Abortion care providers in my state of Texas have been under siege for over thirty years by heavily propagandized fundamentalist Christian bullies, domestic terrorists, who know and understand little or nothing about abortion care but have swallowed whole, with neither mastication nor cogitation, the blatantly deceptive propaganda of the so-called "pro-life movement" and are convinced they know it all. The latest salvo is in the form of what is called “the Texas sonogram law.” This law is making abortions much more difficult for women and teenage girls to obtain and much more difficult for us to provide – which was the clear intent of the law although it was hypocritically disguised as intended to safeguard the health and lives of women. The actual fact of this law is the opposite: it is already a terrible tragedy for many Texas women and teenage girls, with many, many more sure to follow.
Under the new law, a woman seeking an abortion must not only first get an ultrasound (which had already been standard practice in abortion clinics since the early 1980’s), but she will be required by law to be shown the ultrasound image and to look at it and to listen to her doctor describe the image in detail. The bill also calls for a 24-hour waiting period between the ultrasound and the abortion, except for women who live at least 100 miles from an abortion provider.
The law has no medical purpose and runs contrary to informed consent standards and basic principles of medical ethics. The law rests on a number of faulty and demeaning premises about women by discounting a woman’s ability to make health decisions about her own life. In addition, the law imposes vague requirements in violation of abortion providers’ right to due process and violates the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, potentially damaging it by compelling doctors to deliver unwanted speech.
The House introduced a bill on February 11, 2011 to force women to make two trips to an abortion facility, view and hear a description of the fetal images from a mandatory ultrasound on the first visit, and then wait 24 hours before obtaining her procedure. The Texas Senate had introduced its own less restrictive mandatory ultrasound bill a month earlier.
The Texas legislature passed House Bill 15 on May 7, 2011. The law took effect on September 1, 2011, with compliance by providers starting October 1, 2011.
Gov. Rick Perry declared this bill an “emergency item” during the legislative session in an effort to bypass procedural hurdles. He ceremonially signed the bill into law on May 20, 2011 flanked by anti-choice groups such as the Texans for Life Coalition. Texas now joins Oklahoma in having the most extreme ultrasound restrictions in the country.
In what I regard as an eloquent and cogent press statement Ms. Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of abortion facilities under the name of Whole Woman’s Health, makes a passionate plea for sanity, empathy, truth, and understanding in the ongoing conflict over reproductive freedom for women and teenage girls:
Press Statement
Re: Recent Ruling on Sono bill implementation from the 5th Circuit
13 January 2012
Whole Woman’s Health, LLC and its affiliated companies have provided quality reproductive health care in Texas for almost a decade. We are proud of our distinguished record of excellent medicine and compassionate support for women and families. We know that every day, good women have abortions. We understand that facing an unplanned pregnancy is about much more than a medical experience for women. The feelings and values that women explore during this time are very important to respect. Whole Woman’s Health is committed to treating women with the dignity they deserve. What legislators and judges are doing in Texas is cruel and unjust to women and it is embarrassing in light of what America is supposed to stand
for to the rest of the world.
The new Sonogram law in Texas is insulting to women. The law is offensive to physicians. These regulations are not related to medical necessity and they disregard women’s feelings and wishes. This law is not related to good healthcare and disregards physician’s expertise and specialized training. The people who support this law need to stop pretending it is about informed consent. Women who seek abortions know they are pregnant. Women do not choose abortion lightly. They know if they continue being pregnant the odds are that they will have a baby. Because they know this they are seeking an abortion. Women know the facts; 65% of our patients at Whole Woman’s Health are mothers already. They have seen many ultrasounds; they know exactly what a baby looks like. And because they know exactly what is involved in caring for a child, they are seeking to terminate their pregnancy.
Women have always had and needed abortions. Restricting access, cutting off insurance coverage, shaming and insulting women, and targeting abortion providers – none of it prevents abortion. Making women listen to the heartbeat and hear a description of the fetus is not going to change her mind about abortion. All it can really do is add another obstacle for women to navigate, and in the process, make her feel bad about her decision.
