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Lizziecat
Citizen
Username: Lizziecat
Post Number: 158
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 - 11:49 pm: |     |
Nobody, but nobody, especially no man and no government should have the right to use the law to interfere in a woman's decision to carry a pregnancy to term or to not do so. What is Ashcroft going to do, arrest those women who have had late-term abortions? Does anyone think that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is taken lightly? Does a woman wake up one morning and say "nice day, goody, I think I'll have an abortion today?" Come on. |
ashear
Citizen
Username: Ashear
Post Number: 961
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 9:36 am: | |
CJC - you say "it does happen" meaning late term intact dialation and extraction procedures on healthy fetuses. Where and when?
I must say your viciousness at someone who has obviously had a difficult personal experience is appaling. I'm always amazed that the anti-choice people think that kind of behavior is going to win anyone to their cause. |
ffof
Citizen
Username: Ffof
Post Number: 1948
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 9:43 am: | |
why would JA being doing this? THe repubs already have the right whackos on their side. So it's obviously a ploy to duck the real issues (iraq and economy). |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 912
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 12:29 pm: | |
ashear and clkelley -- you're not reading what I've actually said about your particular, horrific circumstance. Either that, or you choose to ignore it. Or, you're both too emotionally wrapped up in this issue that logic and what is actually said versus what you feel is ruining your reasoning ability.
Let's just say, clkelly and ashear, that clkelly's case is totally legit. OK? Got that? You're golden, in the clear, totally kosher -- all right? ALL RIGHT?
Now....There are some previously done abortions that as of the partial birth abortion ban that are ILLEGAL. (Don't say illegal, cjc. That's so harsh). Sorry, against the law. (Still harsh). OK...frowned upon by the judicial branch with possible legal ramifications.
It appears that DoJ is investigating if something illegal was done. If nothing illegal was done, then they're just as wonderful and worthwhile as you both are.
Mercury must be in retrograde....
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ashear
Citizen
Username: Ashear
Post Number: 970
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:20 pm: | |
You need to read the article, which Nohero helpfully posted above, this is not a criminal investigation. But lets say it were. Do you think the feds should be able to look at every medical record of every woman who has a late term D&E? Gun records we can't look at even to find terrorists, medical records are another story. |
ashear
Citizen
Username: Ashear
Post Number: 971
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:21 pm: | |
By the way, I still await the evidence to back up your claim that these procedures are used to abort healty fetuses. |
vor
Citizen
Username: Vor
Post Number: 179
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:41 pm: | |
To answer the question as to why there is no exception for the life or health of the mother, let's think about the reason this law exists.
A little research reveals…
“For the stage subsequent to viability, the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.” Roe v Wade
The Court defined viability as the point at which the fetus is "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid."
In other words states may decide that abortion after viability is illegal unless the life or health of the mother is in danger.
So if states can already outlaw certain abortions unless the life or health of the mother is in danger, thereby making the abortion of a viable fetus (as defined) illegal, why the need for this legislation? Simple, IMO, it's meant to take away the "life or health of the mother" exemption. Period, end of story!
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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 914
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:50 pm: | |
Fine, this is not a criminal investigation. The doctors have nothing to worry about.
I think if DoJ has reason to believe the Law was broken, they should be able to investigate. I believe doctors used to have to report syphylis or gonorreah numbers a while back and might still be obligated to today. Just add that on to the report. I also believe doctors are obligated to report gunshot wounds.
Number of late-term abortions? I found this from a pro-life website in my limited search, but it cites the Guttmacher people who are pro-abortion.
"A just-released survey of abortion providers by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) showed the reported number of partial-birth abortions more than tripling from the same organization's survey four years ago.
The AGI survey for 1996 (released in 1998) for the first time asked a question relating to partial-birth abortion (which they called "D&X"), and then estimated that "about 650" such abortions were performed annually in the U.S. Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute was quoted as saying, "The numbers aren't exact, but I'm pretty sure it's in the 500 to 1,000 range" (The New York Times, Dec. 11, 1998)."
