Article: Abortion is the Umbrella Issue

Abortion is the Umbrella Issue

By Kylie the Kranke(n)schwester
August 18, 2019

For anyone who feels they have a just, informed stance on abortion- either for or against it, I urge you to look again into the legislation relating to abortion and you will see the multiple angles of assaults on women’s rights to physical and emotional health. And I hope your opinion of abortion, wherever it started, will then evolve. Even to use the phrase, “a woman has a right to do what she wants with her body” is trite and oversimplifies the issues women face in America and completely ignores a plethora of other issues relating to women’s health. And then, on the other side of the pendulum, if you are one to argue that women’s health and access to women’s healthcare is not related to the abortion issue means that you have no clue what it is like to be a woman and what we experience everyday because of our sex and gender identity.

Abortion laws made news earlier this year when multiple states passed “heartbeat bills” putting stricter prohibitions on abortions than the standard set by Roe v Wade. Roe v Wade protects abortions nationwide until about 24-28 weeks which at that time was deemed the gestation of viability of the fetus. Roe v Wade acknowledged states could individually limit abortions after this viability benchmark but not before. As we see with the heart beat bills- which I don’t like to refer to them as such, there are more correctly “no post-sixweeks-pregnant abortions” that have passed in states this year and others that are still more restrictive than Roe v Wade as we see in the chart below, such as many states that now have “no post-18-weeks-pregnant abortions”- this is in defiance of the Roe V Wade decision and other court cases since that have upheld its standard.

After seeing the above graph I wanted to know the exact wordings in these bills and what else was being regulated by them. I’ll be honest, my first and only inquiry when I started this research was to see which states included the termination and removal of ectopic pregnancies in their definition of abortion. I had recently finished a project looking into Catholic hospitals and health care systems and found that catholic hospitals would not abort and remove an ectopic pregnancy despite it being nonviable and dangerous to the mother due to Catholic dogma. As a woman who is not immune to having an ectopic pregnancy, this finding infuriated me as I know I have a 1/6 chance of ending up in a Catholic emergency room in America and that I would, in the situation of hemorrhaging during and ectopic pregnancy, be put into labor as opposed to having the fetus immediately aborted for my safety. I am happy to report, however, that after reading nearly 20 bills signed into laws by the above states, termination of an ectopic pregnancy is listed as a specific exclusion from the definition of abortion. I did, however, find other ways in which these politicians have limited and blatantly assaulted my entire sex and gender of womanhood by unnecessarily regulating abortion procedures and women’s clinics, women’s mental health, and our rights to appropriate health care.

A good place to start for any person who is not clued in to the patriarchal rule over women's health is the words of the politicians themselves who have passed the above laws. There are many articles and videos on the internet of male politicians making ignorant remarks about women’s bodies. The following image contains references to such people as reported in an article on slate.com in May 2019. It shows how little male politicians know about women’s bodies, our health care needs, and how little they care to understand.

Their ignorance of basic female anatomy should be enough to disqualify them from voting on laws to restrict our access to appropriate care.

I want to outline a few of the attacks on women’s health and wellbeing that has been written into a lot of the abortion legislation this year. There have been two separate approaches in their attacks on women. Firstly, states have legislatively put huge logistical burdens on women’s clinics to stay in compliance with new operating laws. If they couldn’t make abortion completely illegal, they’d make it a journey to hell for the operators, executives, and financiers to keep the clinics open. And secondly, states have implemented laws and regulations to make us women feel like shit for wanting or seeking an abortion in hopes to deter the procedure which completely disregards the lived experiences of all types of women including women who may not be strong enough to know their worth and deserved equality in society.

Here is a list of a few of the tenets of various state abortion laws that I found surprisingly hurtful.

1. The definition of abortion and the definition of the “exclusion situation” when it can be legal. In the legal definitions of abortion of all states there is a variation of this line: “abortion shall be illegal except in the case of a medical emergency”. And then, in the text of the law, there follows a definition of what that state defines as a “medical emergency”- most likely we think of if a woman is experiencing seizures or is losing pints of blood due to the pregnancy. Ideally in these cases the medical professional can determine if by terminating the pregnancy they can save the life of the woman. Now, in a couple of states the politicians and legislators have written into law what a medical emergency is NOT. And this is where I feel personally targeted. Some states do not include emotional or psychological grounds to be a reason to look into abortion as an option. Lets look to the text of Oklahoma Senate Bill 614 passed this year:

""Medical emergency" means a condition which, in reasonable medical judgment, so complicates the medical condition of the pregnant woman as to necessitate the immediate abortion of her pregnancy to avert her death or for which a delay will create serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function, not including psychological or emotional conditions. No condition shall be deemed a medical emergency if based on a claim or diagnosis that the woman will engage in conduct which she intends to result in her death or in substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

This is what I hear in my head as I read this, “Ohhh, you emotional women… we men know you’re going to try to use that as an excuse to get out of anything and we want it in writing that you shouldn’t even think about it.”