Women will do whatever it takes to get an abortion when they want or need one. They already fly or drive hundreds of miles to get the care they need, they already borrow money to help pay for their abortion. They sign whatever paperwork they have to, they watch whatever movie they have to, they listen to whatever script they have to, they come in how ever many times they have to – 2 or 3 or 4 days. And now they will have to make another trip, drive more, sign more forms, pay for more childcare, listen to the heartbeat and listen to a graphic description of the fetus. But still women will need abortions and women will do whatever it takes to terminate a pregnancy when they know in their hearts and minds that it is not time for them to bring a life into this world through their bodies. They always have, and they always will.
Women are good, heartfelt, ethical and moral agents. Women who seek
abortion because they cannot care for a child are doing what is right and we all know it. The vast majority of Americans know women are ethical and compassionate and trust women to do what is right. We cannot stand by and let these wing nuts hijack the very values of liberty and justice that this country was founded on.
Shame on you heartless, cruel bullies. I challenge you to look into the eyes of a woman at her time of need and try to explain to her why this new law is supposed to help her. It is cruel and it is wrong. Every day good women have abortions in Texas, and every day Whole Woman’s Health clinics will be here to provide them compassionate care with the dignity and respect they deserve.
VERY WELL SAID, AMY!!!
I am a proud, even defiant, abortion provider. And, believe me, defiance is an asset in the sociopolitical climate in which I provide abortion care. First, let me assure you that it is not that I love embryos and fetuses less, but that I love women and teenage girls more – although I must confess that I really have no love, nor any feeling at all, for insentient embryos and fetuses in the wombs of women and teenage girls who do not want them there. Like it or not, I respect and feel deep compassion for the dominion of any conscious human female over the insides of her own body and feel no compassion for as yet insentient embryos and fetuses that she doesn’t want there, whatever her own reasons.
There is perhaps no area of human behavior in which clear rational thought and understanding of factual reality is more obscured by obstinate prejudice and intransigent, willful ignorance supported only by emotionally charged irrational belief and misinformed and uninformed opinion and in which the consequences of this failure to face and accept truth, reason, and understanding are more catastrophically and mercilessly cruel than in matters concerning sexuality and reproduction, even among many physicians and other highly educated people who have had every opportunity to know better.
There is much that needs saying (and hearing by open and honest minds) to illuminate the issues surrounding human sexuality and abortion rights and to counter the deluge of blatantly false, misleading, and inflammatory propaganda that has for many years, from launch pads in narrow-minded and rigidly legalistic religious belief systems, flooded the halls of government, the courts of law, popular media, and the internet. Far too many, still, in the 21st century, hold to the facetious maxim, “ignorance is bliss,” (though often believing they not only are not ignorant, but know it all) and persist in plunging through their lives uninformed or misinformed, proud of it, and even aggressively defending and championing their ignorance and prejudice, oblivious to the swaths of pain and suffering and destruction they create in their wakes and feeling superciliously righteous about it.
I’m talking about the pain and suffering and destruction of, for example, a conscious, feeling woman or teenage girl stricken with an unwanted pregnancy, which is often to her not a “precious gift from God” or a “divine miracle,” but a stressful catastrophe of a devastating and incapacitating magnitude. These are the lives I am “pro.” Embryos and fetuses don’t suffer or feel pain or anything else. We know that they do not have sufficient brain development and functionality for conscious sensation until late in the 3rd trimester. I see nothing compelling to distinguish them from the uncountable billions of early embryos lost on used tampons and pads as the results of early spontaneous abortions (“miscarriages”). But the women and teenage girls are a different story. They are our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our lovers. They think and feel. And we should think highly of them and feel for them.
Someone rightly said, “A woman does not want an abortion like she wants an ice cream cone, a new dress, or a Porsche; she wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg to escape.”
