legislators on Thursday were preparing for final votes on a sweeping anti-abortion measure that would block tax breaks for abortion providers and outlaw abortions performed solely because of the baby's gender.

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France Will Now Pay The Full Cost Of Abortion And Contraception

The conversation around reproductive rights in the United States has centered, in recent years, solely around the idea that such rights are becoming more and more elusive for young women. Across the country, abortion and contraception access are at risk, and might be rolled back or banned entirely. But that’s far from the case in France, where the government has just enacted a law to reimburse the total cost of both abortions and contraception:

The French state will reimburse 100 percent of the cost of abortions beginning April 1, while girls aged between 15 and 18 will be offered access to free and anonymous birth control.

The change comes as a law approved in late 2012 comes into force.

Until now, French women over 18 could only receive up to 80 percent of the cost of the procedure, which can run up to 450 euros.

On Friday, conservative Americans were outraged to learn that a federal judge had ruled that girls of any age should be able to access Plan B over the counter. Younger women have virtually no access to over-the-counter birth control in the United States, despite medical guidelines that advise to the contrary. That’s a far cry from the expansive access to reproductive rights unfurling in France, and around the world.

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Why The Response To A Philadelphia Abortion Doctor’s Ongoing Murder Trial Gets It All Wrong

A Philadelphia-area abortion doctor is currently on trial for murder, based on gruesome reports about the illegal techniques that he and his staff used to perform late-term abortions for desperate, low-income women. Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s high-profile case is sparking understandable outrage, as evidence has emerged that he may have taken advantage of vulnerable women, violated multiple medical codes, and performed inhumane surgeries.

According to prosecutors, Gosnell’s clinic went 17 years without an inspection — and abortion opponents are leveraging that to go after other abortion clinics that have no affiliation with Gosnell or his crimes. “Unfortunately and tragically in Pennsylvania, facilities were going uninspected for years,” Maria Gallagher, a lobbyist with the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, said in reference to the ongoing trial. That’s a big reason why abortion opponents like Gallagher were able to push Pennsylvania legislators to tighten restrictions on abortion clinics in 2011, updating state law to require abortion clinics to adhere to the same standards as outpatient surgery centers. According to NPR, Gosnell’s case was “mentioned frequently” as Pennsylvania lawmakers considered, and ultimately approved, the unnecessary new restrictions.

If proven guilty, there’s no doubt that Gosnell and his staff committed horrific crimes. But the knee-jerk reaction to his murder trial — the assumption that most abortion doctors aren’t adhering to medical standards, and that the women who visit health clinics are in grave danger of receiving unsafe care — is off-base. In fact, as the right-wing pushes for tighter abortion clinic standards to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, that crusade could end up having exactly the opposite effect.

Pennsylvania’s abortion clinic restrictions fit into a larger anti-choice effort across the country that is solely intended to force abortion clinics to close their doors. In states like North Dakota, Virginia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas, abortion opponents are pushing legislation to force abortion clinics to adhere to unneccesary new regulations in the name of “ensuring women’s safety.” That sounds like a noble goal. But these measures — known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP — aren’t really about ensuring women’s safety at all. As Mississippi’s Republican governor once admitted behind closed doors at an anti-choice event, TRAP laws are about indirectly restricting women’s access to abortion by shutting down health clinics.

In Pennsylvania specifically, one Planned Parenthood affiliate was forced to spend nearly a half a million dollars to get two of its clinics into compliance with the new regulations. That involved unnecessary updates like installing hands-free sinks, replacing the floors, and updating the air-conditioning system. The affiliate’s CEO, Dayle Steinberg, explained to NPR that the state’s stricter requirements didn’t actually do anything to improve the care provided to the women at her clinics, where the complication rate is already less than one-tenth of 1 percent. “They were thinly disguised as improving patient safety, when really it was about increasing the cost for abortion providers — hoping that some of them wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Steinberg said.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Women’s health advocates consider TRAP measures to be some of the most dangerous threats to women’s access to safe abortion services across the country. In North Dakota, where anti-choice Republicans are advancing the most stringently anti-abortion legislation in the nation, one doctor warned lawmakers that the new TRAP law will force women into dangerous, “backroom” abortion procedures. Retired pediatrician Ted Kleiman worked at a hospital before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, and he watched women die from botched abortions. “The thought of returning to those days is really beyond imagination,” Kleiman told his state lawmakers, urging them not to shut down the only abortion clinic left in North Dakota.

