SB 194 – Hospital privilege requirement for physicians performing abortions.

Comments

1. Gigi says

   January 13, 2007 at 12:01 -05006

   I am so all for this.

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2. Gigi says

   January 13, 2007 at 12:26 -05006

   Wait. I thought a little more about this and I’m not so sure. Bringing abortion into hospitals (rather than clinics – Planned Parenthood, etc.) would also bring into the issue the crooked politics of hospitals, insurance, and healthcare. It would also make the procedure probably much more expensive. Hmm.

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3. Doug says

   January 13, 2007 at 15:18 -05006

   I think you’re getting the picture there. The anti-abortion crowd has a growing history of trying to limit or eliminate abortions simply by regulating the hell out of it. For example, there was a bill last year that would have imposed a bazillion little structural requirements for abortion clinic facilities.

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4. Branden Robinson says

   January 13, 2007 at 15:26 -05006

   Doug,

   Absolutely. The right wing screeches piteously about the “death by a thousand regulatory cuts”, but sees no problem with the same strategy when endorsing the same approach to abortion, rather than having the balls to propose a fully consistent and serious anti-abortion program.

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5. Branden Robinson says

   January 16, 2007 at 11:35 -05006

   Er, in my post above I was referring to piteous screeching on economic regulatory issues, if that wasn’t clear.

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6. Branden Robinson says

   January 22, 2007 at 21:02 -05006

   I read an interesting article on the socio-economic realities of abortion today.

   Even when abortion was formally illegal in every state, safe abortions performed by doctors in hospitals were widely available to women with the right connections. (The Nixon appointee Lewis Powell joined Roe largely because, as a corporate lawyer in Richmond, his firm had arranged for the daughters of wealthy families to obtain gray market abortions. He understood that the lofty abstractions used to defend abortion bans didn’t reflect common practice.) The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision didn’t so much create a right of abortion as extend the de facto access to abortion enjoyed by rich women more widely.

   As long as Griswold is good law, a woman’s reproductive freedom is plainly a fundamental right. And the actual way abortion laws were written and enforced prior to Roe — with affluent women given a de facto exemption, with (in most cases) no criminal sanctions levied against women who obtain abortions at all, and with the rare prosecutions of black market abortions often unable to garner jury convictions — makes it very difficult to argue that the state’s interests can trump a woman’s fundamental rights. If there was a social consensus that a fetus has the status of a person, the issue would be different and much more difficult. But given that the abortion laws were much more consistent with regulating female sexuality than protecting fetal life, the Court was correct to strike them.

   (source)

   Given the current alliance between social and economic conservatives in GOP, it is of course unlikely even if James Dobson got his way, that many prosecutorial dollars would be spent on wealthy seekers of abortions, or the doctors who cater to them. At best, a renewed abortion ban would be effective only against poor women by “pricing” (in the formal economic sense) the service out of their reach even in the absence of the the notorious back-alley scenarios.

   Of course, the social divide of laws for the poor and liberties for the rich is one that has been embraced by the GOP at least since the Reagan era, so maybe this is no surprise. I do wonder how many Christians can read the New Testament without the hypocrisy of this position sticking in their craws, however.

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7. RIch says

   March 12, 2007 at 10:35 -04006

   I think everyone needs to realize that no guidelines help the issue of abortion. It simply should be made illegal and be put to an end. Plain and simple.

   Reply