Debra Ness, President, National Partnership
It’s been 39 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade – but the battles over access to the full range of reproductive health care services still rage on.
In 2011, the number of abortion restrictions introduced in state legislatures reached a three-decade high. But such laws – like the ultrasound law in Texas, which requires providers to perform ultrasounds, describe the fetus and give women the option to hear the fetal heartbeat – aren’t just problematic in that they put barriers between women and their health care. They are affirmatively bad for women’s health. They require unnecessary and invasive procedures not recommended by doctors. This is especially problematic when women are directed or tricked into seeking care at crisis pregnancy centers – which often have no qualified medical professionals on staff.
Women deserve sound medical advice from actual medical professionals.
The Texas sonogram law is just one example of the attacks on women’s reproductive health over the past year. They have been far-reaching and dangerous – and anti-choice extremists show no signs of letting up.
Not only is access to abortion services out of reach for many women, but so is birth control, maternity care, and social services to help them raise healthy families. It’s time to recommit to protecting and expanding common sense policies that improve women’s health by providing access to affordable, high quality reproductive health services. The National Partnership has joined the Trust Women Silver Ribbon Campaign virtual march to make sure our elected officials know that restricting women’s health services is unacceptable. Join us!
Once again the hypocrisy of the right wing is on full display. While we are faced with health care costs that are continuing to climb and payments to health care providers are being assaulted and their decisions for their patients are being second-guessed by health insurance industry bureaucrats, these special interests and their legislative lackeys are insisting on forcing women to undergo unnecessary and costly medical procedures designed to interfere with a matter that is between them and their doctor. I find it even more deplorable that these people assume that the vast majority of women who seek such services are too ignorant or uncaring to appreciate the realities of the difficult choice they are facing. Having had to make this agonizing choice on more than one occasion due to the heart-breaking results of genetic testing (which was covered by my health insurance but not the procedure to terminate), I cannot think of a more torturous and inhumane ordeal to put a woman through. Thank you,Deborah, for continuing to fight for women’s rights to control their own bodies.
To Susan, Debra Ness,
I feel sorry as I read your views on the unborn. I am at an abortuary every Saturday morning, and as the shiny new cars come streaming in, I remember how mass-enacted abortions were initiated to rid America of poor blacks in the 1920s and onward. I talk to the men, disillusioned by the vacuuming of their child but who were never granted parity in that fatal year of 1973. I am aware of no infant in the very first stage of its divinely created existence who ever was asked for its innocent choice. I think of the term “choice,” which only the human mind enjoys from moment to moment during our lives. Every choice reflects what the individual perceives as “good,” good for himself or herself because that is the goal of all our choices. Yet, I see “good” so often tending toward the selfish individual, and I wonder why these ladies driving into the clinic cannot see beyond themselves, into the knowledge of the man, into the respect for the child that comes through an act of God working within human means. Can two wrongs make a right? Better, can adoption be a solution that respects both the infant and its parents? Have the parents talked about this? Is pregnancy a health concern? It is natural for the beginning of a family. It is essential for the human race. It cannot be wrong if it is both natural and essential. What, then, is unnatural? The phrase “women’s health” in conjunction with pregnancy is a total distortion of “health,” or otherwise “natural” and “essential” must be rejected as in no way linked to the growth of the family into the formation of the human race. Can counseling, financial aid and, ultimately, adoption assist these mothers? I am sure they can assist in every way possible. Many ladies want to adopt infants and see in them the fulfillment of the very motherhood they crave.
Ladies, don’t ever walk away saying that you didn’t know the consequences of your actions. Don’t ever invoke “women’s health” in an effort to destroy what God has entrusted to you. The “health issues” are those that will come from many directions to attack those who willingly choose to terminate their own family.
I am all for allowing women true freedom of choice and allowing them to make decisions that do not require a conversation – especially adult women who can easily think through issues on their own. I do not favor the strong language “war on women” and hope that you will be less rhetorical with future requests.
Have you tried the approach that American women might have the same rights as their Canadian neighbors to the North? At least in terms of the FMLA, Canadian women enjoy much better benefits.
Thank you for what you do.
Thank goodness the decision from the Supreme Court on Roe vs Wade, has given women some health freedom for 39 years, but it is still a constant struggle for women and their health needs.
