LA Times Opinion: My Wife and I had an Abortion...

[bliss_eternal]

The abortion debate brought home

He and his wife have always been pro-choice; recently, they were forced to make the Choice.

By Dan Neil
May 6, 2007


MY WIFE AND I just had an abortion. Two, actually. We walked into a doctor's office in downtown Los Angeles with four thriving fetuses — two girls and two boys — and walked out an hour later with just the girls, whom we will name, if we're lucky enough to keep them, Rosalind and Vivian. Rosalind is my mother's name.

We didn't want to. We didn't mean to. We didn't do anything wrong, which is to say, we did everything right. Four years ago, when Tina and I set out on this journey to have children, such a circumstance was unimaginable. And yet there I was, holding her hand, watching the ultrasound as a needle with potassium chloride found its mark, stopping the heart of one male fetus, then the other, hidden in my wife's suffering belly.

We don't feel guilty. We don't feel ashamed. We're not even really sad, because terminating these fetuses — at 15 weeks' gestation — was a medical imperative. This has been a white-knuckle pregnancy from Day 1, and had it gone on as it was going, Tina's health would have been in jeopardy, according to her doctor. The fact is, multiple pregnancies are high risk, and they can go bad very suddenly. I wasn't going to allow that, though the fires of hell might beckon.

In the midst of this experience, practically on the eve of our procedure, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling in Gonzales vs. Carhart, upholding the federal ban on a rare obstetrical procedure called intact dilation and extraction, or intact D&E, also known as "partial-birth" abortion.

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taken from:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-neil6may06,0,2723837.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

[ismnotwasm]

1. Wow

I saw that yesterday, I knew it would be good so I waiting until I had a little more time to read it. One of the central frustrations with any abortion ban, outside the fact it regulates half the population to the status of a petri dish, is the complete lack of medical veracity. Forced birther's are some of the biggest liars there are, and evidently believe their own lies, although my feeling is it's more of a emotional reaction, a selfish one having to do with power first, and control second and always pending, inevitable, personal mortality third.

This caught my attention;

"The court's ruling upholds the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which declares the intact D&E — in which the fetus is partially extracted from the uterus before being dispatched with an aspirating needle, scissors or forceps — to be "gruesome and inhumane." But the truth is, there is no such thing as a pretty abortion. The alternatives to intact D&E are no less grim. Is grasping and dismembering the fetus in utero with forceps (as opposed to after a partial extraction) or injecting it with heart-stopping chemicals and then delivering the stillbirth any less repellent?

Gruesomeness is no standard at all. Removing the organs from a brain-dead teenager is gruesome, yet we do it to preserve the life of an organ recipient. The point is, sometimes it's necessary.

Americans need to be careful what they wish for. I think antiabortion advocates imagine a world in which women — promiscuous, lazy or selfish singletons — roll into the doctor's office for midterm abortions and stick their feet in the stirrups while still chatting on the cellphone. Recreational abortions, you might say"


Be careful what you wish for--no doubt.