Passed by state, likely to be signed into law by governor (also likely to be challenged in court).
The bill requires that doctors conduct screenings of women to determine whether they were coerced into abortions, and whether they have physical or mental risk factors that might lead to problems post abortion.
If this bill were actually written with any care for women’s health, wouldn’t these questions also be asked of any woman carrying a child to term: Have you been forced into it? What factors do you have that may put you at risk for mental or physical problems during and after the pregnancy?
I hope, actually, that most competent health providers would have these conversations with their patients even without a bill to guide them. The difference here is that it explicitly gives patients the right to sue doctors if they aren’t ‘screened’ – and later have emotional or physical problems they attribute to their abortion. Again, doing this for abortions and not for pregnancy (given that babies carried to term are still way more common than babies aborted) indicates that it’s not about concern for the woman’s health but about reducing the number of abortions by a) making the process more difficult and shaming for women than it already is and b) providing extra cause for physicians to be afraid to perform abortions (although as long as they’ve kept good files on the conversation they had outlining the risks, they should be at no increased risk of losing money beyond the time and expense of defending against a civil court case).
I’m not sure why I felt the need to write 300 words proving this has nothing to do with women’s health. No one is really pretending it does (unless that’s their argument when this bill is challenged). I’m just annoyed and this is my way of dealing.
Also, I like this paragraph a lot:
“Supporters say it simply puts abortions in line with other medical procedures in which patients are screened for possible problems. . . The measure is unusual, however, in spelling out what factors doctors must consider when doing the screenings. Schleppenbach said that’s because doctors otherwise would turn to other abortion providers to set the standards for the medical community.”
Last I checked, in most states only doctors can provide abortions, and in some places nurses. So I’m sort of curious who these nefarious ‘other abortion providers’ are.
Hmph.
