Banning all abortion...

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 2:22 PM on February 22, 2006.

This post is from Amie Newman, Communications Manager for Aradia Women’s Health Center in Seattle, Washington.

You probably remember the photo [left] of the smiling white male legislators standing on a platform in front of the American flag surrounding a smug President Bush as he blithely signed away the reproductive rights of women in this country. It was the signing of the Federal Abortion Ban in 2003, fabricated by forced-birth strategists as the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban."

Back then I thought that photo was a public relations disaster. At the very least Bush should have thrown a woman in there for show to at least pretend that he and his administration cared one iota for the lives of our female citizens. Ahhh, but, it was exactly the way it should be: President Bush and his cronies didn't care -- they felt secure in the moral certainty of their actions and wanted us all to know it.

The abortion ban that President Bush signed into law in 2003 was crafted by forced-birth activists and sponsored by forced-birth legislators to draw attention to a procedure of their own creation. Now, there is no such thing as a "partial-birth abortion"; It's neither a medical term nor a medical procedure. It's also linguistically senseless since a woman is either giving birth OR having an abortion. What the forced-birthers were using as their springboard to attempt to ban all abortions after 13 weeks was a procedure called Dilation & Extraction (D&X).

Over the past couple of weeks the ban has reared its ugly head once again. I cannot take it as coincidence that just as Justice Alito reported for his first day of work on Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to review Gonzales v. Carhart, the case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck down the Federal Abortion Ban of 2003.

The appellate court held that the act was unconstitutional under the Supreme Court's ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), in which the Court struck down a Nebraska statute similar to the federal law, holding that it was unconstitutional because it did not contain a health exception for women. In other words, the law did not allow for a woman and her physician to make a decision about the woman's life if it was in danger, mandating instead that her body be legislated by the highest court of the land.

In addition, the law is worded in such a way that it would allow for bans on all abortions after the first trimester with no exceptions. According to the National Abortion Federation which brought a case to the Supreme Court in 2003 attempting to appeal the law:

"What many people do not realize is that the ban does not allow women to have an abortion after the first trimester. Unfortunately many birth defects cannot be detected until well into the second trimester, and often times women choose to have an abortion after their 18-20 week ultrasound, if a birth defect is found."

...that if disgustingness was going to be the criterion for banning abortions, it made no sense to single out this one procedure.

Dilation & Extraction (D&X) is a medical procedure (that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, is performed an estimated 2500-3000 times annually) performed by physicians with a pregnant woman's consent based on consultation and discussions with the woman and her family. When a physician performs a d&x on a woman it is because together they have made the decision that this is the safest, most appropriate procedure for her and her family at that time.

In an attempt to reframe the discussion and avoid repeating the false term "partial-birth abortion," pro-choicers have latched onto the phrase "late-term abortion" to better describe the actual procedure being discussed. The problem with using the term "late-term abortion" is that what the forced-birth strategists are talking about is not a late-term abortion which is vague and difficult to define. Is it an abortion performed after the first trimester? After the second? Only in the third?

It's also worth noting that what the forced-birthers have constructed with this legislation and debate is a non-existent concept -- there is no such thing as a partial-birth abortion. I hesitate to even use the term because it clarifies nothing and isn't factually correct.

In terms of framing the debate we need to come up with something that addresses the fact that there is NO such thing as partial-birth abortion rather than just reframing it. Let's call out this Federal Abortion Ban for what it is: an attempt to outlaw all abortions.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.