Aborting Women’s Rights

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted October 28, 2003.

A woman’s right to choose was dealt a major blow on Oct. 21 with the Senate’s vote to ban a form of abortion commonly referred to as “partial-birth abortion.” The overwhelming (64-34) passage of the bill by the Senate was the first federal ban on a form of abortion passed in 30 years, and President Bush has already promised to sign the bill into law.

While abortions of this type are relatively rare, making up only about 2,200 of 1.3 million abortions performed in 2000, the legislation has much farther reaching implications.

Any ruling on the highly charged topic of abortion rights has deep symbolic meaning, with a victory like this for the anti-choice movement bolstering their confidence and demonstrating their political clout. And the actual language and specifics of the legislation are extremely disturbing.

For one thing the law uses vague colloquial terminology, like the term “partial-birth abortion,” which was coined by the anti-abortion movement, in place of medical language. This is harmful on several fronts. It helps to further remove the abortion debate from the realm of science, medicine and logic and pushes it into the nebulous area of morality, where the anti-abortion movement holds sway. While the legislation was intended to address what in medical terms is known as Dilation and Extraction (or intact dilation and evacuation), or D&X, the language is vague enough that it could be applied to other procedures as well. This is especially chilling in the effect it will have on doctors, who are likely to be intimidated by the threat of prosecution and lawsuits into avoiding any abortion procedures as much as possible. Doctors who perform the procedure could be punished with two years in prison, and the woman’s husband or parents if she is under 18 could also file lawsuits.

And most disturbing, the legislation specifically does not allow for abortions even in the case of danger to the woman’s life or health. Anti-abortion forces fought against a provision of that type on the grounds that it would create a “loophole” for doctors to do abortions whenever they wanted. But the deeper significance is that it furthers the trend of putting the unborn fetus’s well-being before the mother’s. And the fact that a woman’s husband or parents can sue over the procedure takes us back to primitive levels of misogyny, implying that these parties have more authority over a woman’s body than she does herself.

The legislation was opposed by the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstreticians and Gynecologists, the American Public Health Association and other medical professional organizations, as well as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro- Choice America.

“The Senate took its final step toward substituting politicians’ judgment for that of a woman, her family and her doctor,” says a statement from NARAL. “No one should be fooled as to the real intentions of the bill’s sponsors: they want to take away entirely the right to personal privacy and a woman’s right to choose.”

NOW president Kim Gandy said that, “like each of its predecessors, this bill is intentionally worded so vaguely that it could criminalize even some of the safest and most common abortion procedures after 12 weeks and well before fetal viability.”

The partial-birth abortion issue has been ricocheting through state legislatures and the Supreme Court for the past decade. President Clinton vetoed a ban on the procedure in 1996 and 1997, and in 2000 in the Stenberg v. Carhart case the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that Nebraska’s ban on the practice was unconstitutional. This ruling also essentially prohibited about 24 other states from enforcing their own bans on the procedure.

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