Do no harm
As I was crawling around the internet … looking for a recipe that could gather the ingredients left in the pantry for a dinner that would feel like a hug to the family … (In other words a rainbow-colored unicorn that I wouldn’t find) I discovered something that surprised me.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, Vermont doesn’t limit abortions for any reason.
Perhaps, my cynical brain surmised, the Green Mountain State didn’t need to exert such pressure. Maybe it just doesn’t have enough healthcare providers and they don’t feel a need to flex that authoritarian muscle.
Or maybe they recognize that abortion is healthcare, plain and simple. Maybe they’ve decided legislators have no place in the exam room determining their interest in a procedure that is really not unlike an appendectomy — when you need one you should have one.
But they seem alone in their humanity.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, 30 states have introduced legislation that seeks near-total abortion bans this year. Seven states — Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming — have passed bans in at least one legislative chamber.
Much of the bans target healthcare providers, intending to make abortion services inaccessible.
What will follow is predictable: Patients with the means will travel for services; patients without the means to do so will suffer; the rate of adverse outcomes will explode, including the criminalization of women who do not have successful pregnancies.
Like the Texas woman who was arrested and charged with murder after hospital workers were alleged to have turned her in for causing her own miscarriage. The case was eventually thrown out because the law that makes abortion illegal at six weeks doesn’t attach criminal charges.
As it is, abortion has long been a fraught subject. Our collective conscience has allowed us to see the procedure as a necessary evil: Something to be minimized overall … unlike gun deaths … or school shootings.
A woman’s health … her ability to make decisions … or merely choose the safest evidence-based care for her situation … shall always be infringed.
I suppose what shouldn’t have surprised me — especially in the case of Texas where an unconstitutional law on its face has virtually ended the protections of Rowe in that state — was the realization that our healthcare providers are ready, willing, and able to allow the state’s weaponized laws to do harm through them.
Perhaps it is understandable. Doctors have been murdered for doing their jobs. According to Guttmacher, less than 20 percent of private doctors perform abortion care as part of their women’s health practices. They, understandably, don’t want to be the targets of those allowed to harass under cover of “free speech.”
Meanwhile, women continue to endure poor treatment and worse outcomes because we won’t defend them and their constitutionally protected care.
But I don’t understand. And I don’t think I can forgive when it causes real harm.
All of the arguments made to limit choice do so under the bad-faith reasoning that abortion never saves lives.
It most certainly does.