Obama Lifts Abortion Gag Rule

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http://www.obama-mamas.com/blog/?p=164

“Say it plain, that many have died for this day.”

Those words could just as easily been said on January 22, 1972, as they were on January 20, 2008. This is not to suggest that there is a comparison to the injustice and violence of racism and slavery; but women by the tens of thousands did die waiting for the day when our uteruses would not be subject to dirty knives on creaking tables in shady neighborhoods.

Roe v. Wade did not create abortion. It does not advocate abortions. Neither does the Mexico City Policy, otherwise known as the global gag rule, which President Obama has lifted today.

Abortions have been a fact of life as far back as recorded medical history goes, as is evidenced in the 1500 BC medical document, the Ebers Papyrus. It described a variety of recipes to induce labor, while the Celsus described a D&C process which ended with the extraction of the fetus with a hook. Herbal recipes were used through modern times, with many colonial midwife guides having various recipes for “bringing on the menses” with herbs and oils. Some studies have estimated that there were as many as 2 million abortions per year in the 1800’s, a significantly higher rate than today, although the tinctures that were used often led to death.

In the last century, surgical abortion became more common as an alternative to the poisons that women had been using, and then vacuum procedures were introduced in the 70s. It is true that the advent of safer methods and antibiotics improved the health of women by the time Roe v. Wade was decided, so there were fewer than the 15,000 women a year who died from abortions in the 1920’s. During the Depression, abortions increased again because women would lose their jobs if they turned up pregnant. At the same time, laws became more stringent and the political culture move repressive. This increased across the country, prompting hospitals to set up committees to protect doctors who were fearful of retaliation over their interpretation of “therapeutic abortion”. Some committees considered suicide attempts, for instance, while others didn’t and went so far as to hospitalize women to force them to carry the pregnancy to term. This practice was abolished, along with Roe, in the case of Doe vs. Bolton that invalidated a Georgia law that required a woman to get approval from a physician’s board. The Supreme Court vote was 7-2, so there were actually 2 highly educated men who supported sending teen-age girls before panels of strangers to describe their rapes, incestuous fathers, molestations and other personal sexual details. The current parental consent laws are almost as bad, requiring these girls to go before a judge instead of a panel.

It’s ironic that the very issues that caused us to support legalizing abortion are the ones that are currently most at risk. Late term abortion is another example. I can’t think of a more cynical and exploitive political game than the one that was played with this rare procedure that is almost always performed in the midst of some kind of emergency in a pregnancy. I am old enough to remember when we spoke of these tragedies in whispers, when we empathized with women who had to have their baby “taken”. Consisting of less than 1% of all abortions, late term abortions are performed after 20 weeks and, of necessity, are surgical procedures, either a D&X or Intact D&E. For many years the abortion was performed by the traditional D&E, where the uterus was dilated and the fetus was dismembered and surgically extracted in pieces. In the early 90’s, the D&X procedure was developed wherein the uterus is dilated, the fetus is removed intact, and the neck is incised. Any of these procedures is tragic, but the D&X is known to reduce bleeding and the risk of uterine lacerations. They also cannot be completely outlawed as the Supreme Court ruled in that there were cases in which the D&X was necessary to protect the health of the mother.

Abortion is with us, it is a protected right. It is time to turn our attention to the issue of reducing unwanted pregnancy for women of all ages, all over the world. There is no question that unwanted pregnancy, whether you’re 14 or 40, has the capacity to ruin lives. When money is kept from the rare women’s clinic in a third world country, it does not reduce abortion, it reduces reproductive health care. It reduces the availability of contraception, it reduces the availability of prenatal care, it reduces the availability of delivery, postpartum and even neonatal care. To say it plain, women and infants die.

When women speak of choice, this is the choice we are talking about. The choice to direct our own lives, the choice for our uteruses to be healthy, the choice to live.