Opinion
Women should have right to choose
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Also by Rob Deters:
- SUVs and Earth Day do not mix (April 24, 2003)
- Reflections on 'real world' (April 27, 2005)
- Lessons gathered while in Madison (May 5, 2005)
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Ugh. Two guys arguing about partial-birth abortion. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, until the day I grow a uterus, I don’t have a damn thing to say about it. Yet, as a liberal, I absolutely have an opinion whenever conservatives go about limiting a woman’s right to choose.
Let’s be clear. Abortion is not murder. If it were, the Supreme Court would not uphold it as constitutional. If it were, the American Medical Association, whose opinion on health and ethics I hold in high esteem, wouldn’t support abortion as a viable medical procedure. Abortion is murder only if you choose to define it as such, but there is no such definition that you can make every rational person believe.
Partial-birth abortion, or, more accurately, intact dilation and extraction, is a technique by which a non-viable fetus is removed from a woman’s uterus. The skull of the fetus is collapsed via a cervical incision and suction rather than crushed with forceps.
The other technique used at this stage in a woman’s pregnancy is dilation and evacuation, which calls for the dismemberment of the body of the fetus with forceps and its removal from the uterus.
No law to ban “partial-birth abortions” prohibits this second procedure, just the first.
All abortions are performed with the end result being the destruction of a fetus; it’s simply the method that we’re discussing. You can scrape, suck, crush or surgically remove fetal tissue from a woman all for the same purpose — to terminate a pregnancy.
Why does this technique even exist? Dilation and extraction is simply an option for a doctor to use when a woman is at a very specific point in her pregnancy. At 16 weeks into a pregnancy, a fetal skull is too large to pass through a non-dilated cervix. At 17 weeks, the bones in a fetus begin to calcify, leading to a higher probability of injury to a woman’s uterus because of bony fragments.
These two techniques are options for a doctor to choose from in order to perform the abortion in the safest way possible. At 24 weeks (the end of the second trimester) abortions are outlawed as a voluntary procedure and are only performed if there is a medical emergency.
The argument over dilation and extraction is all about politics, not about a woman’s health. There are no studies that show dilation and extraction is a more dangerous procedure or that it leads to problems getting pregnant in the future. In fact, many doctors feel the procedure has many benefits, including fewer instruments used in the uterus, less chance of infection and shorter operating time.
Squeamish yet? Of course you are. That’s exactly how conservatives want you to feel. They want to use the natural reaction we have to this medical procedure (feeling uncomfortable) to make an argument that just doesn’t hold. In fact, it doesn’t hold in courts of law very much at all.
Previous attempts to limit dilation and extraction have all been struck down. Two years ago, the Supreme Court in Stenberg vs. Carhart ruled that Nebraska’s ban on dilation and extraction was unconstitutional. It cited two reasons: there was no exception for the woman’s health, and the ban placed an “undue burden” on the woman’s right to choose. Although it was a close call (a 5-4 vote), it still didn’t pass muster.
The current law being discussed in conference committee at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., is little different.
Many opponents of the “partial-birth abortion” ban that just passed both the House and the Senate (it’s simply being revised) say it will take just a matter of time until the Supreme Court strikes it down just like it did Nebraska’s law. This is probably true, but the narrow margin of the previous decision doesn’t make this an absolute.
What is really going on here is far more pernicious. “Partial-birth abortion” is a scare campaign. It’s a way for conservatives to pounce on a tiny fact, blow it up out of proportion and make political hay.
If dilation and extraction is so terrible and we have to limit it by law, it must be rampant, right? Wrong. In 1996, the last year for which statistics are available, there were 1.4 million abortions performed in this country. Of them, only 650 were “partial-birth abortions.”
Conservatives believe that a government that governs the least governs the best. For conservatives, when it comes to morality, a government that is the most intrusive is the ideal.
Currently, many of this nation’s conservatives are demanding abstinence-only sex education, taking stands against the decriminalization of drugs and legislating that marriage be defined by law as between a man and a woman. This is fundamentalism at its most obvious. Conservatives — Republicans or not — demand your lifestyle, your choices and your options be limited to those with which they themselves feel comfortable.
A woman’s right to choose is based on a simple premise: A fetus is not a person until it can live outside the womb. Until that point, it is up to the woman, for health, personal, economic or social reasons, to either carry to term or terminate that pregnancy. There is no “child” and there is no “person” — there is a thing.
Rob Deters (rvdeters@wisc.edu) is a second-year law student.
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