Last week, a state Legislative committee began discussing a new bill intended to outlaw coerced abortions in Wisconsin. AB 427 — the Coercive Abortion Prevention Act — would obligate physicians and nurses to investigate whether patients are pressured to abort a pregnancy and inform them about services for victims of domestic abuse. Committee members — most notably state Rep. Mark Gundrum and Sen. Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin, — claimed the proposal is crucial for ensuring consent is "voluntary" and that women are not threatened and pushed into a procedure they may later regret.
Yeah, right.
You would have to be a fool to think the "righties" of Wisconsin care about protecting women and their abortion rights. In May, the anti-choice tandem of Gundrum and Lazich voted against a legislative proposal requiring that state emergency rooms provide rape victims access to emergency contraception. In fact, most sponsors of AB 427 have done everything in their power to take away women's rights — not strengthen or maintain them. Look beyond the ambiguous rhetoric of the coercive abortion bill, and it serves as nothing more than another attempt to restrain the freedom to choose.
To highlight the need for AB 427, Mr. Lazich cited a report from the non-profit Elliot Institute stating that 64 percent of abortion patients admit they feel "pressured" to undergo the procedure. Let us overlook the fact that the Elliot Institute is a pawn in the anti-abortion campaign — a bias palpable on its website, which preaches to "educate the pro-life movement"– and assume these figures are credible. There is still a significant difference between being coerced and being pressured. Coercion mainly involves violence or the threat of violence to compel someone to do something. Being pressured, however, is a much broader concept and in the case of abortive decisions, extends well beyond abusive boyfriends and husbands.
In this scope, AB 427 is far too narrow. Even Wisconsin Right to Life acknowledges in its analysis of the bill that "pregnant women are intimidated into having an abortion through financial, relational and emotional threats." Yet, if passed, the new law would only protect against physical harm or the threat of it, overlooking an array of other influential elements. What about a man threatening to alter a living or financial situation to pressure his wife or girlfriend to abort? What about the pressures rooted in the discontents of our current social system, which fails to provide potential mothers with the necessary resources to provide for children, including employment, child care, housing and health care? All of these factors compel a woman to terminate a pregnancy — yet AB 427 does nothing to address them.
On the other hand, coercive abortion is just one indicator of something far more menacing: household violence. Women should not need to wait until they enter an abortion clinic to receive information and assistance for victims of domestic abuse, and it should not be the sole responsibility of physicians to determine whether a patient is in an abusive relationship and requires assistance. If a man is inflicting physical harm on his girlfriend to force her to have an abortion, there is a much larger problem at work. The focus should be on the abuse itself, not abuse solely as it relates to a reproductive decision.
These realities — and the fact that Wisconsin's Women's Right to Know Law of 1996 already requires that an abortion may not be performed without voluntary and informed consent — expose the "Coercive Abortion Prevention Act" for what it really is: a limited, unnecessary, politically charged proposal distracting the legislature from more pressing issues, such as the rotting state health care system and the delayed budget fiasco.
A woman's decision should be her own. But in order for that to be the case, she must be protected from intimidation on both sides. If legislators are so concerned about ensuring that women's reproductive decisions are free of coercion, why not make it a crime to coerce a woman to not have an abortion? Why not protect women from the menacing, and sometimes violent, protestors who scream in their faces as they approach the abortion clinic: the "pro-life" demagogues who shove pictures of dead, mangled fetuses at them in the street and the looming anti-abortion billboards that accuse them of being savage murderers?
Of course, such action would be extremely detrimental to the right's "pro-life" movement, threatening rabid anti-choice legislators like Mr. Gundrum and Ms. Lazich, who ironically continue their own campaign to coerce women by using coercion's highest form: the law.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and African studies.
