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Edited on Tue Mar-23-10 03:18 AM by Hekate
Coming supplied with a uterus involves a huge amount of education and decision making, and you'd better hope that the women and girls in your family have had enough relevant education to make informed decisions. I once knew a woman who when she got pregnant with her third child (by her husband, okay?) wept to the doctor that she really didn't know how babies were made or how to make them stop coming and would he please, please tell her. She was absolutely humiliated. This lack of information was not her fault -- no one, including her own mother (much less her husband!) had ever told her. This was in the mid-60s, not the Victorian Era. She wasn't stupid; when I met her she was making straight-As in college, which she enrolled in as soon as that last kid was in kindergarten.
So right away you can tell that with our uteruses (uteri?) sometimes we want to be pregnant and sometimes we don't. We need to make informed decisions about what that entails and we need to have the means -- that is, contraceptives, birth control, IUDs, the Morning After Pill, Plan B, whatnot. (Europe has some nifty little devices for women who want to chart their own cycles, and they're not available here. Europeans wonder why Americans are so backward.) Most of these things require a physical exam and a prescription, though some of them (like the Morning After Pill and Plan B) should not need one (and again, Europeans wonder about us).
All female contraceptives cost money, and they cost money ongoingly. Did you know that many workplace insurance plans make women pay for their contraceptives out-of-pocket? The same insurance plans pay for the magic blue pills for men, so men can get stiff and hard and have major orgasms (you wouldn't believe the spam I get -- plus there's no avoiding the tv commercials) -- but for women to try to control their fertility, too bad.
Did you know that RW anti-choicers have defined nearly all contraceptives as abortifacients? They're not, but thanks to these religious fanatics there is a "conscience clause" for hospitals, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who want to decide for women that they should not be using these perfectly legal things, even in case of rape.
A few years ago there was an essay in the Washington Post by an apparently upper-middle-class professional woman who had always been super-careful with her fertility, but even tho the kids were in college neither she nor her husband had had their tubes tied. Then one fine weekend... oops. There's a small window of opportunity to take Plan B, which can be dispensed OTC by a pharmacist, so she went to her pharmacist. No dice -- his "conscience" you know. She went to another one, and another, and yet another. By this time she was feeling a lot of emotions, like humiliation and rage. The essay made for some interesting "This could happen to YOU" reading.
There's more. In my 62 years I have known women to get pregnant while using every known form of birth control, including once, famously, tubal ligation. When I was quite young and my mom and her friends were all in their childbearing years, I used to sit quietly and listen to them, so this goes back a long way before it was me and my friends. My own daughter got pregnant while she was on The Pill, for gods' sake.
Planned pregnancy is no picnic. It makes tremendous demands on a woman's body, and for some it can be dangerous. A heart condition, compromised kidneys -- not safe. My mom had two early miscarriages, during which she hemorrhaged so badly she was hospitalized for both and nearly died from one of them. Fortunately our family doc knew her well, otherwise-- well I've heard of women being turned away from the hospital if there was some suspicion they might have tried to abort themselves, which was a felony. -- BTW, did you know that the idjits in the Utah legislature just passed a law, signed by the governor, that criminalizes miscarriage? on the theory that the woman who suffers one must have been at fault in some way? Soulless, heartless bastards.
Supposing everything goes pretty normally, a pregnant woman needs very nutritious food and supplements to make sure her baby develops in a healthy manner. She needs regular checkups and the advice that goes with them. An ultrasound is recommended, and it costs several hundred dollars. Usually the doc and the technician confirm a nice healthy spine and the gender -- gender being bonus information, but nice. It was really a thrill to see the DVD of my granddaughter before she was born.
Supposing it doesn't go well, and the ultrasound shows an anomaly like spina bifida, or an empty skull, or organs looping outside the body. None of these threatens the life of the mother, but two of them are definitely incompatible with life outside the womb, and one is a lifetime of severe disability. Who are you (or the Utah legislature) to tell the expectant parents what their decision should be, except that the doctor should help them make an informed one.
Unplanned pregnancy is not an "inconvenience." It's a lifetime of change. It's all of the above plus the emotions of knowing that this absolutely is not the right time to be having this or any baby. Women don't shilly-shally around for months making up their minds. Nearly all abortions are performed in the first trimester, before the zygote is even an inch long. If Plan B/the Morning After Pill are used, if there is a fertilized egg at all it is the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Did you know that Mother Nature causes untold numbers of fertilized zygotes to be shed with the uterine lining every single month by millions of women who have no idea their egg got caught by a sperm? That fertilized zygote so fetishized by religious fanatics is not a pregnancy; it's a possibility.
Did you know that abortion services are not even available in 80% of the counties of the USA? That's the work of the fanatics operating on their self-imposed "conscience clause." In order to make their point they have blockaded clinics, bombed clinics, murdered doctors, followed staffers home, stalked the children of staffers and doctors... A woman with a dead baby inside of her that refuses to come out (it happens, and it is life-threatening) can't even get surgical help because (gasp, shock) that would be an "abortion." A woman who needs Plan B is shit out of luck in such counties, too. A woman who needs to make what should be an entirely private decision has to to figure out how to get away from work and family, husband, and kids, and gossipy neighbors, for at least a day in order to go to the nearest big city, which may be quite a long distance from home.
I've never had an abortion myself, but when I put myself in the shoes of other women, my heart goes out to them. It's a legal procedure and in any other civilized country they can get it.
You reference Planned Parenthood. They do good work, but abortions are only about 5% of what they do. I have supported them for something like 40 years because of their primary mission -- every child a wanted child. Their founder, Margaret Sanger, RN (1879-1966), was actually imprisoned for holding clinics where she dispensed contraceptives to women and for mailing contraceptive information through the US Post Office. In modern times PP clinics have also been vandalized, burned, blockaded, their doctors and staffs threatened. It takes incredible courage to do what they do.
They are a private organization, supported by donations from people like me. There is no way they can do everything that needs to be done, although they do their utmost.
Abortion and contraceptives, PAP smears and annual checkups, obstetrical and gynecological care, mammograms -- all these are on a continuum of female medical care. They aren't separate little bits that you can chop pieces out of and still call it complete. Comprehensive health care for women has to include all of these things in addition the stuff that men take for granted, i.e. heart checkups, colonoscopies, dental and eye care .
Women's bodies are complicated. Women's medical issues are complicated. If you have to ask it in the first place, there is no short answer to your question.
Any comprehensive health care plan MUST include all of our needs. Requiring women to write two insurance checks as has been proposed (one for the "abortion plan"), requiring women to pay for their contraceptives out of pocket (while providing Viagra for men, remember), is just rank discrimination.
Hekate
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