So, I guess we can think of the Partial Birth Abortion ban as a stupid piece of legislation that addresses practices that virtually never happen. |
ashear
Citizen
Username: Ashear
Post Number: 973
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:53 pm: | |
I did not ask about numbers. You claimed that these procedures were being conducted in situations where they would not be justified to protect the life or health of the mother. What is the basis for that claim? |
Michaela May
Citizen
Username: Mayquene
Post Number: 71
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 1:55 pm: | |
Guttmacher is not a pro-choice group -- they are a research group whose statistics are used by both sides of the debate and whose numbers and work is largely credited as neutral. But, given that you found that information on an anti-abortion website, I would wonder what was left out. |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 915
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 2:04 pm: | |
Hey, ashear -- I surrender. Those opposing this method of infanticide kept saying "what about the life of the mother!!!!!", I concluded that was a rationale for these abortions. Was I wrong? Why else would they make that claim? We now know that isn't necessarily the case (per the AMA), though there are rare, rare exceptions.
I guess there were 650 rare, rare exceptions, and that number is growing. I'm sure I'll be proven wrong and as this number increases, you can be very happy about it. Let's just take a look see and be sure. |
Michaela May
Citizen
Username: Mayquene
Post Number: 72
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 2:07 pm: | |
cjc -- i am curious, are you a man or woman? |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 916
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 2:09 pm: | |
Now? |
tjohn
Citizen
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 2277
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 2:11 pm: | |
Cjc,
It's really simple. If the law was balanced, it would have included specific language to protect the health of the mother and would have covered the case of less than healthy fetuses or fetuses with birth defects. It did not. Therefore, the law is just another attack on Roe v. Wade and hence the uproar. |
vor
Citizen
Username: Vor
Post Number: 180
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 13, 2004 - 2:23 pm: | |
Some perspective...The number of births in the U.S. in 1996 was approx 3.9 million (from the 1996 census bureau statistics). Could there possibly have been 650 late term abortions where the health situation of the mother and/or fetal abnormalities left no other choice. Seems feasible to me.
And as far as the number growing, so is the number of births. In 2002 the number of births in the U.S. was 4.3 million.
If the rationale is to stop late term abortions that are allegedly performed for no other reason other then to terminate the pregnancy, states already have the ability to prosecute on these grounds (per Roe v Wade). |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 421
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2004 - 5:16 pm: | |
Cjc,
You don't have the right to pass judgement on clkelley or any other woman faced with that kind of decision, and your use of terms like "you're golden", and "totally kosher" is absolutely vile.
At least have the common decency to apologize for the hurt you have caused.
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J. Crohn
Citizen
Username: Jcrohn
Post Number: 925
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2004 - 6:40 pm: | |
"At least have the common decency to apologize for the hurt you have caused."
Look, this goes too far. You guys are piling on Cjc unjustifiably. He has not been insensitive.
He may be wrong that the number of late-term abortions of healthy fetuses is significant, but he is not wrong that such abortions are infanticide. (Anyone using the same term to describe the abortion of, say, an anencephalic baby would be technically correct, but guilty of obscuring the salient issue of non-viability.)
I would support unreservedly a federal law that prohibited third-trimester abortions of healthy babies that posed no health risk to the mother. It is my position, moreover, that as science pushes back the definition of viability and it becomes possible to support life outside the womb at increasingly early stages of development, it will become increasingly necessary for the law to grapple with such issues as the onset of sentience.
However, it certainly appears that Mr. Bush's law has been written to eliminate abortion, not only infanticide.
I lifted the subsequent Boston Globe piece off of FreeRepublic. Cjc will excuse its painfully emotional aspects to observe that the writer makes some perfectly rational objections to the "partial birth abortion" ban.
As for John Ashcroft...well, I think perhaps he could use a new job. I'd be very happy for him to take his chances waiting online at some Iraqi police recruitment center.
