Recently New York State celebrated adding new laws to its state constitution which supposedly help protect women and ensure their choice in matters of pregnancy. I believe the laws do the opposite and will both harm women and decrease choice.
Abortion activists often led by Planned Parenthood, have argued against any restrictions on abortion. After the fall out from Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia House of Horrors, made possible by lack of regulation, politicians in some states attempted to tighten laws regarding inspections, safety rules for the facilities, and qualifications for doctors performing abortions, all to ensure the safety of women in abortion clinics. Abortion activists blanketly labeled these ‘TRAP’ laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) and ascribed the motive of attempting to limit access rather than caring about safety. Texas was one state that attempted increased regulation with HB2. Following the Gosnell murder conviction, Houston late term abortionist Douglas Karpen was being investigated after being accused by former employees of twisting the necks, snipping the spinal cords, or stabbing the heads of babies born alive. (1) Texas officials feared a lack of regulation could lead to a second House of Horrors. Planned Parenthood fought HB2 all the way to the Supreme Court and abortion activists and naive Americans cheered when it was determined to be unconstitutional because it made abortions more difficult to obtain. TRAP laws would never ensure women’s safety in abortion clinics again. Access over safety. Getting an abortion was to be considered safer than all other medical procedures, getting a tattoo, or even eating pizza, at least as far as the inspections required for facilities performing these operations was concerned–none in some states including New York. (2) Evidence of the dangers to women at unregulated or poorly regulated abortion clinics is easily found at CheckMyClinic. org. (3) This Supreme Court ruling should not have been cheered by women, but mourned as an attack on women’s safety and a setback for women’s healthcare.
The new New York abortion law adds further danger to women by allowing non-physicians to perform abortions. This decision was not made by informed medical groups in the interest of women’s safety but by agenda-driven politicians inspired by profit driven abortion lobbyists to improve abortion access at the expense of safety. It’s hard to find doctors willing to do late term abortions because it is a grizzly procedure that tears apart or delivers whole a viable baby. Abortionists have never been fooled by the rhetoric they use to fool (or soothe?) their patients. It’s a baby they are killing, not tissue they are removing and not just a pregnancy they are terminating. They are responsible for counting the body parts removed and most physicians in good standing want no part of it. Many third trimester abortionists have previously lost their licenses due to malpractice or other criminal behavior and abortion clinics are a lucrative place to land. (4) These and others sometimes travel across states to spend a day here or there performing a series of late term abortions on women they meet first in stirrups never to see again as after care belongs to clinic staff or local hospitals when things go wrong. Abby Johnson, a Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life activist, whose story will fascinate you in the movie Unplanned premiering March 29, 2019, now runs an organization called And Then There Were None. They assist the many abortion workers who flee this horrifying business when they ‘just can’t’ anymore or when they finally realize, like Abby, what they are actually aborting. So the NY law addresses this by allowing a new army of abortionists unencumbered by the physician’s Hippocratic Oath, unable to make as much money as physicians can elsewhere, and unaffected by the horror of killing viable babies.
The new New York law also harms women and assists the abortion industry by decriminalizing the death of a fetus. This will protect practitioners who perform botched abortions and partners who pummel women to cause an abortion. It will prevent women with unwanted pregnancies from collecting damages due to negligence by abortionists and women with wanted pregnancies from collecting damages when their babies are killed in the womb. This hurts women. Nothing about it helps women. The combination of no regulation of abortion clinics or practitioners, the addition of non- physician abortionists, and the elimination of criminal penalties will lead to back-alley level of care as the abortion standard. Back-alley abortions were not done in the alleys themselves but in hidden clinics with no regulation by questionably trained abortionists. Like New York allows except they don’t have to be hidden because they are both legal and above the law.
The new New York law allows abortion until birth for both the life and health of the mother. Honestly this is not new. Abortion clinics have been considering any reason a woman gives as good enough for years and nobody checks this. It would fall under doctor patient confidentiality if anybody else asked and the women are mortified by their decision if they wind up regretting it and would never take legal action to question the need for the abortion they chose. But perhaps one day a class action suit might be brought by a group of brave women arguing that they were never appropriately consented for the procedure because nobody ever told them that it was a baby being aborted, or that there were organizations to support them medically, emotionally, and financially if they chose not to abort, or that they they might have devastating physical or mental health consequences from their abortions. So New York added protection for abortionists because ‘health’ is a very broad term which covers physical, mental, emotional, and even financial health. Now the abortionist is always safer than the women from consequences.