Our healthcare is constantly being challenged by many political, religious, and other non-healthcare entities.
One of the simpliest rights, is ensuring women’s access to contraception which means fewer unintended pregnancies, healthier women and stronger families. Birth control is basic health care for women.
My wish for 2012 and the future is for others to keep their restrictions off my body and reproductive rights. Peace, Health, and Harmony to all.
I marched for Roe v. Wade and later became an adoptive parent years later. I was grateful to the birth parents for letting me adopt that lovely child. They didn’t believe in abortion and I did. I have had to consider that, had they aborted, I would not have that child. But, I still believe as I did before, that it’s having the choice that’s important. We need to protect a woman’s right to choose. As a Clinical Psychologist, I see patients whose mothers were not ready for the huge responsibility of being a parent. Those children and their parents suffer when the time for them to parent is not right. People need to be able to decide if the time is right. If it is not, they should have choices. I respect both choices and have seen that, in our case, it turned out right for all involved.
We must never take for granted that this right exists. It was hard to win. Don’t let it get eroded. Keep on strengthening women’s rights to choose and hope that women never need to make these hard choices.
It is time MEN stop making policies and demands on what is best on WOMEN’S REPRODUCTION RIGHTS AND CHOICES as if they would have any clue whatsoever what women face due to these very MEN not being able to keep their “sperm container” in their pants; which is WHY women of all ages MUST HAVE safe access to abortion service, birth control, maternity care and social services concerning women’s families health.
Have MEN yet to pass any policy on their responsibility of passing their unwanted sperm into women’s vaginas? Perhaps they should pass a policy demanding all men be sterilized or have vasectomy’s at the age of puberty, with no reversal without their spouses permission to have a family?!
What’s good for one gender – should also be good for the opposite gender, right? Perhaps that is an issue we should petition for and let them deal with the constant stress as we women are faced with for decades at childbearing age.
Make no mistake – this IS a War on Women we are now engaged in. The rhetoric has been ramped up, every single candidate for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination has run on primarily religious determination to overcome Roe v. Wade. To a person they want to roll back Women’s Rights. Hard-fought for, years-in-the-making women’s rights. Which of course means stacking the Supreme Court with more of ‘their kind’ of justices to ensure Roe is overturned for years to come.
As some others have brought up – nary a hint of MEN’s contraception included in any of the rhetoric, NOR do they want any mention of ED meds mentioned – it’s ONLY all about taking away a woman’s right to her autonomy and to choose what’s right for her. Men are still free to indulge in their sexuality at will.And ‘choice’ is the operative word. I have absolutely NO issues if a woman chooses not to abort an unwanted pregnancy – it’s her right. But her choice is paramount and cannot be because she was coerced into it by religious terrorists.
The worst part is they don’t give two figs about her pre-natal care DURING the rest of her pregnancy, nor about her child once it’s born – she and her children can live on the streets and starve for all they care, as long as her SEX life and right whether or not to get pregnant is taken out of her hands initially.
A Pox on these men and the self-hating women who support them! We women need to vote – and vote in numbers large enough to make our wishes unmistakable.
On the topic of access to prenatal care for those women who choose to become pregnant or to continue a pregnancy, there are terrible problems at the state level. Would you believe that two full years after the Affordable Care Act became law, its provision that mandated access to birth centers for women enrolled in Medicaid has not yet been implemented in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Birth centers and midwives who practice in birth centers have a great track record of high-quality, woman-centered care that lowers rates of prematurity and low birth weight. But the state governments are dragging their feet, while the managed care plans that control access to prenatal care for at least 90% of Medicaid-enrolled pregnant women are largely refusing to cover the services of birth centers or midwives. Women are presented with few if any care choices except crowded noisy stress-filled clinics, where they must wait hours to be seen for a bare few minutes by overworked doctors, residents, and nurse practitioners. Amnesty International, in a study, “Deadly Delivery,” released in 2010, chronicled the poor prenatal care and childbirth care offered to American women, particularly those who are poor and live in underserved communities. According to this study, women of color and their babies in the US are at much higher risk of maternal mortality and morbidity and infant mortality and morbidity than other Western nations.