Womb Service

There are obviously many well meaning people on either side of the abortion debate. Right to Lifers believe that life begins at conception, that abortion is murder and that they are the lone advocates for an unborn population that has no one to speak for them.

I am pro choice, believing that a woman herself knows best if she is personally able to bear and raise a child and give it a decent life.

This week a federal judge in Indiana, Tanya Pratt, ruled that Indiana can not cut off funding to Planned Parenthood with their new law and blocked a portion of the law requiring abortion practitioners to tell women considering an abortion that their unborn child will feel pain as early as 20 weeks into pregnancy. She rejected Planned Parenthood’s request that a part of the law be blocked that women be told before an abortion that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”

Indiana Right to Life President Mike Fichter issued the following statement after the ruling:

“We are deeply disappointed that today’s ruling brushes aside the will of the Indiana legislature.  This ruling opens the pipeline for our tax dollars to flow back into the hands of Indiana’s largest abortion provider and denies women seeking abortions the right to know about an unborn child’s ability to feel pain.” Fichter said. “We are confident that Indiana’s right to defund Planned Parenthood and to inform women about the facts of fetal pain will eventually be upheld in the courts, but it is troubling to know that in the meantime, Indiana is being forced to subsidize a business that profits from over 5,500 abortions every year and women are being denied key information they deserve.”

This is a part of the anti abortion argument that I find troubling.  The woman may have a personal duty to know about a child's feeling pain but does she have a right to know that is presently being denied her? This is a very strange part of their narrative. If a woman wants to find out about an unborn child's ability to feel pain she has every right to do so but we have no right to force her to do so. In the pro life world, none of these women are capable of making an informed choice by their self. Women are always victims of unscrupulous abortion merchants, bent on making obscene profits by killing babies and are being cowed by evil men to have abortions because none of them would ever have one if they were confronted by a particular set of facts. An argument that is absurd on its face and degrades women and turns them into unwitting victims.

This argument also unfairly denigrates and impugns groups like Planned Parenthood, an organization that unfortunately operates as the sole access to health care for many I women that I know.

Some of the pro life women say that they look back and regret their abortions. Does that give them the right to take away another woman's ability to make their own informed decision? Or they create  the simplistic narrative that women are getting abortions with all the emotional gravitas that they would get from a teeth cleaning. The reality is, at least for the women I know that have been faced with the choice, is that abortion is a tumultuous decision that is never made casually.

The right to lifers try  to intimidate women by forcing them by law to watch sonograms and force doctors to describe the fetal parts in the most intimate detail and pretty much terrorize them during the proceedings.

If there is a percentage of women who do not know what they are doing when having an abortion, the ethical implications of the act itself and have not weighed the pluses or minuses of the termination, my guess is that it is infinitesimally small. If they choose to educate themselves into the deeper consequences of their actions, that is certainly their privilege but in my opinion we as a society have no right to badger them and hit them over the head with the information, especially during a time of deep emotional stress.

It must surely be a tough decision but I would hope that it remains a woman's decision to be made in consultation with her doctor and not the province of the state or the federal government.