Jophiel wrote:
People oppose ultrasounds because it adds unnecessary additional barriers and steps to a legal procedure. There is zero medical need for a sonogram, much less for the pregnant woman to see the sonogram.
I never said there was a medical need for it. I said that if we required women considering an abortion to view a sonogram of the fetus, fewer women would go forward with the decision to have an abortion. That this is a true statistic suggests strongly that some women are making the decision to have an abortion based on false or incomplete information about what exactly is involved. We can speculate about the degree to which pro-abortion literature may cause that gap in information, but given the consistency with which the whole "it's just like removing cancer cells" gets tossed around in here, is this really speculation? Point being that if showing a women a sonogram of the fetus reduces the odds she'll go through with an elective abortion, I kinda consider that a good thing. The women who would change their minds as a result of such a thing are presumably also the exact same women who will be most likely to suffer psychological harm later as a result of that decision.
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However, she now has to schedule extra time and pay extra money for a wholly unnecessary procedure just to have a legal procedure done and for no reason other than people casting judgment on her morality.
Seriously? "No other reason". How about "let's give her time to make a better and more informed decision". Again, the very fact that a statistically measurable percentage of women change their minds after seeing a sonogram more or less proves that these women are making the choice for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong information, or in haste, or whatever. If showing women a sonogram never changed their decision and someone pushed to require it anyway, you'd have a point. We would be doing it purely to make the whole process more expensive and time consuming and putting unnecessary obstacles in the way.
But that's not the case, is it? Women do change their minds after seeing a sonogram. To me, that's reason enough to require them.
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Wanting to "increase the number of abortions" doesn't factor into it.
It doesn't? Then why? If we were talking about used car salesmen fighting against a requirement that potential buyers be able to view an accident report of the car they're thinking about buying, no one would doubt that their opposition was because they want to maximize the number of cars they sell, even if the customer will later regret buying it. Why would you assume that abortion is any different?
Again, you'd have a point if no one ever changed their minds as a result of seeing those sonograms. But they do. Just as people might change their minds about buying a car after seeing the reports and that's why we require sellers to make them available to the buyer.
If that's not the motivation, then what is?
I'll also argue that the extra cost isn't as high as you might think. Given that a sonogram is very inexpensive relative to an abortion procedure, even if just a small percentage of women change their mind, we will have reduced the total cost. And honestly given the importance of a decision like abortion, I just don't see how one extra office visit is that much of a burden. Give people the time and information to make a good decision. Nothing wrong with that.
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Did you actually believe there was ever a time when poor minority women had more access to abortions than wealthy white women? Ever? A hundred years ago? Fifty years ago? Today?
Access to? Or actual abortions? You get that you're making my point for me, right? In the absence of organizations like Planned parenthood pushing for abortion as a right (and providing funding and services to fulfill that right), wealthy white women would have much greater access to birth control and abortion than poor black women. So, the net effect of the "abortion is a right" movement and the creation and proliferation of organizations like planned parenthood serves the effect of reducing the relative population growth among poor minorities.
Shocking, isn't it? Wealthy white women did not need a "reproductive rights" movement for them to have access to birth control and abortions. However, eugenicists like Margaret Sanger needed to create a reproductive rights movement in order to legally operate the kinds of clinics and sexual education programs needed to get poor minority women to reduce their birth rates. Now we can imagine that she did this out of the goodness of her racist heart, but it seems much more likely that she did it because it was the only way to push the eugenics movement forward in a society that was growing increasingly suspicious of the traditional eugenics arguments.
Edited, Nov 20th 2013 7:22pm by gbaji