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J. Crohn
Citizen
Username: Jcrohn
Post Number: 926
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2004 - 6:42 pm: | |
My Late-Term Abortion
The Boston Globe Magazine | January 25, 2004 | Gretchen Voss
President Bush's attempt to ban partial-birth abortions threatens all late-term procedures. But in my case, everyone said it was the right thing to do — even my Catholic father and Republican father-in-law.
Way too excited to sleep on that frigid April morning, I snuggled my bloated belly up to my husband, Dave. Eighteen weeks pregnant, today we would finally have our full-fetal ultrasound and find out whether our baby was a boy or a girl. I had no reason to be nervous, I thought. I was young (if 31 is the new 21), healthy, and had not had so much as a twinge of nausea. Well into my second trimester, I was past the point of worrying about a miscarriage.
The past 3 1/2 months had been a time of pure bliss -- dreaming about our future family, squirreling away any extra money that we could, and cleaning out a room for a nursery in our cozy, suburban home, then borrowing unholy amounts of stuff to fill it back up. From the day that we found out we were expecting a baby -- on New Year's Eve 2002 -- we thought of ourselves as parents, and finding out whether the "it" was a he or she would cap the months of scattershot emotions and frenetic information-gathering. I just couldn't sleep. I invited our 105-pound yellow Labrador "puppy" into bed with us and snuggled even closer to Dave.
Later that morning, at quarter past 9, Dave held my hand as I lay on the cushy examining table at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center office in Lexington. As images of our baby filled the black screen, we oohed and aahed like the goofy expectant parents that we were. "Can you tell if it's a boy or a girl?" I must have asked a million stupid times. The technician was noncommittal, stoic, and I started feeling uncomfortable. Where I was all bubbly chitchat, she was all furrow-browed concentration. She told us that she had a child with Down syndrome, and that none of her prenatal tests had picked it up. I thought that was odd.
Then, using an excuse about finishing something on her previous ultrasound, she left the room. Seconds passed into minutes while we waited for her to return. Staring at the pictures of fuzzy kittens and kissing dolphins on the ceiling, I knew something was wrong. Dave tried to reassure me, but when the ultrasound technician told us that our doctor wanted to see us, I started to shake. "But she doesn't even know we're here," I said to her, and then to Dave, over and over. That's when I started crying. I could barely get my clothes back on.
The waiting room upstairs, usually full of happy pregnant women devouring parenting magazines, was empty. Our doctor, who usually wears a smile below her chestnut hair, met us at the front desk. She was not smiling that day as she led us back to her cramped office, full of framed photos of her own children.
As we sat there, she said that the ultrasound indicated that the fetus had an open neural tube defect, meaning that the spinal column had not closed properly. It was a term I remembered skipping right over in my pregnancy book, along with all the other fetal anomalies and birth defects that I thought referred to other people's babies, not mine. She couldn't tell us much more. We would have to go to the main hospital in Boston, which had a more high-tech machine and a more highly trained technician. She tried to be hopeful -- there was a wide range of severity with these defects, she said. And then she left us to cry.
We drove into Boston in near silence, tears rolling down my cheeks. There was no joking or chatting at the hospital in Boston. No fuzzy kittens and kissing dolphins on the ceiling of that chilly, clinical room. Dave held my hand more tightly than before. I couldn't bear to look at this screen. Instead, I studied the technician's face, like a nervous flier taking her cues from the expression a stewardess wears. Her face revealed nothing.
She squirted cold jelly on my belly and then slid an even colder probe back and forth around my belly button, punching it down every so often to make the baby move for a better view. She didn't say one word in 45 minutes. When she finished, she looked at us and confirmed our worst fears.
