They found that the greatest risk to a woman’s health from an abortion did not arise from the lack of hospital admitting privileges or even from a lack hospital-width corridors, but from state interference.
The committee concludes that the quality of abortion care depends on where a woman lives. In many states, regulations have created barriers to safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable abortion services. The regulations often prohibit qualified providers from providing services, mis-inform women of the risks of the procedures they are considering, overrule women’s and clinician’s medical decision making, or require medically unnecessary services and delays in care.
And yet, as of September 2017, 16 states require specific corridor width, room size, and maximum distance to a hospital; 10 states require the physician to have admitting privileges and an agreement with a local hospital to transfer patients if needed; and 34 states want a licensed physician to perform all methods of abortions, including handing the patient a pill. Ultrasounds are now required in 14 states.
Pre-abortion counseling is mandated in 35 states, 14 of which require that counseling to be in-person, requiring an additional visit to a clinic where the shock troops of forced birthers will be freely allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights to harass patients. In five states, said patients will then have to listen to doctors, whose First Amendment rights have been stripped, instruct them on the way to reverse a medicated abortion, which is an unproven methid. Or listen to lies about the risks of abortion on future fertility (there are none) in six states. Or its possible link to breast cancer (none) in five states. A dozen states will force them to endure a lecture about the long-term mental health consequences of an abortion (there are none).
The consensus study concludes that:
“Legal abortions in the United States—whether by medication, aspiration, D&E,or induction—are safe and effective.”
But Vice President Mike Pence wants to get rid of legal abortions in the United States. He will never get rid of all abortions, only the safe and effective ones. And more women will die should he succeed.
Ohio has introduced a bill to ban all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest. That was no oversight, but done intentionally, because there is nothing any woman wants more than to bear the child of her rapist.
Hood’s co-sponsor, state representative Nino Vitale, called the proposed Ohio law a “save them both” bill and said many women who conceive in rape later regret their abortions.
“Life isn’t always giving us things by our choice and I don’t want to put a woman through a second trauma after she’s been through such an awful first one,” Vitale said.
This bill allows for criminal charges to be filed against a woman who has an abortion. NARAL has accurately described the objective of this bill and many others, like the Mississippi bill signed into law on the same day the Ohio bill was introduced:
“Anti-choice extremists from the Ohio Statehouse to the White House are lining up their dominoes to topple Roe v. Wade and punish those who seek or provide abortion care,” a statement from NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio executive director Kellie Copeland read.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, just signed the most draconian anti-abortion law in the land last Monday. Banning any abortion at 15 weeks, it was immediately challenged by the last remaining abortion clinic in the state.
"We'll probably be sued in about half an hour," Bryant said to laughter from supporters as he signed the bill. "That'll be fine with me. It'll be worth fighting over."
Bryant's prediction was accurate. The state's only abortion clinic and one of the physicians who practices there sued in federal court within an hour, arguing the law violates other federal court rulings saying a state can't restrict abortion before a child can survive on its own outside the womb.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves agreed with the clinic and the physician, and issued a temporary restraining order:
“The Supreme Court says every woman has a constitutional right to ‘personal privacy’ regarding her body,” Reeves wrote in a brief decision that quoted previous legal rulings on abortion. “That right protects her choice ‘to have an abortion before viability.’ States cannot ‘prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision’ to do so.”
Reeves said in court that the “ultimate question” is whether a state can ban abortion before viability. He asked: “Does the state have the right to trump the woman’s right to have control over her decisions, over her body?”
And that is the question: who does have control over a woman’s body? If it is not the woman herself, then she is not an autonomous human being. In order to be a fully equal participant in our economy, our community, and in our democracy, one must be fully in charge of one’s own body. Every time a state steps in to dictate how a woman must be treated as an incubator instead of as a person, we lose a little bit more of our autonomy, of our adulthood. We have to use what tools we have, while we still have them, to fight back.
And that includes the ballot box.