Women’s health advocates, particularly those who work at health clinics, are extremely concerned about ensuring that women receive the highest standards of reproductive care. But clinics that allow women to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester of pregnancy — which involves taking a pill, and is not actually a surgical procedure — aren’t analogous to Gosnell’s clinic, which performed incredibly late-term, illegal abortion services. Over-regulating the clinics like Planned Parenthood’s, where the vast majority of patients are already receiving incredibly safe care, will actually limit women’s options instead of keeping them safe. That could lead more desperate women who feel like they don’t have any other options left to seek out doctors like Gosnell.

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Indiana GOP Drops Forced Ultrasound Requirement To Focus On Shutting Down Abortion Clinics

Last month, Indiana Republicans proposed a measure intended to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state. The original SB 371 legislation also contained a clause that would have required women taking the RU-486 abortion pill to undergo two invasive transvaginal probes — one before taking the pill, and one after. But ever since the transvaginal ultrasound provision first erupted into controversy, the state’s GOP has been working to scale it back, hoping to assuage public outrage and quietly shepard the rest of the anti-choice legislation’s passage into law.

At first, the Indiana Senate removed the bill’s second ultrasound requirement to ensure its passage. And now, a House committee has removed the ultrasound requirement altogether. According to an Associated Press report, “Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter says the group agreed with the decision to drop the ultrasound requirement because debate over it in the state Senate had taken focus away from its goal of tightening regulations on clinics that provide abortions.” Now that abortion opponents have conceded to public pressure on the invasive forced ultrasound measures, the rest of SB 371 will seem moderate in comparison. But the anti-choice legislation would still have far-reaching consequences for women’s reproductive rights in the state.

Indiana lawmakers are pursuing a popular right-wing strategy for limiting abortion access: Indirectly restricting abortion by imposing costly, unnecessary requirements on abortion clinics with the intention of forcing them to close their doors. SB 371 would force health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not actually surgical procedures. It’s a direct attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides the RU-486 to patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, since that clinic would likely not be able to comply with the new restrictions.

Women’s health advocates consider these type of abortion restrictions to be some of the most dangerous assaults to women’s health — because they can take effect fairly quickly, they effectively limit women’s abortion access, and they often fly under the radar without inspiring the same kind of outrage that other laws, like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, do. That’s exactly why Indiana Republicans are willing to sacrifice mandatory ultrasounds to focus on their real “goal.”

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Indiana GOP Moves Closer To Mandating Invasive Ultrasounds For Women Taking The Abortion Pill

The Indiana senate advanced a measure on Tuesday to require all women to undergo an unnecessary, and potentially invasive, ultrasound procedure before taking the RU-486 abortion pill.

The original version of the bill actually mandated two tranvaginal ultrasounds — before and after women took the pill. Yesterday, before the Senate vote, GOP lawmakers agreed to remove the second ultrasound requirement to ensure the legislation’s passage. Their efforts were successful. Despite bipartisan opposition as four Republican state senators broke from the rest of their party to oppose SB 371, the measure will now advance to the GOP-controlled House:

The bill passed on a 33-16 vote despite a chorus of complaints from opponents who said it’s a step too far into doctors’’offices without improving their patients’ health.

“This bill is not about patient safety. It’s about patient harassment,” said Sen. Vaneta Becker of Evansville, who was one of only four of the Senate’s 37 Republicans to join the 12 Democrats who opposed the bill.

