Abortion bans are causing women’s deaths*: Is this what the “pro-life” movement wanted?
*added by Zany editor
Abortion bans aren’t working*
If the right wanted to bring more babies into the world by banning abortion, the plan is backfiring.
Zany: Let me jump in here quick. Since when have bans on anything worked? Remember Prohibition? People found ways to get alcohol and organized crime took over the transporting and sale of alcohol when it was illegal. A parent bans their daughter from seeing her new boyfriend. She climbs out the window at 1 AM to see him or tells her parents she has something school-related after school to see him, or she says she’s staying overnight at Mary’s but goes to see him. Bans don’t work. People will take matters into their own hands if they can’t find any other way to get an abortion.
One of the reasons abortion was legalized is that women were dying after giving themselves an abortion or visiting an underground “doctor” that performed them in an unsterilized environment without medical knowledge on the proper techniques or what to do if anything went wrong. If the woman was bleeding out, there was no one to call to get “4 bags of blood STAT” to give her a lifesaving transfusion.
Sorry to be so graphic, I’m just trying to get my point across that abortion was legalized so women could have safe, sterile procedure rooms with knowledgeable physicians and nurses performing the abortion who could act quickly in the case of an emergency.
Not only that, but if their OBGYN said their fetus was nonviable or “If you go forward with this pregnancy, you will die,” they could go to the hospital where their own OBGYN could perform the procedure. Now you have women being told the fetus has no bones in its head and won’t survive outside the womb, and their only option is to go to another state. By the time they arrange transportation and get time off from work to travel, they end up losing an ovary and fallopian tube because they waited so long, making their chances of growing their family, consisting of a husband and 2 children, even slimmer (true story). This woman already had children, and this is the type of person who is seeking an abortion—married women with children.
Six in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers, and half of them have two or more children, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “One of the main reasons people report wanting to have an abortion is so they can be a better parent to the kids they already have,” Professor Upadhyay said.
The New York Times
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Lawmakers hear that people are having less babies than before and think this is the way to address it. How about realizing that most people can’t afford to have children! Address it by reinstating the child tax credit and pass the bill providing 2 years of free preschool! Instead these out of touch people decide to force people to have children they can’t afford. They care so much for the unborn, but once they’re born, screw ’em. I think they also forget that parents are financially responsible for a child for 18 years.
Our foster care system is struggling. Why not provide funding to fix it and help the already “unwanted” children find homes? Instead, you’re only creating a situation where more children are going to end up in foster care. Why not care about those kids who are oftentimes abused physically and sexually by their foster parents, because they don’t care about the kids, they just want to collect the checks each month? Figure out a way to solve the incentive to take in 5 kids just to get that money? Hire more social workers to check in on the kids?
Okay, sorry, I went off-topic again (if you’re a regular reader you know that’s common for me).
Now include the laws being passed in states that will ban traveling out of state for an abortion. In my opinion, that’s fascist (and I’m not being hyperbolic). Here’s the article from The Intercept to explain how abortion bans are killing women. Is that really what the Pro-Life movement wants?
THE INTERCEPT
In fact, abortions have increased since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Every state without an abortion ban — especially those adjacent to red states — saw a rise in abortions from 2020 through 2023.
But even women facing severe restrictions have managed to end their pregnancies. In 2023, abortion in the U.S. reached its highest level in over a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute — and that’s counting only terminations recorded by the formal health care system.
While surgical abortions are harder to get, the word is out about self-managed abortions using pills. Online services like PlanC, Aid Access, and Abuzz disseminate the information; shield laws protect blue-state providers from red-state prosecution if they prescribe pills via telehealth and mail them to patients living under the bans. Abortion funds are in overdrive helping abortion-seekers with travel, child care, and medical costs.
Judith Levine is a contributing writer at The Intercept. A journalist and personal essayist on sex, justice, and emotions in politics, she has written five books, most recently “The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence,” co-authored with Erica R. Meiners (Verso, 2020).