I use the word “belief” to mean anything that is assumed to be factual and true without credible and verifiable evidence to support that it is anything but guess, imagination, or myth. Believing requires a “leap of faith” in what faulted perception seems to reveal or supposed authority asserts or proclaims, especially if ingrained by long tradition in which such misperception, assertion, or proclamation has gone effectively unchallenged, despite the absence of any credible evidence at all in support of it and even in willful denial and aggressive rejection of clearly demonstrable evidence against it. Believing requires a level of gullibility sufficient to overthrow factual knowledge and replace it with fantasy – with make-believe – with conviction that what is not known is known, or what is known is not (e.g., global climate chnge), in some cases such as rigid religious belief bolstered by long-ingrained and ritualized delusion that what is not known is. Knowing requires simply acknowledging the truth of actual demonstrable fact and is possible only in the presence of a willingness to question authority and discard beliefs that lack authentication by factual reality as we learn more and more about factual reality.
Although there is widespread confusion about it, there is a distinct difference between “ignorance” and “stupidity.” The majority of authoritarian believers are not stupid, but even the smart ones take ignorance to a new level. Ignorance means not knowing and understanding, whereas stupidity is a pejorative term meant to convey a relative lack of ability to know and understand. In many cases it is true that not knowing and not understanding result from that sad lack of ability, but in many more cases not knowing and understanding, and even active refusal to know and understand, is the result of a learned interference with learning and understanding reality by unfounded but esteemed belief. No one knows all, there is a lot to know, and therefore everyone is ignorant of more than he or she is knowledgeable about – even the most intelligent and educated among us. And the vast majority of humans unknowingly suffer to at least some significant degree from a learned and conditioned thought disorder that causes them to fail to recognize and acknowledge the huge difference between knowing and merely believing. For a great many, probably most, believing without evidence to support and confirm the belief is exalted and given dominance over knowing and understanding factual reality. It is a way of life for teeming billions of humans on overpopulated earth. Many people, although plenty smart, relegate their potential intelligence to a position subservient to indoctrinated, unfounded belief and thus render themselves, in varying degrees, quite ignorant in terms of knowledge and understanding provided by honest, critical appraisal of factual reality, thus sometimes in some ways appearing to be quite “stupid” or even “crazy.” And in many, no matter how intelligent and educated they are, this thought disorder is of sufficient force and intransigence to qualify them as psychotic – the psychiatric word for insane.
No matter how fervently - even defiantly - even ragefully - one believes that he or she knows what he or she merely believes, he or she merely believes it, and he or she might be wrong – very wrong.)
In general, thinkers do not believe, and believers do not think.
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain
Let's consider some things we know, objective facts and figures that reveal what so-called “pro-life” citizens and politicians really stand for, turning from considering what some believe to some things we know. We know that all over the world since human civilization began, countless "crimes against life," including wars, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and purges that annihilated the lives and livelihoods of millions, have resulted from the rageful intolerance of zealous proponents of opposing dogmatic and authoritarian religious belief systems, a most prominent and especially intolerant one of which, both historically and currently, is represented and presided over by the pope. Although many, like the pope, are all-too-humanly in denial of it and much more for the sake of preserving their own highly questionable, highly controversial, non-evidence-based, and non-rational systems of traditional dogmatic belief in a rich variety of exquisitely nuanced religious ideologies (Christian and numerous others) and the illusory sense of security and triumph over death they derive from those beliefs, we know that perhaps the greatest threat to life - even to our continued survival as a species and that of many other species as well - is rampant, exponentially expanding worldwide human overpopulation, with resultant overcrowding; environmental pollution and habitat destruction; depletion of limited land, water, oil, and other natural resources with progressively vicious competition for the dwindling remains; rapidly progressing global climate change from our expanding excess of fossil fuel usage for the energy essential to our survival; and inevitable violent political strife in an age when terrorism or war can lead not only to massive suffering, loss of life, and destruction of our civilizations - of our cities and nations and even our farmlands and water supplies - but to destruction of the earth’s capacity to support and sustain all higher forms of life.