Now, Senate Bill 371 heads to the House, where Republican Speaker Brian Bosma of Indianapolis said he expects it to win passage as well — perhaps after some changes.

And this legislation has another anti-choice provision tucked into it, too. SB 371 also seeks to over-regulate abortion providers — requiring health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to all of the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not surgical procedures — which threatens to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state.

“This bill is directly targeted to Planned Parenthood in Lafayette,” state Sen. Becker (R) pointed out in the debate on the floor. “When you do this, you’re not doing anything that will improve the health and safety of low-income women in the state of Indiana. All you’re doing is forcing them to go other ways — in particular, to the Internet — to get this same particular drug that you’re talking about regulating.”

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Chipping Away At Roe: Arkansas And North Dakota Advance ‘Fetal Pain’ Abortion Bans

So far this year, GOP lawmakers in Arkansas and North Dakota have practically tripped over each other to see which state can introduce more anti-abortion legislation. Among other abortion restrictions, each state is currently advancing a “fetal pain” measure to outlaw abortion procedures after 20 weeks of pregnancy — based on the scientifically disputed notion that fetuses can feel pain at that point — despite the fact that similar laws have been blocked in court for running afoul of the reproductive rights granted under Roe v. Wade.

On Monday, state senators in both Arkansas and North Dakota approved 20-week abortion bans. Neither measure makes an exception for the health of the woman, despite the fact that women who seek late-term abortions often do so because they discover unexpected health issues or fatal fetal abnormalities. Arkansas’ measure does include narrow exceptions to allow abortion services in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life — but North Dakota’s abortion ban doesn’t even make the narrowest exceptions for rape or incest.

Nebraska was the first state to pass a 20-week abortion ban under the specious logic that fetuses can feel pain during the second trimester of pregnancy. Since then, seven other states have passed similar laws, and two fetal pain measures in Georgia and Arizona are currently being blocked from taking effect.

But the possibility of an impending court challenge won’t stop anti-choice lawmakers who are insistent on slowly chipping away at women’s constitutional right to reproductive health services. Both Arkansas and North Dakota have also proposed more extreme abortion measures — a “heartbeat ban” in Arkansas that would outlaw abortion after just 12 weeks, and a “personhood” measure in North Dakota that could ban all abortions and even some forms of contraception — that go even further to circumvent Roe, which guarantees women’s right to a legal abortion until the point of viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

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As George Tiller’s Wichita Clinic Reopens, ‘After Tiller’ Reframes The Abortion Debate

In Mother Jones today, Kate Sheppard has the news that Dr. George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, shuttered after he was murdered at his church in 2009, will be reopening under the leadership of Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller when he was alive. In Burkhart’s conversation with Sheppard, she says that she decided to reopen the clinic in part because no one else would do it, and because she wants to reframe the debate about abortion care. “I think abortion is about motherhood,” she said. “Abortion is about motherhood because by and large women coming in to have abortions are concerned about the kind of life and the future for their children. Women are thinking in a very responsible manner when choosing that.”

These are important points, and ones made at greater length in one of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, After Tiller. By first-time directors Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, After Tiller spends time not just with the four remaining doctors in the United States who are willing to perform late-term abortions—Burkhart’s clinic will not—but with many of their patients. It’s a set of perspectives that rarely enters the national debate about the legality of abortion procedures. The testimony of women and men who badly wanted children who have grown too sick to survive, and of doctors who help them when almost no one else will, may not convince the people who protest outside the four doctors’ clinics, and for whom the questions involved have simple and obvious answers.

But for anyone else watching the film, it will be clear, as Dr. Susan Robinson says, that no one ever wants an abortion, particularly not the kind that she and her colleagues provide. And the doctors in After Tiller are providing their services not out of some sort of attraction to the procedure that’s become their calling card, but out of a conviction that women shouldn’t be abandoned in their decision-making processes. After Tiller is a powerful reminder that abortion in America is less about desire than about need, and a matter not of carelessness, but the result of dreadful deliberations.