Instead of cinnamon and spice, our child came with technical terms like hydrocephalus and spina bifida. The spine, she said, had not closed properly, and because of the location of the opening, it was as bad as it got. What they knew -- that the baby would certainly be paralyzed and incontinent, that the baby's brain was being tugged against the opening in the base of the skull and the cranium was full of fluid -- was awful. What they didn't know -- whether the baby would live at all, and if so, with what sort of mental and developmental defects -- was devastating. Countless surgeries would be required if the baby did live. None of them would repair the damage that was already done.
I collapsed into Dave. It sounds so utterly naive now, but nobody told me that pregnancy was a gamble, not a guarantee. Nobody told me that what was rooting around inside me was a hope, not a promise. I remember thinking what a cruel joke those last months had been.
We met with a genetic counselor, but given the known as well as the unknown, we both knew what we needed to do. Though the baby might live, it was not a life that we would choose for our child, a child that we already loved. We decided to terminate the pregnancy. It was our last parental decision.
So this is our story -- mine, my husband's, and our baby's. It's not a story I ever thought I'd share with a mass audience, because, frankly, it's nobody's business. But now it is.
On November 5, George W. Bush signed the first federal ban on any abortion procedure in the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, and the first ban of a surgical technique in the history of this country.
"I'm pleased that all of you have joined us as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 becomes the law of the land," Bush said. After singling out 11 political supporters of the bill -- all of them men -- the president whipped the 400-strong, antiabortion crowd into a frenzy. "For years a terrible form of violence has been directed against children who are inches from birth, while the law looked the other way," he said to cheers and whoops and hollers.
The signing ceremony staged by the White House was part evangelical tent revival, part good ol' boy pep rally, ending with the audience muttering "Amen." The president stoked the crowd's moral indignation with emotional platitudes like "affirming a basic standard of humanity" and "compassion and the power of conscience" and "defending the life of the innocent."
But on that Wednesday afternoon, President Bush never addressed what, exactly, the ramifications of the bill would be. His administration portrayed it as a bill aimed solely at stopping a "gruesome and barbaric" procedure used by healthy mothers to kill healthy babies. That portrayal served to spark a national, emotional knee-jerk reaction, which precluded any understanding of the practical outcome of the legislation. But it was those very real practicalities that immediately prompted three lawsuits and got three federal courts to prevent the bill from actually becoming law, starting a fight that will probably drag on for years.
At the heart of the debate is a term that legislators concocted. They created a nonexistent procedure -- partial-birth abortion -- and then banned it. They then gave it such a purposely vague definition that, according to abortion providers as well as the Supreme Court, which ruled a similar law in Nebraska unconstitutional, it could apply to all abortions after the first trimester.
Though some proponents of the bill say that they merely want to ban a specific medical procedure -- properly called intact dilation and extraction, which accounts for fewer than one-fifth of 1 percent of all abortions in this country, according to a 2000 survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute -- they never specifically called it that. Instead, the bill is written in such a way that the much more common procedure -- dilation and evacuation, which accounts for 96 percent of second-trimester abortions, including my own -- would also be banned.
Supporters of the ban have argued that this procedure is used on babies that are "inches from life." But in the bill, there is no mention of fetal viability (the point at which a fetus could live independently of its mother for a sustained period of time). Nor is there any mention of gestational age. Thus, the ban would cover terminations at any point during pregnancy. (In fact, Roe v. Wade already protects the rights of a fetus after the point of viability, which occurs sometime after the 24th week of gestation, in the third trimester of pregnancy. Massachusetts bans all abortions at and beyond the 24th week, except to protect the life or health of the mother. Indeed, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in 2001 there were only 24 abortions after the 24th week, out of a total of 26,293 abortions.) By not mentioning viability, critics say, this ban would overturn Roe v. Wade, which clearly states that women have the right to abortion before fetal viability.
So what does it all really mean? It means that all abortions after the first trimester could be outlawed. No matter if the fetus has severe birth defects, including those incompatible with life (many of which cannot be detected until well into the second trimester). No matter if the mother would be forced to have, for example, a kidney transplant or a hysterectomy if she continued with the pregnancy. (Legislators did not provide a health exception for the woman, arguing that it would provide too big a loophole.)