One would think that a movement that calls itself “pro-life” would concentrate on these issues. However, the so-called “pro-life” movement that we have generally just denies the existence of these real and urgent problems and/or honors and reveres them as being “God’s will.” They are just thrilled and tingly all over in their belief that “God” is even now working to destroy the earth and that they, and only they and others who believe exactly as they do, will be spared and go to “Heaven.” All whom they don’t like and agree with, they believe, will be hideously murdered by a righteous and sadistic “God.” I remember one poll that revealed that 60% of the American people believed in the wacky End Times prophesy gleaned from nothing but fanciful interpretations of dream-like biblical hallucinations and delusions. What should concern us all (like scare our pants off!) is that when fueled by the fear-driven, ardent beliefs of so many mind-abducted, misguided people such imaginings can become self-fulfilling. I’m sure you have noticed that the world seems to be “going to Hell in a hand basket” - not the fulfillment of “divine” prophesy, but very likely at least aided and abetted by a large portion of the mass of humanity believing in “divine” prophesy, wanting the end of the world to hurry up and get here so they can hurry up and get to “Heaven,” and striving toward that goal, personally and politically, as intently, though not as yet so openly and dramatically, as did the Islamic fanatics of 9/11 fame intent upon hijacking airliners and flying them into large buildings, killing thousands of innocent people, to earn their passage into “Paradise.”
Something else we know is that in those countries where men who believe like the pope or their chosen "holy" man or particular choice of religion (or publicly pretend agreement out of fear and cowardice or to hypocritically gain economic, occupational, political, or social advantage) have outlawed the extremely safe minor surgical procedure of vacuum aspiration abortion and even effective pregnancy prevention measures, even condoms and diaphragms, and now the “abortion pill” as well, millions of desperate women and terrified teenage girls knowingly risk death and serious injury each year in seeking illegal abortions, and we know that 70,000 or more of these actually die, often horribly and in chilling fear and excruciating pain, each year around the world from incompetent and dangerous abortion attempts made by often well-intended, but ill-trained, unskilled, and inadequately-equipped outlawed abortionists. We know, too, that many times the numbers who die are seriously injured and maimed for life by incompetent illegal abortion attempts.
We know that the effects of overpopulation in some areas of the world have long been catastrophic, that any baby born has a less than fifty percent chance of living to be five years old in some of those areas, and that illegal, and thus unsafe, abortion is the leading cause of death of women of childbearing age in some of those countries in which we know the pope and his indoctrinated minions regularly and consistently preach to swooning multitudes of cradle-to-grave indoctrinated true-believers not only against abortion, but against any and all forms of effective birth control and sex education, including condom use to prevent HIV/AIDS, and we know that he is thus undeniably, though indirectly (and, of course, denied by him and his fawning ecclesiastical hierarchy and those multitudes of indoctrinated, mind-abducted, true-believing followers), responsible for egregious human suffering and death on a massive scale.
The World Health Organization estimated, in 2003, that in those parts of the world in which abortion is illegal, more than 70,000 desperate women and teenage girls die every year from illegal attempts to abort unwanted pregnancies. 70,000! That is more than one every 10 minutes dead because they are prohibited by law from accessing a reputable legal clinic for a safe, legal abortion. Many times that number are seriously injured and maimed for life.
In addition, every minute, night and day, no holidays or weekends off, around the world
• one woman dies of complications of pregnancy and childbirth (every minute),
• ten teenage girls undergo dangerous illegal abortions (every minute),
• thirteen infants under twelve months old die (every minute),
• fifty seven people contract an STD (every minute),
• eleven people are infected with HIV (every minute), and
• the already-burgeoned-beyond-the-planet's-capacity-to-sustain human population increases by 150 more people (every minute),
all sanctioned, encouraged, and even required by our government through international interference with and withholding of funding from worldwide reproductive health programs, and all with the vigorous support and reinforcement of the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical Christians.
