It's really happening

Like a bad dream, I feel hopelessly unable to do anything about the news.

http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2006/02/21/330845.html

Even if you are "pro-life", I wonder why it is so important to not include a clause for medical necessity? This is the one point that makes it clear to me that the whole debate for or against abortion is all about what we think of women in this country. The pendulum swings and here is where it stands now:

Women are sluts
Women do not have the brains to decide when an unplanned pregnancy should be terminated.
A woman's life is worth far less than that of an unborn child.

Personally, I don't know what to think about the concept of partial birth abortions. It's totally abhorrent to me that a human being could do that to another life. Which is why I have to support it.

But, less than 1% of abortions performed are later than 20 weeks. Partial birth is only a small part of this 1% of abortions. The rate of abortions has been going down since 1996. In fact, the rates in the year 2000 were less than those in 1976! Not only that, but very few doctors even perform this procedure. So the 1% of abortions performed after 20 weeks can be even further reduced by the number of women who can actually reach that handful of doctors who will even perform these abortions.

Now that we have established that not all women go out to hunt sex and then kill the baby through abortion as the conservatives would have you think, lets move on to the next point.

Do you really think that doctors who perform partial birth abortions would do so without first finding a way to avoid the whole procedure?

To quote the article.
"Defenders of the law maintain that the procedure is never medically necessary to protect a woman's health."

Oh sure. Doctors just routinely extract a fetus and smash it's head. Just for fun! Sure.

So. I request that those of you who know so much about how to save the life of a mother with advanced pre-eclampsia, a blood clot or any of the other pregnancy conditions that currently warrant a partial birth abortion, please enlighten us and those in the medical field who are not familiar with these procedures. Because I can tell you there are a few women out there who have had to go through this to save their lives. Do you think that a day goes by for these women where they don't question the necessity of losing their child? I'm sure the OBs who are performing these procedures would far rather tell the mother that her infant is fine and she is fine as well.

The second condition for this procedure is that the baby is so profoundly deformed or mis-developed as to be incompatible with life. So, now mom has to make a decision whether to terminate her child's life in this horrible fashion or to allow her child to live very briefly and possibly painfully. I know two women who have made the decision to let their child live in this situation. It is a decision only a mother can make. The courts and the religious do not belong in this decision.

This isn't just a bad dream. Women will lose their lives over this and the other legislation that is being presented to our newly stacked conservative court. It's time to question the motives of the people behind this.

If the partial birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect a woman's life or health, why do they not just accept the bill with the clause? According to this logic, no partial birth abortions would be performed because it would never be medically necessary to protect a woman's life or health. That should be enough. But it's not, because the bill is not about saving the lives of babies.