This completely negates the experiences of our chronically mentally ill sisters if they were to become pregnant and then also any one of us who believes our lives will be so altered by the birth of a child that we don’t want to even live anymore. As someone who has experienced suicidal ideation in my life and seen the call to action it gave to first responders, this makes me think that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I was pregnant. And to think of all the other different situations and circumstances my sisters all over the country are suffering in and what a pregnancy might do to worsen that situation- this is what I mean when these politicians have no clue what our lived reality is.

2. The reporting requirements of women’s clinics to states. In Louisiana’s House Bill 484 passed this year, there is now a requirement for women’s clinics to keep the abortion records of patients for seven years. Now, it may be common practice to require records to be kept, but the extent of the individual patients’ information that must be kept that long to be in compliance and the number of executives that have individual responsibilities to each keep those records for seven years leaves innumerable opportunities for error and penalties that could easily result in the shutting down of the clinic. Specifically this Louisiana law calls on anyone with as little as 5% financial interest in the clinic to have an independent duty to keep these records for seven years. That means any outside health systems or NGOs that contribute financially will need to have these records on hand at all times. And the records Louisiana wants to keep include over 25 pieces of
personal information including race, marital status, education level, blood type, number of living children, number of previous abortions, and onward of anyone who receives an abortion. This weight and possibilities for logistical errors could easily inhibit financial support for women’s clinics.

3. Another attempt by states to put financial and logistical burdens on women’s clinics is to have laws relating to ultrasounds and education prior to a woman receiving an abortion. For a woman to walk in to a clinic and receive the appropriate care for an abortion overall should be a 30 minute clinic visit, but with all these laws regulating the information that must be provided and paperwork that must be signed stating you have received all the “educational” material prior to electing to have an abortion, that clinic visit is now four hours long, and more…all those “educational” materials you were forced to read were to convince you not to get an abortion and make you feel like a horrible person if you do. For example, Nebraska Legislative Bill 209 which was passed this year redefines the commonly understood term, “informed consent” of a procedure to include giving ridiculous amounts of pro-life literature to a woman before being able to called this woman “informed” before an abortion. While I’m grateful for some access to education, if a woman is presenting to a clinic telling a provider she doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore and doesn’t want to have the whole rest of her life altered by this formation that is happening in her body, I think she probably has a good idea about what she wants and doesn’t want. And to spend time with her in the clinic to make her feel like a piece of shit for what she wants to do is condescending and a rape on her emotions.

4. Access to Mifepristone. Mifepristone is a common abortion pill that has been around since 2000, and subsequently in 2016 received updated clinical reign by the FDA to expand its known and tested effectiveness. It has been proven that is it safe for even mid-level providers to prescribe this medication meaning physicians assistants and nurse practitioners. Mifepristone is taken as two separate doses orally over 2-3 days and followed by some bleeding within a week which usually means it has been effective. An additional dose can be taken if not effective the first time. Now, in order to limit access to this medication available to women and approved by the FDA, 18 states have banned it from being prescribed via telemedicine which is a growing field, instead requiring that the first oral dose be administered in the presence of a physician. This grossly restricts access to women of rural areas or those that cannot afford to come to clinics- be it financially cannot afford the commute, afford child care, or afford to take off work to go to a clinic. I remind you this medication is a pill taken in two separate doses. It is completely unnecessary that it be administered in the presence of a doctor, who will likely only observe the patient for as long as two minutes after it’s swallowed if that.

As women, I hope we can continue to band together and no longer be ashamed of our bodies, their capabilities, or their complexities. We cannot allow ignorant people with religious and patriarchal agendas to restrict our health care, reduce the amount of scientific discoveries in the field of women’s healthcare or continue to influence our country’s laws and our lives. We should not be ashamed for who we are and what we feel. If you do not see the intricacies of attacks on women’s lives by these abortion laws, then I don’t know how you can be a part of the human race. To ignore the above is to live in a glass house and throw stones on the rest of us. We will band together, we will rise up, and we will fight you for the equality we deserve and give you the lessons of womanhood that you desperately need.

For more information and references:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/abortion-laws-states.html
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/alabama-abortion-law-republican-ignorance-femalereproduction.html
https://legiscan.com/gaits/search