There are 525,600 minutes in a year. You do the arithmetic. The numbers are so huge as to be virtually impossible to contemplate, but those are the kinds of numbers we deal with when describing events in a world population of 6.9-plus billion individuals that is growing exponentially and gobbling up and poisoning the only planet we have, toward the point of severe degradation and even destruction of the biosphere upon which all life depends.
And let's not forget the women brutalized and incarcerated by law enforcement in those countries in which the powerful Roman Catholic Church has pushed for and won the criminalization of abortion and achieved that cruel piece of "God's will on Earth be done." In countries such as Mexico, Chile and El Salvador women having not only induced abortions, but spontaneous abortions (“miscarriages”), are routinely subjected to police investigations and interrogation, arrested, and incarcerated. Many women having natural spontaneous miscarriages are so afraid of such persecution and prosecution that they avoid seeking medical care in such situations, and some (many I would think) die.
These terrible atrocities are completely and easily preventable and treatable by modern medical science. However, the implementation of modern medical science is blocked by the ardent extremists of the so-called “pro-life” movement, predominantly in the western world by religious fanatics and their supporters in the name of God and Jesus.
Those atrocities are what so-called “pro-life” citizens and politicians stand for.
It was once so in the United States as well. However, in the United States we have recently been vastly more fortunate as the result of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade on January 22, 1973, that enjoined the states from enforcing laws prohibiting abortion care. Almost 4,000 women every day obtain professional abortion care in the United States that is legal, professionally provided, and therefore extremely safe. It is reliably estimated that approximately 35% of all adult women in the country have had an abortion. 35%. Maybe your sister - the teenage girl next door or down the street (yes, no matter how perfect her Sunday school attendance or how diligently and sincerely she prays or you pray for her) - your daughter - your best friend's daughter - your wife - your mother - your teenage son's girlfriend! You just aren't likely to hear about it because they fearfully keep it secret. It’s one of those taboo subjects most people don't feel free to discuss. Nor do many people want to hear about it, preferring to bolster their comforting false beliefs that it just couldn't be so by ignoring and denying factual knowledge of it.
Even so, tragically, there are today droves of willfully ignorant and misguided persons and their narrow and uncompromising political, legal, and religious organizations in this country who are zealously struggling to throw history into reverse and turn back the clock to those hideous times before Roe v. Wade. They strive to recreate the blood bath and the derailed and wrecked lives that existed prior to Roe vs. Wade as one especially pernicious and merciless plank in their ardent campaign to transform our free society into a religious tyranny motivated by much the same sort of fervent and uncompromising beliefs that moved other crazed religious fanatics of a different religious persuasion to guide large airliners full of innocent people into large buildings full of innocent people in that infamous “faith-based initiative" on September 11, 2001. The irrational roots of religious beliefs nourish intolerance to the point of murder and genocide. And war.
These belief-driven, thoroughly propagandized religious extremists who call themselves “pro-life,” possessing little if any more compassion for real living, breathing, thinking, feeling women and teenage girls living their real lives than was expressed by the Roman Catholic inquisitors of long ago who regularly, proudly, piously, and publicly tortured and hanged or burned alive real living, breathing, thinking, feeling women and teenage girls (and men and boys) living their real conscious lives for such “sins” or “crimes against God” as “witchcraft” and “heresy,” are succeeding in their zealous efforts to recriminalize abortion care. They have far from given up on their efforts to get Roe vs. Wade overturned, but their major successes thus far have been through their massive propaganda campaign to scare women, deceive thepublic, and influence state governments to institute restrictive state laws against abortion care and women’s rights to access it. They have produced and widely disseminated a thundering tsunami of blatantly exaggerated, sensationalized, false, and misleading claims about abortion care purveyed by books, brochures, videos, films, internet sites, billboards, etc., and through tens of thousands of churches around the land, and this withering propaganda barrage has paid off for them as more and more deluded, mind-abducted, gullible Americans have been wrongly convinced by their lies, misconceptions, and misrepresentations, more and more pandering politicians have set into law unreasonable and unwarranted restrictions and barriers to abortion care (under the hypocritical sheep’s clothing of “protecting women”), and more and more church coffers have been swollen by hysterically emotionalized exploitation of blatant misinformation about abortion care into a cash bonanza as the rabid minions of propagandized true-believers have been set to foaming at the mouth with misplaced zeal.
