Proposed abortion bills worry opposersCan you imagine what it would be like to be a rape victim and having to be raped again by the government because you want an abortion. Not only that, but the state will not pay for the ultrasound you will have to pay for the invasive test.
WAVY-TV
Updated 2/20/2012
Some opponents are calling HB 462 state-sanctioned rape, citing the invasive nature of the ultrasound. 10 On Your Side went to a Chesapeake OB/GYN who specializes in ultrasounds to see the equipment used in the procedure.
When most people think of an ultrasound, they picture a technician rolling a wand over a pregnant woman's abdomen to reveal a fuzzy black and white picture.
But when the patient is fewer than about seven weeks along, doctors can't get the picture using a wand on the stomach.
[…]
Under bills passed by Virginia's House and Senate, a woman who wants an abortion would be required to have one of these transvaginal ultrasounds and could then opt to see the images.
The law also requires the doctor to make the test and if you refused to see the results of the test a part of your medical record.
Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an AbominationYou remember the Republicans rallying call for less government, let’s get government off our backs. Well it seems only to pertain to the EPA & OSHA, but it is perfectly Okay to bring government in to our most private space of the doctor patient relationship and force a doctor to violate his ethics.
Under the new legislation, women who want an abortion will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason. Where’s the outrage?
Slate
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012
What’s more, a provision of the law that has received almost no media attention would ensure that a certification by the doctor that the patient either did or didn’t “avail herself of the opportunity” to view the ultrasound or listen to the fetal heartbeat will go into the woman’s medical record. Whether she wants it there or not. I guess they were all out of scarlet letters in Richmond.
So the problem is not just that the woman and her physician (the core relationship protected in Roe) no longer matter at all in deciding whether an abortion is proper. It is that the physician is being commandeered by the state to perform a medically unnecessary procedure upon a woman, despite clear ethical directives to the contrary. (There is no evidence at all that the ultrasound is a medical necessity, and nobody attempted to defend it on those grounds.) As an editorial in the Virginian-Pilot put it recently, “Under any other circumstances, forcing an unwilling person to submit to a vaginal probing would be a violation beyond imagining. Requiring a doctor to commit such an act, especially when medically unnecessary, and to submit to an arbitrary waiting period, is to demand an abrogation of medical ethics, if not common decency.”
Presidential candidate Rick Santorum said,
Santorum challenges policy on prenatal testingLook at some of the other laws that Republicans have proposed that attack women…
By Tom Cohen, CNN
February 20, 2012
The government shouldn't make health care providers fully cover prenatal tests like amniocentesis, which can determine the possibility of Down syndrome or other fetal problems, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Sunday.
[…]
"People have the right to do it, but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, is a bit loaded," he said.
The former Pennsylvania senator was arguing against what he called a mandate in the health care legislation passed by President Barack Obama and Democrats in 2010. He said Saturday at an appearance in Ohio that the law was intended to increase abortions and reduce overall health care costs.
The House GOP's Plan to Redefine Rape
New GOP Bill Would Allow Hospitals To Let Women Die Instead Of Having An Abortion
Georgia State Lawmaker Seeks To Redefine Rape Victims As 'Accusers'
I often wonder who, no really WHO, sits around thinking these things up.
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