In the aftermath of the signing of the bill, its supporters spoke about having outlawed a medical procedure and protecting the nation's children. "We have just outlawed a procedure that is barbaric, that is brutal, that is offensive to our moral sensibilities," said Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. Its opponents bemoaned an unconstitutional attack on legal rights. "This ban is yet another instance of the federal government inappropriately interfering in the private lives of Americans, dangerously undermining . . . the very foundation of a woman's right to privacy," said Gregory T. Nojeim, an associate director and chief legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
But lost in the political slugfest have been the very real experiences of women -- and their families -- who face this heartbreaking decision every day.
I don't know what was worse, those three days leading up to the procedure (I have never called it an abortion) or every day since. I clung to Dave. He was always the rock in our relationship, but I now became completely dependent on him for my own sanity. Though abortion had never been part of his consciousness, he was resolved in a way that my hormones or female nature or whatever wouldn't let me be. But I worried about him, too. The only time I saw him crack was after his brother -- his best friend -- left a tearful message on our answering machine. Then I found Dave kneeling on the floor in our bathroom, doubled over and bawling, his body quaking. That nearly killed me.
I don't remember much from those three days. Walking around with a belly full of broken dreams, it felt like what I would imagine drowning feels like -- flailing and suffocating and desperate. Semiconscious. Surrounded by our family, I found myself tortured by our decision, asking over and over, are we doing the right thing? That was the hardest part. Even though I finally understood that pregnancy wasn't a Gerber commercial, that bringing forth life was intimately wrapped up in death -- what with miscarriage and stillbirth -- this was actually a choice. Everyone said, of course it's the right thing to do -- even my Catholic father and my Republican father-in-law, neither of whom was ever "pro-choice." Because suddenly, for them, it wasn't about religious doctrine or political platforms. It was personal -- their son, their daughter, their grandchild. It was flesh and blood, as opposed to abstract ideology, and that changed everything.
I was surprised to find out that I would no longer be in the care of my obstetrician, the woman who had been my doctor throughout my pregnancy. It turned out that she dealt only with healthy pregnancies. Now that mine had gone horribly wrong, she set up an appointment for me with someone else, the only person who was willing to take care of me now. I felt like an outcast.
As we drove to his private office in Brookline that Monday, April 7, 2003, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going to meet my executioner. I had never met this doctor, but I did look him up online. With thick, mad-scientistlike glasses, he looked scary. In person, though, he reminded me in both looks and manner of Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules. He had the kindest, saddest eyes I had ever seen, and he sat with us for at least an hour, speaking to us with a heartfelt compassion and understanding that I had never encountered from any doctor before. His own eyes teared as Dave and I cried.
He explained the procedure to us, at least the parts we needed to understand. Unlike a simple first-trimester abortion, which can be completed in one quick office visit, a second-trimester termination is much more complicated, a two-day minimum process. He started it that day by inserting four laminaria sticks made of dried seaweed into my cervix. It was excruciating, and he apologized over and over as I cried out in pain. When I left the examining room, my mom and my husband were shocked -- I was shaking and ghostly white. The pain lasted throughout the night as the sticks collected my body's fluids and expanded, dilating my cervix just like the beginning stages of labor.
The next morning, Dave and my mother took me to the hospital in Boston. I was petrified. I had never had any sort of surgery, and I fought the anesthesia -- clinging to the final moments of being pregnant -- as I lay in that stark white room. As I started to drift off, my doctor held one of my hands, and an older, female nurse held my other, whispering in my ear, "You're going to be OK, I've been here before, lean on your husband." It was my last memory. When I woke up, it was all over.
Dave had to return to work the next day. He didn't want to leave me, and he certainly didn't want to return to the furtive stares of his co-workers, all of whom knew that we had "lost the baby." I really don't know how he did it. My mother stayed with me at home for the next week, trying to glue my shattered pieces back together with grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. I had no control over my emotions. I felt like a freak in a world full of capable women having babies, and I couldn't stop whimpering: Why did my body betray me?