Many of the patients who agreed to have their consultations with the doctors filmed in After Tiller are facing the prospect of aborting children they planned to have, but whose pregnancies have gone terribly awry along the way. “It just didn’t seem fair to her,” say the parents of one child who would live in agonizing pain if she were born. Another describes a dreadful dilemma, saying “It’s guilt because we’re doing what we’re doing and guilt because if we brought him into this world he wouldn’t have any quality of life.” Monica, a patient whose child was diagnosed at 25 weeks with a debilitating illness that would cause his certain death if he were born, ultimately chooses to have an abortion rather than delay an inevitable decision to end her child’s life—better now, she ultimately decides, than to make him suffer before turning off his respirator so she can have had the experience of his brief, agonizing life. “It is hurtful because it was a planned pregnancy, and I did want this,” another patient explains.

Much of the focus of the consultations and on the planning for these families’ abortions is focused on giving them dignity and helping them process their emotions, both before and after their procedures. “The only time they get to say hello to their baby is when they have to say goodbye to it, too,” Dr. Robinson explains. As she runs through a checklist to help a couple prepare for their abortion and the burial arrangements for their child, I started to cry in the theater when the shot showed that “blanket requested” was one of the options on the list. There’s an incredible cruelty to the genetic lottery that forces parents to convert receiving blankets to burial shrouds, and an incredible courage to those parents who have their only time with a child after that child has died. Dr. Shelley Sella counsels two couples with ill children together, telling them “Both of you have babies who are really sick, and both of you have babies who would suffer a lot,” and giving them an opportunity to see that their experience is neither solitary nor shameful.

Even beyond the difficulty of the decision to have a late-term abortion itself, the procedure is daunting. Susan, a counselor who does intake at Dr. Robinson and Dr. Sella’s clinic in Albequerque, talks one patient through the fact that she’s going to have go through an actual labor and delivery. There’s no question that process is draining. But as Susan explains it, it’s necessary precisely to preserve the patients’ childbearing ability for future, unclouded pregnancies. “We want to make sure you can make a family when you cant to have a family,” she says. There’s none of the horribly stereotypical glee—much less moral distance—anti-abortion protestors ascribe to the doctors and patients whose lives they make difficult. “The woman delivers a baby. And it’s a stillborn. And that’s hard to deal with,” Dr. Sella reflects. “I think the reason that I’ve struggled is I think of them as babies. I don’t think of it as a fetus. That’s a way to distance myself from what I do.”

After Tiller also does something interesting in making clear that there are abortions the doctors won’t perform, or that they truly struggle with performing. Dr. Robinson turns down a patient from France who is 35 weeks pregnant, but has no fetal abnormalities—the woman essentially had delayed dealing with her pregnancy while traveling—and Susan counsels her to consider adoption as an alternative instead. The two women also debate whether or not Dr. Robinson should perform a procedure for a 16-year-old, pro-life Catholic who was afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant, in part because Susan is worried that the girl’s mind truly isn’t made up about having an abortion, and that her regret later could be psychologically damaging. Dr. Robinson only decides to go forward when the patient convinces her that she is determined to have an abortion.

But it’s an illustration of the challenges that stem both from respecting a woman’s decision-making process when she, herself, may not have made up her mind, and from legal requirements in some states that patients convince doctors that their pregnancies threaten them. “Kansas law required the patient to present you with a story that compelled you to believe that this pregnancy would threaten her life…I found myself being faced with patients who didn’t have the compelling reasons they had in Kansas…Where does it come from that I get to say, ‘well, why?’” Dr. Robinson asks. “What if you’re just not a good storyteller?…What I believe is that women are able to struggle with complex ethical issues and make the best decisions for themselves and their families.”

