It's 2012; Why Is This OK?

When I first started thinking about writing this blog, I decided that my first post was going to be about the woman's health issues that have been making the news recently.  Contraception and birth control being covered by insurance, personhood being redefined, the fact that EIGHT men and TWO women were used as witnesses in a women's health debate, whether or not  aspirin is a valid contraceptive, the list was virtually endless.  Yet, one topic of this whole universe of recent news brought itself to the forefront recently.

Last week, the Virginia state Legislature passed a bill titled "Abortion; informed consent."  This bill states that "...as a component of informed consent to an abortion, to determine gestation age, every pregnant female shall undergo ultrasound imaging and be given an opportunity to view the ultrasound image of her fetus prior to the abortion."

Let's just pause right there.


Can anyone please enlighten me: why is this necessary?  The backers of the bill, specifically the Governor, Bob McDonnell, would like to believe that they are just giving more information, and, hey, who wouldn't want that?

But that's the problem: if a woman wants more information before her abortion, she should be allowed to have it.  But who is to tell her that she needs it?  Governor McDonnell?  ANY Legislator in Virginia?  No.  None of them.

But the deeper, more sinister goal of this bill is--and I believe this firmly--to put a woman through even more hell about the procedure she has decided to undergo.  No one is uninformed as to what an abortion is; and I've yet to meet a woman who would make such a decision lightly.  Tracy Weitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, published a study to that effect, reporting that "[w]omen do not have abortions because the believe the fetus is not a human or because they don't know the truth."

But I have a very hard time imagining that seeing an ultrasound of the fetus that a woman is currently carrying does not place undo emotional strain upon a person who is already probably making a decision that will forever change her life.  It's cruel, and it's unnecessary.

That being said, most abortions occur before 12 weeks.  That means that the only way to have the required ultrasound would be an "invasive transvaginal probe."

I am a man (or, at least, a guy).  I have no idea what this procedure would feel like, but I have no delusions that it would be a pleasant ordeal, especially under these circumstances.  The article where I've gotten a lot of my information for this post is subtitled "Under the new legislation, women who want an abortion will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason.  Where's the outrage?"

"Forcibly penetrated for no medical reason."

It's 2012.  This is not OK.  It is no longer OK to make women feel like second-class citizens about the decision of their own health.  It is no longer OK to think that the government has any place to tell a woman what to do with her body.  And it is certainly not OK that any type of legislation would demand an "invasive transvaginal probe" that yields no medical information before a woman makes quite possibly the biggest decision of her life.

Really, it never has been.