Nobody wants an abortion. Nobody gets a kick out of someone scraping around and vacuuming her insides. I have never known a woman who made the choice to have an abortion easily. I have never known a woman who was not thoroughly devastated by the decision to end a pregnancy. Every woman I know who has ever made this decision has made it because she did not have the means to support the child. Outlawing abortion again will not bring more potential children into the world, but many, many more women will die.
I asked why, if nobody wants an abortion, it's considered "helping" when you facilitate one. Wouldn't it make more sense to help her avoid the abortion?
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The beginning of the end of reproductive rights?
“South Dakota's state Senate plans to vote Wednesday on a controversial bill to ban abortion in nearly all cases -- except to protect the life of the mother.”
How many impoverished women will have to carry pregnancies to term because they can't afford travel to a state where they can have an abortion? How many improverished women will have to resort to life-threatening coat hanger abortions?
South Dakota abortion rates by county
South Dakota abortion totals
Most South Dakota counties have fewer than ten abortions per year. The abortion rate is low. The only counties where more than 8% of pregnant women seek abortions are in counties near the state border. I'd bet that women living in the rural areas of South Dakota are used to driving a long way for anything. So all this hand-wringing is about a situation that, frankly, it seems that South Dakota women are pretty much happy with. They're not like New York women, who in some counties abort half their pregnancies.
So, just in terms of pure numbers, we're not looking at a public health disaster.
Of course, this doesn't address the issue about whether having legal abortion readily available is really doing women any favors in the first place.
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Go Blue wants to lower the bar even further:
On one hand, I think that it should be the right of the individual whose life this decision ultimately affects to decide whether or not to bring a child into this world. On the other hand, I do not feel that it is fair to allow a woman to have the decision on whether or not she wants to have the child. I say this because if a woman has the right to decide to keep her child or to abort the pregnancy, then the male counterpart should have the decision to completely walk away from the situation without penalty. It is not fair to force the male to pay child support, which is a life altering situation, without having the option to walk away from that situation, but allow a woman to make the decision.
Not that he or she is the first one to advocate letting men bail on their kids. Hey, if women are allowed to kill them, letting the man simply walk out is a small concession, right?
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Jen doesn't seem to understand that once you've got most of the baby out you might as well deliver him live. Hello? We put the cranioclast away with the advent of antibiotics. Crushing the baby's skull used to be relegated to the obstetric house of horrors. Now suddenly it's necessary again. Go figure. And the prolifers are supposedly the ones who want to "turn back the clock."
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