In After Tiller, there are real costs to helping women make some of the worst decisions any of us could ever be faced with, and to helping them see those choices through with compassion. Some of the doctors have paid prices in blood, whether it’s the loss of Tiller, a friend and mentor to all of them, the threats that have become sharper to Dr. Hern as he’s started his second family later in life, the stable owned by Dr. Leroy Carhart, which was burned down in 1991, killing 21 horses who were borded there, or simply the lost prospect of retirement in a world where no one appears willing to replace them.

But they persist, telling rape victims they deserve justice, telling families who are shattered by the loss of a wanted child that they owe it to themselves to be kind and to avoid self-recrimination, and performing medical procedures that echo the work many of them did bringing life into the world. Without ever needing to state it directly, After Tiller makes a forceful point that’s too easily forgotten or obscured in political debates about abortion. It’s easy to “pray for healing” for women who are having late-term abortions. But it’s abortion doctors who provide these women and their partners real physical and mental care.

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Michigan GOP Would Force Women To Undergo Invasive Ultrasounds Before Getting An Abortion

Example of a transvaginal probe

Michigan Republicans introduced a mandatory ultrasound bill this week with a carefully-worded clause that threatens to stir up controversy that first erupted during the height of last year’s “War on Women.” By stipulating that the ultrasounds must use the “most technologically advanced equipment on site,” Michigan lawmakers would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive transvaginal probe.

Transvaginal ultrasound bills, which require doctors to insert a wand into a woman’s vagina before proceeding with an abortion procedure, were introduced last year in Virginia and Alabama. Widespread public outcry — including considerable derision from the national media — forced GOP lawmakers to back away from the extreme legislation, but Talking Points Memo reports that Michigan lawmakers are now ready to revive the fight:

The bill requires the use of ultrasound equipment “providing the most visibly clear image of the gross anatomical development of the fetus and the most audible fetal heartbeat.” As a practical matter, that requires transvaginal ultrasounds, said Donna Crane, the policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“It does lay bare that the real motive is to make abortion providers continue to acquire more and more and more equipment before they’re even eligible to perform an abortion,” Crane told TPM. “They’re trying to make it harder for doctors to do their jobs.” [...]

Crane said NARAL and its allies are prepared to fight to sink the legislation.

“Women should be up in arms over these types of laws,” she said. “Unfortunately they’re not new. But the fact that politicians just went through an election cycle and got spanked over how they treat women and reproductive freedoms and still introduce bills like this really boggles the mind. It’s not clear that the sponsors haven’t been living under rocks since November.”

But unfortunately for the women in Michigan, this is hardly the only recent attack on their reproductive rights. Their lawmakers already capitalized on the lame duck session at the end of last year to push through extreme anti-abortion legislation that limits abortion access for women who live in rural areas, requires doctors to prove that mentally competent women haven’t been “coerced” into their decision to have the procedure, and enacts unnecessary, complicated rules for abortion clinics and providers.

Abortion opponents often use mandatory ultrasounds as a tactic to impose additional barriers to reproductive care, as well as convince women to change their minds about having an abortion. But they don’t work. Studies have shown that nearly 90 percent of women feel “very confident” about their decision to have an abortion before they approach a doctor, and forcing them to look at an ultrasound doesn’t change their mind.

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Anti-Choice Activists Push To Ban Abortion For Rape Victims, But They Admit It’s A ‘Tough Sell’

The 2012 election season was largely dominated by Republican men making insensitive and medically inaccurate comments about rape — so much so that the GOP caucus actually received professional advice to stop talking about rape at a retreat last month. But the anti-choice community is pressuring Republicans to do exactly the opposite, even though they admit it’s not exactly the most popular message.

Personhood USA, the group that advocates for endowing zygotes with the full rights of U.S. citizens, recently launched a new “Save the 1? campaign with the goal of limiting abortion access for women who have become pregnant following a sexual assault. And at the recent March to Life event protesting the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists emphasized the issue that “even pro-lifers have a hard time embracing” — pregnancies that result from rape:

Standing before the throngs at the March for Life on Jan. 25, Ryan Bomberger admitted that he was the poster child for one of the most difficult aspects of the abortion debate: his mother had been raped.

