Kim’s Domain

The following is a post I started over a week ago in response to an article in the New York Times titled “Abortion Foes See Validation for New Tactic” and never completed until now. Unfortunately, the original article is only available now in the archives.

I find the following article in today’s New York Times very disturbing, and yet another step toward dismantling Roe v. Wade:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22abortion.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1179846299-V+IhgSNVLlgR0×3cTXh3hQ

Let’s put aside the argument that Roe v. Wade is a bad law and we should do a public opinion vote which would undoubtedly keep some forms of abortion legal. What I find so disturbing about this article is that it describes a movement to portray women as victims of abortion, with the State as an entity with their best interests at heart - one more step toward completely illegalizing the procedure.

Apparently, a couple thousand women have come forward saying they feel depressed and a loss of self-esteem after having an abortion. I feel for these women. I think abortion is an awful, traumatic thing. What gets my cheese is that still the Right is so focused on abortion instead of focused on education and prevention (and we all know I am NOT talking about only abstinence). Their solution? To pass legislation called “informed consent” laws requiring that women be told that their fetus is a whole, separate living being. How is this comforting to a woman facing a really difficult decision? I can’t imagine any woman gets an abortion without a little personal grief. But hello, sometimes it’s just not feasible for a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and that should be a decision between her and her doctor.

I’m not saying I don’t think women should be told the full possible consequences of their decision. I think they should know the possibility of depression after the fact. My feeling is that these side effects, if you will, should be told to a woman by her doctor while she is making the decision, not forced upon her by the clinic she is turning to for help. The ruling by the Supreme Court is a scary step toward legalizing scare tactics. Sure, we’re not talking about fire-bombing clinics and harassing women as they walk into clinics, but to me it’s even scarier to think that a woman who walks into a clinic to get an abortion could be faced with pictures and charts and graphs of the fetus in her womb and make her feel like a murderer.