For months, I hid from the world, avoiding social outings and weddings. I just couldn't bear well-meaning friends saying, "I'm so sorry." So I quarantined myself, and would try to go about my day -- but then, bam, heartbreak would come screaming out of the shadows, blindsiding me and leaving me crumpled on the floor of our house. It wasn't that I was questioning our decision. I knew we did it out of love, out of all the feeling in the world. But I still hated it. Hated> it.
I wrote my doctor a long thank-you note on my good, wedding stationery. I thanked him for his compassion and his kindness. I wrote that it must be hard, what he does, but that I hoped he found consolation in the fact that he was helping vulnerable women in their most vulnerable of times. He keeps my note, along with all the others he's received, in a large bundle. And he keeps that bundle right next to his stack of hate mail. They are about the same size.
The trio of lawsuits that has been filed points to the Supreme Court's decision three years ago that overturned a similar so-called partial-birth abortion ban in Nebraska. The court, in Stemberg v. Carhart, ruled in a narrow, 5-4 decision that the ban was unconstitutional on two grounds: the lack of an exception to protect a woman's health; and the fact that the ban would prohibit even the most commonly used and medically safe abortion procedures throughout the second trimester of pregnancy. Many legal scholars think that this federal ban will also be ruled unconstitutional on those same grounds.
Because of the lawsuits, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 cannot be enforced, though it could be years before the abortion debate winds its way through the system and heads back to the Supreme Court. By that time, the composition of the court could be entirely different. "We are looking for a permanent restraining order," says Petra Langer, the director of public relations and government affairs for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. "Who knows what the long-term situation will be? If George Bush is reelected, all bets are off, unfortunately."
But even the short-term situation is bleak. The doctor who performed my termination has stopped doing the procedure, worried that he might get caught up in a lawsuit. He is not a lawyer or a politician, and he doesn't know what this law means for him right now. "I may go to jail for two years," he tells me. "They can suspend my medical license. It would cost me a fortune to have a lawyer to defend me."
His fears are justified. "There are bunches of doctors out there who could be prosecuted today under this legislation," says Roger Evans, a lawyer for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The three injunctions cover only doctors who are affiliated with Planned Parenthood clinics, who are members of the National Abortion Federation, or who are one of the individual plaintiffs in the Nebraska suit. This leaves "scores of doctors who, if they perform an abortion that falls under the very broad definition of the banned procedure, could be prosecuted," he says.
The doctor who performed my termination talks about the women he has helped through the years -- the pregnant woman who was diagnosed with metastic melanoma and needed immediate chemotherapy, the woman who was carrying conjoined twins that had only one set of lungs and one heart, the woman whose baby had a three-chambered heart and would never live. Now, he is turning these women away. "Now, today, I can say no, but what is she going to do?" he says sadly. "What is she going to do?"
Way too nervous to sleep on that frigid morning this past November, I snuggled my bloated belly up to my husband and curled into a little question mark. Sixteen weeks pregnant, today we would finally have our full-fetal ultrasound, finding out whether our baby was developing normally. Given what happened the last time, I had every reason to be nervous.
The last four months had been a sort of emotional no man's land where the baby was concerned. While we were elated to be pregnant again, we were also terrified. It was hard to become fully attached to this pregnancy, knowing that it could be taken away from us. Instead of shopping for layettes, we were consulting genetic counselors. We now knew all too well that pregnancy was a hope, not a promise.
In the lobby at Beth Israel, I shoved my face into a tattered Redbook, waiting for Dave. As soon as he walked in, I started crying. "I'm so scared," I said. "I know, but everything is going to be OK," he answered, and gave me a hug.
Dave held my hand tightly as I lay down on the examining table. This time, the technician was chatty and jokey, while I was silent and concentrating. She pointed out the kidneys and the stomach, the two hemispheres of the brain, and the four chambers of the heart. I started to feel more optimistic. Everything looked fine, she said. She printed out pictures for us. She asked us if we wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl. She never left the room.