“I’m the fringe case that even pro-lifers have a hard time embracing,” said Bomberger, an anti-abortion activist whose mother chose to continue the pregnancy and put him up for adoption. [...]

Bomberger, an evangelical Christian, said his inclusion at the January rally — and increased chatter on social media — are signs this issue is getting more attention. His Virginia-based Radiance Foundation aims to “shatter the myth of the unwanted” through campaigns that focus on adopted children, including those who were products of rape. [...]

“These are the tough sells in the public,” said [Susan Wills], assistant director for education and outreach at the [U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop's] Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. “It’s very easy for us to convince people that partial-birth abortion or other gruesome late-term procedures ought not to be happening, but when we talk about rape and incest, it’s not a sound-bite issue.”

Obviously, like Bomberger’s mother, not every woman who becomes pregnant from rape chooses to have an abortion. But some certainly do. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimates that women who become pregnant from rape or incest contribute to about 10,000 to 15,000 abortions each year. The group also reports that 22,000 pregnancies resulting from rape could be prevented each year if female survivors had better access to emergency contraception — another women’s health resource that abortion opponents often attempt to restrict.

And polling shows that, just as abortion opponents suspect, they haven’t had much success “convincing people” that abortion “ought not to be happening” in the cases of rape and incest. A full 75 percent of the Americans who describe themselves as anti-abortion still want rape survivors to have legal access to abortion services so they can make their own reproductive choices.

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Oregon Is The Only State Left That Hasn’t Imposed Any Restrictions On Abortion

Despite the fact that Roe v. Wade first legalized abortion four decades ago, anti-choice lawmakers have successfully chipped away at abortion rights on a state level. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff flagged a helpful visual, compiled by Remapping the Debate, to illustrate the recent flood of anti-abortion laws across the country (click to enlarge, or click here to see the interactive version). Five states have at least 20 different restrictions that obstruct women’s access to reproductive services, and Oregon is the sole state that doesn’t have a single piece of anti-choice legislation on the books:

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South Dakota Bill Would Exclude Weekends And Holidays From 72-Hour Abortion Waiting Period

South Dakota Republicans aren’t satisfied with imposing one of the nation’s longest waiting periods for women seeking abortions. As RH Reality Check reports, the state legislature will also consider a bill that would adopt a “business hours only” definition for its waiting period: while women wait the state-mandated three days before getting an abortion, weekends and holidays won’t count toward fulfilling that quota.

South Dakota’s extreme waiting period was enacted in 2011 and has been tied up in court for the past year — but since Planned Parenthood recently decided to drop the case in order to focus their resources on more pressing attacks to women’s health in the region, it may soon take effect. But on top of the restrictive law itself, RH Reality Check points out that a new bill seeks to further clarify the strict parameters of the 72-hour waiting period:

No surgical or medical abortion may be scheduled except by a licensed physician and only after the physician physically and personally meets with the pregnant mother, consults with her, and performs an assessment of her medical and personal circumstances. [...] No Saturday, Sunday, federal holiday, or state holiday may be included or counted in the calculation of the seventy-two hour minimum time period between the initial physician consultation and assessment and the time of the scheduled abortion procedure. No physician may have the pregnant mother sign a consent for the abortion on the day of this initial consultation.

Mandatory counseling sessions and waiting periods are simply methods of limiting women’s reproductive rights, and they don’t actually help women decide whether or not to have an abortion. Women can make up their own minds, and studies show that nearly 90 percent of the women seeking an abortion already feel very confident about their decision when they first approach their doctors. Unnecessary roadblocks that attempt to shame them out of having the voluntary medical procedure don’t actually work, and simply end up creating outsized barriers for low-income women who may not be able to make multiple trips to a health clinic.

Excluding weekends and holidays from South Dakota’s unnecessary waiting period puts an even bigger burden on women seeking reproductive care, and there’s no good justification for it. RH Reality Check notes that no other state with this restrictive policy defines their waiting period in this way.

