Terrifyingly anti-woman law passed in Oklahoma

[SethStarkaddersMum]

I am absolutely at this.

A law has been passed in Oklahoma to force women who want abortion to undergo vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus and view the ultrasound image before terminating a pregnancy.
Even if they are rape or incest victims.

words absolutely fail me.

I have had an abortion (in 1996) and I was given a scan, not an internal one. I didn't find it very upsetting because I had already made up my mind very firmly about having the abortion. I wasn't remotely interested in looking at the screen. I think it would be a very unprofessional and horrible person who would force a woman to look at a screen when she didn't want to.

My pregnancy came about because of the failure of a condom and then the morning after pill.

I still have absolutely no regrets about my abortion despite the fact that I spent a long time trying to get pregnant in recent years including a miscarriage and finally getting pregnant through IVF.

I think this law is awful.

Spidermama,
" We are encouraged to think of them as routine procedures with NO moral comeback. Our society paints this as the easy option. The message sent out by our society to young people who accidentally get pregnant is that they should abort. "

Yes, I think that we are getting it partly wrong. But as I mentioned in the Japan example, there are humane, women-friendly ways to approach the abortion issue. Not this barbarism like in the Oklahoma example.

FIrst of all, I think Britain has done well in that we provide a single mother with a house and means to raise her child. She won't be rich, but she won't be destitute. This is the first step in cutting down the abortion rate. I'm really proud of the UK for doing this. The abortion rate in other countries that don't provide for single mothers are much higher.

The other one is the shame attatched to being a single mother. Again, in the UK I think there's no problem with this anymore. I guess in Oklahoma this isn't the case

A big problem is (and I feel I'm going to be arguing this until I die) that motherhood and child-rearing is not respected at all by society and at some point this has to change if we are to move forward.
It is not given the prestige and respect it rightly deserves. So if a young woman sees a housewife with no money and no life, or a working mother with the second shift at home, frantically trying to catch up with it all, then looks at "Sex and the city" and all the lovely products that are agressively marketed to her, then she may decide to have an abortion. Most industries are not female-friendly so a woman may have an abortion so she can continue with her career. I hope society reaches a point where she doesn't have to do this.

thats a very good point beach

I have to say tho that I dont agree with people that treat abortion like a form of contracetion, and I also agree the cut off for "accidents" (as opposed to medical issues) should be way earlier than 24 weeks

Surely if you get knocked up, you can get it sorted before 12 weeks????

TheButterflyeffect,
God that sounds awful.
Just..

Beachcomber I absolutely agree with you. For too long this has been a 'womens problem'. Absolute crap. Men who have to pay for the mothers of their children to raise them (or face jail, not fines) would soon think about putting on a condom. It has been too easy for too long for men to walk away from this stuff and it has to change. So many children who are aborted are in my opinion victims of this attitude that women have to deal with it alone.

OK, re separate entities, do I smell a little inconsistency here from the pro-lifers or have I got muddled up?

I said:
'Leonie, how would you feel about forcing people to donate kidneys or bone marrow in order to save lives?
I ask because there is no situation other than pregnancy where a person can be forced to undergo medical treatment on behalf of another person.
Why is pregnancy different?'

Leonie said 'because it involves two entirely separate lives at the same time, probably?'

I thought Leonie meant that my bone marrow/kidney example involved separate lives but isn't the pro-life argument we're getting now that the foetus is in fact a person with an entirely separate life, not just part of the mother? I know Leonie is going on school run soon but can anyone else explain? am I being thick?

Butterfy - what a godawful thing to happen.

wow butterflyeffect -- what a great (sad), articulate, moving post.

It's not a baby or a human. It's a foetus. It's still a foetus until about 3 months after it comes out of the womb. And I have a nine month old.

Whining about cells while millions of actual children die of preventable diseases every year is just sick fundamentalist crap. Imho.

toddlerama, so true

Butterfly

porcamiseria - very good point.earlier is better - fetus less developed , would be less traumatic.

coolfonz - ive never heard of a 3 month old being called a foetus ...

But surely if abortion is illegal and women are forced to carry pregnancies to term then we become nothing more than incubators? Doesn't this terrify you?
It's the slippery slope to the Handmaid's Tale. Abortion must be legal and available (and should go hand in hand with proper sex education and free contraception) because otherwise I have no rights over my own body, I become a second class citizen, subhuman. No man can be put in the situation of being forced to carry a baby to term and give birth to it. If I walked to the shops today and was dragged into a back alley and raped and abortion was illegal then I become nothing more than an incubator if I am unable to choose whether to continue with the pregnancy or not. THAT is where laws like this are heading, criminalising abortion, making it impossible for women to obtain, shaming women, humiliating women.
Doesn't it terrify you, shake you to your very core?

BUtterfly, that is dreadful, really really , and a very good point indeed.

Women should choose what happens to their bodies, end of. Cells are cells.

No, theButterly, they are saying (I think) that there are no exceptions for rape victims.

good post pipoca !. its all about having choice. the choice should be there and it shouldnt be taken away because ,choice equals freedom.

Butterly - nobody can explain it because it would NOT work in practice, as you so eloquently put it.

To be honest if we lived ib the kind of right wing society where abortion was banned except for rape, the rules of proving rape would be so stringent that nobody would ever be able to use that exception. It would be 'oh you led him on, it wasn't rape, you will have to have the baby'. All decided and sanctioned by the state.

yes, it is very bloody chilling.

Seth, I can't speak for Leonie, but my take on that would be that pregnancy is a natural conclusion to conception, so a foetus doesn't require a 'donor' per se, just someone not to intervene and end their life. It's all about the mindset you approach the problem with I suspect!

Having said that, if I required a kidney and knew it would make my child extremely ill to donate it to me, I wouldn't take it. My rights would never trump hers, as my right to control my womb could not trump hers to live. That is obviously an emotional argument that comes from my relationship with my daughter. But, it is an inequal comparison to abortion. To make it equal, I would be ill for 9 months only and she would definitely die.

IN the city I live in they have something called Akachan-post. IT's a kind of post-box run by the city council where unwanted babies can be posted. They began this after a spate of hundreds of babies being abandoned everywhere around the year 2000. They were left in coin-lockers, just everywhere, and they all died.
I don'T know why, because abortion is available here. Maybe it's because you have to pay and because there is a shame of asking parents for the money.

"Women should choose what happens to their bodies, end of. Cells are cells"

I am 23 weeks PG. If I wanted to, I got legally get an abortion (if I got my skates on). Its not "cells", its a small moving human being.

I am very PRO choice, but I think the Jersey laws are better than ours.

I am not quite sure how we handle the rape issue, but I do agree that it should be relaxed in this scenario, for sure.

I am very sorry for what happened to you Butterfly.
But at the same time I do feel very upset about late abortions when its down to carelessness and I cannot say otherwise