My doctor said the ultrasound was completely normal. Completely normal. They were the words I craved to hear, but at the same time seemed almost impossible to believe.
As the rest of our prenatal testing results started to pile up, all of them completely normal, we began to let hope back into our hearts. Of course, we know that anything can happen at any time. We'll never forget that. There will be many more months of worry -- and then, I guess, a lifetime more. At least for now, though, things look hopeful for our son. But I worry about my friends who are planning to have children now and in the near future, friends who are as naive as I once was. It's a different world these days. "Now, it's like the Stone Age, it's like a Muslim country here," says the doctor who performed my procedure. "This is the most backward law, it is not for a civilized country. If this was Iran, Iraq, I wouldn't be surprised. But to pass this law in the United States, what is this government doing?"
Gretchen Voss is a freelance writer.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 1967
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2004 - 8:05 pm: | |
When I was in college, my roommate was pre-med, from a family of doctors. His mother taught at a very well-known med school. These rare abnormalities, and worse, are common enough to be covered even by doctors who don't specialize in obstetrics. Back then, as it was explained to me, these things -- what do you call a mass of undifferentiated tissue with a few teeth and strands of hair in it? -- would go to term, and the doctor would quietly hand it over to the nurse and say, "get this thing out of here." The mother would learn, with great sadness, that the baby died during delivery.
And that's the way it was for thousands of years.
Now we have ultrasound and other tests, dad's in the delivery room, and thank God families don't have to suffer additional pain needlessly.
Or do they? Have we gotten to the point where women can now learn whether it's a boy, or a girl, or a horrible mistake of nature -- one with no chance for life let alone happiness -- and still have to bear it for another 20 weeks? It's like some kind of nightmare, and insane cruel joke.
There's good reason why there were no women up on the platform the day that bill was signed. I can't imagine they could have found one who could have lived with herself.
Ashcroft has serious problems. Imagine spending thousands of dollars on blue drapes to cover the bare breasts on a statue. What kind of perversion do you have to have in your soul to come up with an idea like that? |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 922
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Monday, February 16, 2004 - 10:36 am: | |
Monty -- you're way overboard. I've been specific to the point of being monotonous as to exactly what I've been talking about, and more to the point what I have NOT been talking about. I'm surprised, as usually when we go back and forth it's rather specific and reasoned. It's not good to drink before 3PM. Remember that next time.
All the hurt, the feelings, the whatever on this thread is reserved for those who are allowed to continue living. No such luck for that which is not.
Does that hurt? You have to be alive for that to be true. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 428
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Monday, February 16, 2004 - 2:02 pm: | |
There are two issues here.
First, there's the claim that all anti-choice people make: that they as a group have the right to interfere in an individual's life, on the premise that their general moral principles will be superior to the individual's moral judgement in a specific situation. This is ultimately about power and coercion, which is why you see anti-choice extremists resorting to terrorism and murder when their attempts to manipulate the law have failed. Most of us do not want such people to gain power over our lives.
Second, there's the issue of showing respect for someone's personal experience with a life-and-death decision in late pregnancy. As a man, I cannot describe the feelings directly, but I know from my partner's experience that there are some areas where the final decision must be made by the woman alone, and supported unconditionally by those who care for her.
These two issues are connected because most people who believe in reproductive choice implicity put the woman who is most affected in the position of moral authority. She may be helped and guided and advised but never coerced. Her experience is ultimately what drives the help and advice that will be offered to others.
People who get pleasure from imposing their will on others naturally tend towards the anti-choice position, and it's natural for them to belittle individuals whose experiences contradict the rules they have chosen as the outward - and more rationally argued - form of their bullying.
No grown man seriously sees a fetus as more important than a woman. It's always about something else, even among the well-meaning, and the hateful motivation of others is all too plain. |
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