This week four representatives in the North Carolina House introduced legislation to further restrict access to abortion services. I read the text of the bill sitting at my desk and fought back tears. This evening, on the comfort of my porch, I wept. I wept for the women who will die if this bill passes, for the women whose already painfully difficult decisions will be made worse by a group of men who cannot begin to fathom what it feels like to be the person responsible for the monumental and life-altering decision of whether or not to bring new life into this world. I remembered having to make that decision and I wept for my fourteen year old self.
Changes proposed by the bill include:
- Increasing the mandatory waiting period from 24 hours to 72 hours
- Requiring procedures to be performed by a certified OB/GYN and prohibiting other physicians from performing them
- Prohibiting NC Universities from teaching physicians how to safely perform abortions.
- Prohibiting two of the best hospitals in the southeast from performing abortions at all
- Requiring physicians to report data, including in some cases an ultrasound image, to the NC Department of Health for every abortion performed
These restrictions, while pushed in the name of increasing the safety of women seeking the procedures, actually have the opposite effect. Limiting the number of facilities and physicians who can perform abortion or medically induced miscarriage only serves to limit women's access to medically safe abortion services and increases the likelihood that these women will seek out unsafe abortions or attempt them on their own, endangering their own lives and future fertility. Making abortions harder to obtain does not make them safer.
I noticed as I read through the bill today that the "counseling" requirements remain unchanged. I hadn't had cause to read those counseling requirements until today. I was struck by the fact that they include a provision that the physician must tell the woman that "medical assistance benefits may be available for prenatal care, childbirth and neonatal care" and that "public assistance programs...may or may not be available as benefits under the federal and state assistance programs," and that "the father is liable to assist in the support of the child." All of these required statements seem to be intended to relieve the woman of the notion that she will ultimately be financially responsible for the rearing of her child and to impress upon her the fact that government resources will be made available to her if she only chooses to give her child life and that the child's father will be made to provide for it. Horsefeathers. The intent of these proscribed statements is simply to make a woman question whether her reasons for seeking an abortion are meritorious. They do not seek to improve the health or well-being of the mother or the fetus, nor do they serve to provide for the long-term well-being of either of them. They serve only to guilt her into changing her mind.
Last year the North Carolina General Assembly voted to lower the income guidelines for the state's medicaid program which provides "prenatal, childbirth and neonatal care." Currently, in order to qualify for medical assistance, a single pregnant woman must earn less than $23,000 per year, $2,000 per month. A woman earning $25,000 per year would not qualify for Medicaid services and the cost of her prenatal care and delivery is likely to exceed her entire annual salary. It is the height of hypocrisy for the legislature to impose upon a doctor a mandated script intended to pressure a woman into deciding to keep her child while at the same time voting to restrict the resources that provide for that care. The same rule applies to the legislature's willingness to provide for the child you are encouraging her to bring into the world. How dare you claim that a woman is entitled to federal benefits as a means of inducing her to give birth to a child she may not be able to afford to care for while at the same time denying federal dollars to expand medicaid, cutting funding for child care services and failing to invest in affordable housing initiatives. And, until you are ready to take steps to improve a child support enforcement system that everyone knows is broken, don't tell a woman that the child's father is going to be made to contribute to the cost of care.
Our legislators, in their exceeding wisdom, also introduced this week a bill to limit sex education in the state to strictly abstinence only. The bill would prohibit the education of teenage boys and girls about the efficacy of all forms of birth control, including Plan B and IUDs, two extremely effective and safe methods of preventing pregnancy which have been deemed abortifacents by those on the religious right who seek only to motivate their base for political gain and care very little about the health or wellbeing of women and girls.
There seems to be a movement on the right to force impoverished women to have children they don't want so that they can then hold those same women up as examples of the greedy culture of poverty that wants to live off of the state so that they can vote in further cuts to social programs. I simply cannot understand the thought process that leads one to believe that you should restrict access to birth control and make it harder to afford, limit access to abortions, and then chastise women who seek federal or state financial assistance to raise children they didn't want to have in the first place. On what planet does this train of thought make sense?
You don't have to like abortions. You can believe with all of your might that the person seeking an abortion or performing it is going to burn in hell for all eternity. That is your right. But you do not have the right to prevent a woman from deciding that abortion is the best option available to her. You don't have the right to tell a rape victim that she must bear and rear the child of her rapist. You don't have the right to tell a fourteen year old girl that she must carry a child to term. You don't have the right to tell a woman who has been told her child stands a 99% chance of being born brain-dead that she must bring that child, doomed to a terribly short life filled with suffering, into the world against her own best judgment. You don't have the right to tell any woman that she must become a mother even if her child was conceived in a loving relationship and both parents can afford to provide care. You do not have the right to tell a woman to become a parent. You simply do not have the right.
The hardest thing for me in reading the proposed legislation is the realization that the authors have such an inability to feel compassion or empathy for the women whose lives will be affected. These are real women undergoing serious emotion duress, struggling with a complex decision that you members of our society who possess penises instead of wombs cannot possibly begin to fathom.
If you believe that there is no circumstance which justifies a woman seeking an abortion, that's fine. You are entitled to your belief. But put your powers to use in the service of good, of God. Offer your time and money and energy in counsel and service to young mothers who need it. Find compassion. Buy groceries. Pay for a car repair. Fund child care programs. Don't use those same resources making women less safe.
I grieve for you, my sisters, who will suffer the burden of compensating for these foolhardy legislative actions, and I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure that you have access to safe, affordable abortion services, even if that means I have to drive across the state myself to pick you up, feed and house you. I sure hope it doesn't come to that.
The text of the full bill can be found here. If you are passionate about this issue, I urge you to call or e-mail your legislator. You can find their contact information here.
You don't have to like abortions. You can believe with all of your might that the person seeking an abortion or performing it is going to burn in hell for all eternity. That is your right. But you do not have the right to prevent a woman from deciding that abortion is the best option available to her. You don't have the right to tell a rape victim that she must bear and rear the child of her rapist. You don't have the right to tell a fourteen year old girl that she must carry a child to term. You don't have the right to tell a woman who has been told her child stands a 99% chance of being born brain-dead that she must bring that child, doomed to a terribly short life filled with suffering, into the world against her own best judgment. You don't have the right to tell any woman that she must become a mother even if her child was conceived in a loving relationship and both parents can afford to provide care. You do not have the right to tell a woman to become a parent. You simply do not have the right.
The hardest thing for me in reading the proposed legislation is the realization that the authors have such an inability to feel compassion or empathy for the women whose lives will be affected. These are real women undergoing serious emotion duress, struggling with a complex decision that you members of our society who possess penises instead of wombs cannot possibly begin to fathom.
If you believe that there is no circumstance which justifies a woman seeking an abortion, that's fine. You are entitled to your belief. But put your powers to use in the service of good, of God. Offer your time and money and energy in counsel and service to young mothers who need it. Find compassion. Buy groceries. Pay for a car repair. Fund child care programs. Don't use those same resources making women less safe.
I grieve for you, my sisters, who will suffer the burden of compensating for these foolhardy legislative actions, and I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure that you have access to safe, affordable abortion services, even if that means I have to drive across the state myself to pick you up, feed and house you. I sure hope it doesn't come to that.
The text of the full bill can be found here. If you are passionate about this issue, I urge you to call or e-mail your legislator. You can find their contact information here.