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Idaho Lawmaker Compares Abortion To Prostitution

An Idaho lawmaker on Thursday compared abortion to prostitution, arguing that both are “a choice” that women make, and asking members of the Idaho American Civil Liberties to defend prostitution, since they were willing to protect women’s access to abortion services.

Presenting abortion and prostitution as cavaler choices women make and ignoring the real danger of sex slavery, State Rep. Ron Mendive (R) elicited “audible gasps” on Wednesday during a meeting with representatives from the group, which later condemned his comparison:

“He was correlating a criminal action with something that is constitutionally protected. Those are two completely separate issues,” [an ACLU representative said after the event. [...]

“It was just a question,” he said. “I do believe it’s a double standard.”

Prostitution is a choice “more so than an abortion would be,” he said.

“Because (in an abortion) there’s two beating hearts. And then there’s one,” Mendive said.

Asked later whether he stood by what he had said, Mendive offered, “Maybe it was a poor illustration.”

For some women, sex work is in fact a choice, and questions have been raised as to whether the United States should consider honoring that work as legal employment. But that does not mean that all sex work is voluntary, and, in any case, it is no reason to invite a comparison with abortion.

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Virginia Governor Quietly Certifies Restrictive Abortion Clinic Regulations

On the Friday between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) quietly approved new, stringent regulations intended to target abortion clinics. Virginia’s Board of Health adopted the new anti-abortion rules in September, and the governor’s certification is the next step toward making the regulations permanent — and potentially forcing many of the state’s 20 abortion clinics to close their doors.

A spokesperson for McDonnell explained the governor advanced the anti-abortion rules because he believes “these common-sense regulations will help ensure that this medical procedure takes place in facilities that are modern, safe and well-regulated, in order to help ensure the safety and well-being of all patients.” But women’s health advocates designate this type of legislation as the “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers” (TRAP) because — rather than doing anything to ensure women’s safety — they actually over-regulate abortion providers as an indirect method of restricting women’s reproductive rights. TRAP laws force many abortion clinics to close when they find themselves unable to comply with complicated, expensive standards.

Even though Virginia’s Board of Health is intended to operate as a nonpartisan medical body, the fight over enacting the new clinic regulations has become intensely political — a growing trend among state-level boards, which anti-abortion advocates are increasingly using to advance their anti-choice agendas.

When the Board considered the new rules before their final vote, protesters and women’s health advocates were barred from speaking during the hearing, and only a limited number of people were even permitted to enter the room. And it turned out State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) was essentially threatening Virginia’s Board — which ended up approving the TRAP laws by a 13-2 vote — by warning members they could be denied state-funded legal services if they voted to relax the clinic regulations. In October, Virginia health commissioner Dr. Karen Remley resigned from her position on the Board in protest of the regulations, citing her disapproval of the proposed TRAP laws as the primary reason she could no longer serve “in good faith.”

Now that McDonnell has approved the regulations, they will be sent back through the process of review by the Board of Health following a 60-day public comment period. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the permanent regulations are expected to be adopted by this summer.

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Chilean Study Proves that Outlawing Abortion Does Not Lead to “Coat-hanger Deaths”

For decades, supporters of abortion on demand have insisted on two completely unproven assertions concerning what would happen if abortion were made generally illegal in this country. First, they have asserted, somewhat counter-intuitively and again without any proof, that such a law would not work, and women would continue to get abortions. Second, based on the first unfounded assertion, they insist that therefore women would be forced into “back alley abortions” which would presumably always be performed with a dirty coat-hanger, thus leading to massive maternal mortality. These two pronouncements have been peddled uncritically with all the fervor (and factual backing) of a particularly obnoxious street corner preacher wearing a “THE END IS NEAR” sandwich sign by virtually everyone who supports abortion on demand. Now, for the first time, a scientific study published in a peer-review journal has scientifically disproven both assertions.

