SB 146 is the latest effort by Senators Drozda and Miller to impose more bureaucracy on any woman seeking an abortion. Today, by a voice vote, the Senate rejected an amendment offered by Senator Lanane. (Because it was a voice vote, we can’t see who was for the amendment or who was against it.)
The bill requires that, at least 18 hours before the medical procedure, a woman seeking an abortion be informed that there is “differing medical evidence concerning when a fetus feels pain;” that “many” couples who are “willing and waiting” to adopt a child and that “under certain circumstances” adoptive parents “may” legally pay costs associated with prenatal care, childbirth, and neonatal care; that there are physical risks to the woman having an abortion; and that “an embryo formed by the fertilization of a human ovum by a human sperm immediately begins to divide and grow as human physical life.” (Nice dodge with “human physical life” — technically true, leads to a nasty feeling by Mom that this is murder, and neatly sidesteps the messy debate about what is valuable about human life and whether that value is yet present to be destroyed by the abortion.)
Senator Lanane’s proposed amendment would have added more information – in addition to telling the woman that there are physical risks to an abortion, the doctor would have been obliged to tell the woman that there are physical risks to pregnancy — an inconvenient fact about which the Senate felt the incubators women should not necessarily be aware. The Senate rejected the proposed amendment. Senator Lanane’s amendment also would also have required that a physician advise that a woman should consult with her physician throughout her pregnancy.
I’ve got no problem with that ammendment. All the information is correct. Women seeking abortions need to know all the facts ahead of time.
Interesting that it didn’t pass the Republican controlled Senate. Indiana isn’t exactly a bastion of christian conservatism that Democrats make it out to be.
Do the women also have to read that email about aborting Beethoven?
So, it is important to tell a woman she should keep the pregnancy, but not to tell her about what she will face and that she should seek ongoing prenatal care?
You know, I’d be willing to concede to a number of pro-life measures if they would concede to adequate sex education for all children as well as requiring prenatal care. But no one wants to compromise. Everyone wants to be stubborn.
I’ll admit that I’ve mainly looked at the pro-lifers and been critical of what they do or attempt to do legislatively. I haven’t paid much attention to what the pro-choicers have done. (My sense is that the pro-choicers mainly want government to stay out of the equation and, therefore, haven’t tried to do much of anything legislatively.)
So, with that admitted bias disclosed, I’ll tell you that I find the pro-lifer’s actions (again, conceding that it’s unfair to lump all of them in under one umbrella — different agendas almost certainly apply) make a whole lot more sense if you view pregnancy and disease as God’s punishment for sex.
Through that lens, the following make sense:
# Limited access to birth control.
# Abstinence-only education.
# Mandatory information on the perils of abortion but not on the perils of pregnancy.
# Limited information about birth control and STD prevention.
# Opposition to the HPV vaccine that would prevent cervical cancer from the human papilloma virus.
The fact is that if a woman doesn’t have an unwanted pregnancy, she’s not likely to have an abortion. Prevent the pregnancy – prevent the abortion. Sure, abstinence is almost entirely effective in preventing a pregnancy (the odd rape or bizarro sperm transmission aside). But, it’s not the only way to prevent a pregnancy. Trouble is, birth control allows all that icky sex and thwarts God’s punishment. Intolerable.
Yeah, you guys give too much credit to birth control. The people that I know who have had abortions swear that they got pregnant despite faithfully using birth control, both the pill and condoms. These aren’t stupid people either.
Look at the numbers. The vast majority of abortions are not to ignorant teenagers. They’re older women, many are married.
Abortion is there for one and only one thing: to clean up the failure of birth control. That’s the dirty little secret that no one in this country wants to talk about.
Here’s what I’m talking about, if you’re interested. Numbers are in the story.
Buzzcut–
Oh, sure contraceptives fail. My son is partly courtesy of Ortho TriCyclen Lo, and he’s far from the only one. I remember a wave of pregnancies from that particular formulation, including my wife, and a nurse here. Presently, the Yaz pill (lower estrogen formulation of Yasmin) has blessed another nurse in my office, and she’s not alone.
I stop short of being too critical, though. I was able to enjoy almost two decades of “consequence-free” sexual relations, thanks to pills, condoms, or some combination thereof, before a failure occurred. That is not completely out of line with the quoted failure rates. Just because some data shows most abortions are due to contraceptive failure doesn’t mean most pregnancies are.
The most common description of the pregnancies I see in practice is “Wasn’t trying to get pregnant, but wasn’t doing anything to prevent it.”
I have no problem with abortion being used to “clean up” contraceptive failure. I would like the contraceptives to be as available and as effective as possible, to keep the need for such “clean-up” to a minimum.