While not unexpected, I believe this unfortunate decision is a clear signal that the Supreme Court is opening the door to further challenges to personal medical decisions between patients and doctors that should not involve the government. [Source: (http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/60412.html" title="FreeNewMexican.com)]

While we should be concerned for reproductive choice/freedom/rights, also in peril is the medical privacy between an individual and their doctor for any circumstance.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some estranged politician having a say in any of my medical decisions.

EDITED 07-24-08: Link to news article expired.

I am pro-choice and pro-abortion because ten years after having first read this piece, the truth of it remains and the lack of progress glares ugly.

Letter Fourteen

“Not the Church, Not the State, Women Must Decide Their Fate.”

NO WOMAN SHOULD BE FORCED to have an abortion against her will. No woman should be prevented from having an abortion against her will.

This is what choice is about.

I believe in a woman’s absolute right to choose whether and when she will have a child. Free choice means that a woman must have access to high-quality, physician-assisted, economically affordable, legal abortion and have the option of keeping the child she chooses to bear without having to pay an inhuman price for doing so.

Inhuman prices include: Children having children, having to drop out of school, having a child alone, without family or community, being condemned to poverty because we have no affordable day care, etc. It is also inhuman to have to surrender a child for adoption. This is a trauma from which many birth mothers never recover.

Abortion is not murder. It is the termination of a fetus. This is my view, and the view of the Supreme Court in 1973, in Roe v. Wade. However, if women do not have the legal right to decide whether a pregnancy is a future baby or an unacceptable burden, then it is women who are civilly dead.

Anti-abortion crusaders are more concerned with the rights of the unborn than with the rights — including the right to life — of the living. Abortion opponents actually champion the unborn at the expense of the pregnant woman and her other living children. Anti-abortionists do not demand that the state invade a man’s body against his will for the sake of his living child — who may, for example, die without his father’s kidney, lung, or bone marrow….

Ideally, a woman’s right to choose an abortion should be a civil, not just a privacy right. A woman must have the right to decide if and when to become a mother — not merely the right to choose abortion when her life or health are at stake.

Abortions have always existed. They have not always been illegal, but when they were, wealthy women had them anyway. Poor women either didn’t, or risked death at the hands of back-alley practitioners….

Americans obtained the right to legal abortion in this country not because feminists fought and died for it, but because a sexually positive climate had been created in which both lawyers and physicians emerged who supported a woman’s right to choose abortion. They had seen too many women die awful deaths from unsafe, illegal abortions. Perhaps, physicians also viewed abortion as a potentially lucrative practice. Perhaps, both men and women wanted women to experience sex without worry, not merely as a way to procreate.

My generation initially focused more on a woman’s right to abortion than on her right to motherhood — or on the rights of racially persecuted women to resist sterilization, or the “ideal” of a small family. We were not wrong, nor were we right; no movement can do everything at once….

Never could I have imagined that, in 1997 [as well as in 2007], abortion clinics and their employees would have to suffer prolonged off-site personal harassment, aggressive anti-abortion demonstrations and endless bomb threats, or that they’d be forced to install metal detectors and help train feminists to escort frightened women into and out of clinics.

Who could have foreseen that so many clinics across the country would be forced to close, would be bombed — not once, but repeatedly — that physicians and clinic workers would be forced to wear bulletproof vests, harassed, even killed so that women could exercise their rights to have a legal abortion….

Yes, freedom for women means trouble. But without such freedom, women would be in even more trouble….

Do I think the Second Wave of feminism worked as hard on obtaining the right to mother or parent under feminist working conditions as they did on keeping abortion legal? No, I don’t. But obtaining the right to an abortion is far easier than redefining the family.

As Americans, we shun collective social solutions to what we still view as individual, private matters. We do so at our own peril.

You’ve inherited the consequence of our failure to redefine the family. The task is yours.

(1997; 95-101)

Doctor, There’s a Lawyer in My Womb: The Supreme Court Tries to Understand Partial-Birth Abortion

From the article:
“Perhaps the biggest problem with the words ‘partial-birth abortion’ is that they have neither a precise legal definition nor an exact medical one.”

Perhaps? Gee, ya think?

Senate passes interstate abortion bill
Just moments after the Senate passed its version 65-34 late Tuesday with the support of 14 Democrats Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., used a procedural motion to halt its progress.

Moreover, there are significant differences between the Senate bill and the House version passed last year.

For his part, Bush urged Congress to resolve the differences and send him the bill.

“Transporting minors across state lines to bypass parental consent laws regarding abortion undermines state law and jeopardizes the lives of young women,” he said in a statement.
[Source: (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060726/ap_on_go_co/interstate_abortion;_ylt=AoN4CwGu2ZsadbpcwGVqb3CyFz4D;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--)]

To my bones, any sort of governmental prohibition or restriction on pregnancy termination feels inherently wrong. I can sympathize with a parent’s wish to be informed of their child’s actions and interactions. I can understand the possibility for abuse when a young gal is involved (i.e. being forced to terminate a pregnancy by a relative or partner or abuser [if there is a distinction involved]). However, the passage of this restriction not only “jeopardizes the lives of young women” but all women of all ages.

This is a difficult issue for me because what is age? Does the age of a person wholly dictate a maturity level?

This bill would restrict access for women under the age of 18. I do not think making such a sweeping restriction is the answer or even a viable solution. I’ve known “young” women aged 17 who were capable of making their own life decisions apart from their parent’s influence.

If the issue is women under a certain age being raped and then forced to terminate the resultant pregnancy, then we have other issues we need to find solutions for that do not involve placing restrictions on pregnancy termination.

Both bills are designed to make it a crime to help a pregnant girl cross state lines to get an abortion in an effort to evade parental notification and consent laws in her home state.

The Senate bill would protect the girl and her parents from prosecution, as well as provide an exception for anyone who helps a girl end her pregnancy when the pregnancy poses a threat to the mother’s life. It also contains a way for girls with abusive parents to ask a court to allow the abortion without her parents’ notification.

Struggling to defend their majority this election year, Republican sponsors said the bill supports what polls show a majority of the public believes: that a parent’s right to know takes precedence over a young woman’s right to have an abortion.

What is considered a “threat to the mother’s life”? How do we define a “life” of a “mother”? Does an unwanted pregnancy fit the definition of “threat”?

If a child is abused by their parents and they go before a court, how will they be required to show proof of abuse? Also, this assumes the child would have enough gumption to even go to court in the first place.

In giving parents precedence over their children, we further the possibility for parental oppression over children. If we are so concerned with young women being abused by older men and/or relatives, why give these men extra control under the guise of parental rights?

If it is a young woman who is pregnant, shouldn’t precedence be given to her?

Unlike the Senate bill, the House measure sets out a national parental notification law. It would require a physician who knowingly performs or induces an abortion on a minor who is a resident of another state to provide notice of at least 24 hours to a parent of the minor before ending the pregnancy.

States’ rights, anyone?

Both bills are flawed measures that would impede the ability of young women to seek and have access to pregnancy termination and to make independent, informed decisions regarding their own lives.

EDITED 07-24-08: Yahoo! News link expired.