Many people support abortion during early pregnancy, but up until now very few supported it throughout pregnancy. Now it has become a politicized issue, part of the Democratic platform. The millions of dollars of our taxpayer money that Planned Parenthood used to help elect each Democrat have come home to roost. Planned Parenthood keeps a political scorecard and politicians lose points for supporting any abortion restrictions-even a law to prevent sex-selective abortion. Every law is labeled a TRAP law, no protections are ever justified for the protection of women, because the opposition might be pushing for limits on access. Politicians have no choice but to support even the most extreme laws without question.
It should be clear now how the new New York abortion laws hurt women from a safety standpoint. But do they increase a woman’s right to choose? I have already argued that previous laws allowed women to get abortions through birth for any reason. If you are naive enough to think a discussion with the abortionist would include any words that might discourage a woman from abortion think again. Abortion clinic workers from the front desk to the procedure room are trained to help women to make a difficult decision easier. If a woman feels she has no choice but abortion, the supportive abortionist assures her she is right. Laws that require no parental consent for teenagers and no waiting period encourage a woman to make a vulnerable decision based on the input of just a ‘never say no’ abortionist.
Many women feel pressured to get an abortion by somebody else or by their fear of somebody else. Some are even bullied into abortion. This is because unplanned pregnancies can be very inconvenient for traffickers and pimps, sexual abusers, not ready to commit boyfriends, financially burdened partners, employers, and Me Too rapists, among others. If a woman actually might want to keep the baby, she used to have the choice to hide the pregnancy for a few months then declare that it was too late for an abortion. That choice is now gone in New York.
Women are also sometimes coerced by others prejudiced against the baby’s possible disability, its sex, or even its race. Physicians might pressure women to be tested for chromosomal abnormalities and paint a bleak picture for the child and the whole family should she make the ‘wrong’ choice and not abort. The ratios of boy babies to girls in certain communities suggest that sex selection abortion has come to the United States. (5) The decision, typically to abort a girl, is often made by the father or their patriarchal culture. Racial discrimination in abortion is even more evident in the United States with black women 3.5 times more likely to have an abortion in 2015 than white women according to the CDC. Equally tragic is the statistic that for every 1000 black babies born in New York City, 1039 are aborted. (6) Some might argue poverty is the main reason for this but Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger believed in eugenics, spoke at a KKK meeting, and was invited back. (7)
A nurse in an inner city adolescent clinic with predominantly African American patients asked me how a pro-life physician could justify caring for those patients if she did not like the ‘choice’ of abortion. I turned the question around on her and she admitted that she did not offer adoption as an option for her patients because their ‘culture’ did not ‘believe in adoption.’ I told her many of the teenagers had told me that their mothers would help them raise the babies which they were eager to have. The nurse said the girls were just eager to get the welfare benefits that being pregnant granted them and that they would never graduate or work and would receive welfare for their whole lives. I asked her if she thought any of the teens should choose not to abort and she said “No.’ Once in the door of a clinic where abortions are done, it is questionable how much choice the patient has or feels she has.
In Florida, crisis pregnancy clinics have shown that offering real choices to women results in as many as 90% of abortion vulnerable women choosing to have their babies. (8) (Planned Parenthood consistently refers less than 1% of its pregnant women for adoption.) At these Florida crisis pregnancy clinics women who had positive pregnancy tests were counseled about parenting and adoption options and about abortion as well. In addition to pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, the clinics offered material help, education, and qualified referral services for housing, drug treatment, and other needs. The abortion rate in their community fell as a result. Planned Parenthood has performed roughly the same number of abortions annually for a decade despite the introduction of, followed by the over the counter availability of, Plan B during that time. The slogan for abortion activists and their political allies evolved from ‘Safe, Legal, and Rare’ to ‘Safe and Legal’ to ‘Legal.’ Abortions are now legal in New York through birth. They are nowhere near rare, representing the outcome of one third of pregnancies in the state. Now because of the new law they will be even less safe, while placing more women at risk for coercion to abort. Whose choice was that?
2. new-york-abortion-clinics-inspected-less-than-pizzerias
4. Link for stories of a handful of criminal abortionists: notorious
5. sex-selection-abortion-the-real-war-on-women
6. more-black-babies-in-new-york-city-are-killed-in-abortions-than-born-alive
7. “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)
8. what-these-florida-crisis-pregnancy-clinics-rejoiced-when-their-number-of-s
lifelines 