Recently, I’ve written a fair amount on various pieces of statewide legislation that are aimed at limiting a woman’s access to abortion. One of the most common approaches for anti-choice legislators to take is legislation mandating that a woman must have, and be offered a chance to view, an ultrasound before having an abortion procedure. Many states have even taken up legislation that would require a woman to view the ultrasound before she can have her procedure… whether she wants to or not.

The Guttmacher Institute has a complete overview of all the states that have introduced ultrasound bills this year. The New York Times also recently published a really interesting article on this type of bill, which you can see here.

The article includes a few choice tidbits, including the fact that many abortion providers already require ultrasounds on their own for medical reasons (including Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina), and that both studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that having a chance to view an ultrasound (or being required to) almost never changes a woman’s mind in whether to have the procedure… and, in fact, it occasionally solidifies a woman’s decision to have an abortion. Like I said interesting stuff, and well worth reading.

But I wanted to focus on one quote in particular, because I think it strikes at the heart of what’s really behind these enacted and proposed bills.

“Like other patients, Laura, who has a 17-year-old son, said she took offense at the state’s implicit suggestion that she had not fully considered her choice.

‘You don’t just walk into one of these places like you’re getting your nails done,” she said. “I think we’re armed with enough information to make adult decisions without being emotionally tortured.’”

As this quote gets at, and as the article itself also alludes to, these types of bills do nothing but infringe on a doctor-patient relationship, and also assume that a woman isn’t smart enough or well enough informed, to make her own decision. I can’t think of any other scenario in which legislators could require a doctor to perform a medical procedure on a person, regardless of the patient’s needs or desires.

Can you imagine the outcry from the “big government is bad government” crowd if they were being forced to undergo a particular medical procedure that they didn’t want (or possibly even need)? If you recall the hysteria that occurred by the Tea Partiers and others during the recent federal health care debate, I think it’s pretty easy to get an idea as to what would happen. But because these groups are generally anti-abortion, there’s nary a word about patients’ rights or individual freedoms when it comes to these bills. Yet another example of hypocrisy in action with this group of people.

I’ve said it in previous blog posts (and I’m sure I’ll say it again) but the continual insistence by legislators that women aren’t smart or strong enough to make this decision on their own is both incredibly misogynistic and insulting. As the quote above indicates, this is not a decision that women take lightly.

I spent over two years working in a clinic that provided abortion services, and I am extremely confident in stating that, to an enormous degree, the women who were seeking abortions had given the matter a huge amount of thought and consideration. And anyone who doesn’t think that to be true has probably never met someone who’s had an abortion… or is so consumed by an agenda that they are completely blinded to the reality of the situation.

So what’s your take on ultrasound laws? Are they meant to be barriers to service, or are they, as I think, a larger insult to women? Or are they something else entirely? Sound off in the comments!

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