Of course, these assertions have been from day one based on fabrications generated by the abortion industry. As Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, admitted:

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

“Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

Of course, the revelation that these facts were made up out of thin air has not in the least dissuaded the abortion industry from insisting that they nonetheless conveyed a true story – “fake, but accurate” did not originate with Dan Rather. Problematically, no one had conducted a scientific study to evaluate the evidence one way or another, so these lies took root in the public’s mind and the burden fell on opponents of abortion to disprove an assertion that had never been founded in fact in the first place.

Enter Dr. Elard Koch, an epidemiologist from the Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile. Chile provides a somewhat unique opportunity to study the issue of the effects of making abortion illegal. In recent history (in particular since a number of advances that have overall reduced maternal mortality worldwide), most countries that have changed their abortion laws have made abortion more widely accessible, not less. Chile, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction. Before 1989 in Chile, abortion was largely legal, but in 1989, Chile banned all “therapeutic” abortions, thus providing an actual laboratory in which we might study the question, “What happens when abortion is made illegal?”

The study by Dr. Koch and his team is vitally important and should be read in its entirety. Most importantly, the study conclusively showed that a) outlawing abortion is remarkably effective at reducing the number of abortions that take place in a country, including clandestine ones, and b) there is absolutely no link between making abortion illegal and an increase in the number of deaths from clandestine abortions. In Koch’s own words about the conclusions of his study:

In Chile, therapeutic abortion was prohibited in 1989 since it was considered unnecessary for protecting the life of the mother and her baby. From the perspective of the Chilean medical practice, the exceptional cases in which the life of the mother is at risk are regarded as a medical ethics problem to be solved by applying the principle of double effect and the concept of indirect abortion.

Thus, in Chile, exceptional problems that require medical intervention to save the life of the mother are considered a decision of medical ethics and not a legal issue. Therefore, any kind of directly provoked abortion was prohibited in 1989, in agreement with Article 19 of the Chilean Constitution which protects the life of the unborn.

The second question — does it save lives? — is very complex and important. We can address this important issue from different perspectives.

First, from a public health view, restrictive laws are hypothesized to cause a dissuasive effect on the population, similar to restrictions on tobacco or alcohol consumption. We observed that reduction of maternal mortality in Chile was paralleled by the number of hospitalizations attributable to complications of clandestine abortions. While over 50% of all abortion-related hospitalizations were attributable to complications of clandestine abortions during the 1960s, this proportion decreased rapidly in the following decades.

Indeed, only 12-19% of all hospitalization from abortion can be attributable to clandestine abortions between 2001 and 2008. These data suggest that over time, restrictive laws may have a restraining effect on the practice of abortion and promote its decrease. In fact, Chile exhibits today one of the lowest abortion-related maternal deaths in the world, with a 92.3% decrease since 1989 and a 99.1% accumulated decrease over 50 years.

Second, from the perspective of human life, especially if a developing country is looking to simultaneously protect the life of the mother and the unborn child, a plausible hypothesis after the Chilean study is that abortion restriction may be effective when is combined with adequately-implemented public policies to increase educational levels of women and to improve access to maternal health facilities. A restrictive law may discourage practice, which is suggested by the decrease of hospitalizations due to clandestine abortions estimated in Chile.

Third, from the perspective of protecting human life from the very beginning, obviously, abortion restriction saves many lives, in contrast to countries where elective — on demand — abortion is allowed, because in these countries all the unborn lose their lives.

Finally, it is necessary to remark that our study confirms that abortion prohibition is not related to overall rates of maternal mortality. In other words, making abortion illegal does not increase maternal deaths: it is a matter of scientific fact in our study.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Not, mind you, that anything as pedantic as scientific evidence is expected to have any impact on the rhetoric of the same charming people who manufactured and sold “coathanger pendants” a couple years ago. The abortion industry has never been about truth, facts or logic. But to the extent that people in the middle remain persuadable by objectivity, a major arrow in the quiver of the merchants of death has been irretrievably destroyed.

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