For example, they love to display gory photos of dismembered late-term fetuses, often blown up to billboard size, to create the false impression that abortion involves the brutal destruction of fully developed, healthy fetuses that could simply be born instead, which is never (well, hardly ever if at all) the case. The “Partial Birth Abortion Ban,” now sealed into federal law by a misguided Congress, president (George W. Bush), and Roman Catholic dominated Supreme Court, prevents no abortions. It merely requires physicians to use other methods that in some cases will present greater risks to the women involved.
Another favorite ploy, ever-present on “pro-life” websites, is to display pictures of MICU’s in clinic parking lots with the strong implication that such scenes are commonplace, which they are not. The viewer is supposed to recoil in horror and be thereby convinced that legal abortion is very, very dangerous, which it is not. Current safe, legal abortion care in this country is spectacularly safe, and MICU’s at abortion clinics are spectacularly rare. All medical/surgical interventions carry some risk. The only alternative to abortion is to carry the pregnancy to term and deliver a baby. Just in terms of death rates abortion is spectacularly safer than that alternative. The death rate for continued pregnancy and childbirth is in the neighborhood of 10-30/100,000 (and rising in the United States), while the death rate for abortion is about 0.5/100,000. Even so, across the nation, we are beset daily by the spectacles of mind-abducted lawmakers righteously and deviously pandering to mind-abducted, misinformed, and gullible voters by bloviating about imaginary, trumped up “dangers” of abortion care which for over forty years has been transformed into one of the safest medical interventions in existence by its being made legal, accessible, and openly practiced.
I have a reaction (that “pro-lifers” are generally unable - or unwilling - to comprehend and find outrageous) to seeing those photos of rare MICU’s at abortion clinics. I rejoice in it. What do you think would happen to the woman being transferred to a hospital if she were hemorrhaging on a kitchen table up a flight of stairs down some back alley while her anonymous illegal abortionist attempted a quick getaway, abandoning her lying in a spreading pool of blood?
However, don’t hold your breath until reality, reason, and compassion triumph and those same elected officials who shamelessly pretend to care about the safety of women and teenage girls pass laws requiring physicians to inform them of the much greater dangers of continued pregnancy and childbirth!
Safe legal abortions are quite “rare” in those countries in which abortion care is illegal, as the “pro-lifers” would have it. Safe, professional abortion care is virtually non-existent and exists only underground in those countries, where finding and accessing it among the confusing array of perilous outlaw incompetents is a crap shoot for life and health that women regularly and in great numbers lose. That is what so-called "pro-life" voters and politicians stand for. Have our values and compassion sunk so low that we can't oppose that? They won't stop until they succeed in creating conditions in this country mirroring those in the Third World and in nations such as Mexico, Chile and El Salvador.
What is the truth as I see it? The past should have taught us all that the damage to the health and well-being (and lives) of conscious women and teenage girls is much too high a price to pay for criminalizing abortion in a futile attempt to save the lives of basically inert, unconscious embryos and fetuses inside the bodily domain of desperately unwilling hosts.
Women and men have always had sex and always will. (Have Rick Perry and the other "Wingnut Rick" - Santorum - sit down before you tell them). Women have always, and will always, pay the price. Many women always have, and always will when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, felt like that trapped animal desperately willing to gnaw off its leg to escape. Many women always have, and always will seek and find ways of escaping from what to them is a desperately unwanted, catastrophic life-changing event.
Women and teenage girls always have, and always will, have abortions, regardless of legality.
The political and legal - and moral - choice is not between abortion and no abortion.
It is between very safe legal abortion and very dangerous illegal abortion.
Which would you choose?