April 3, 2012

  • Another Angry Article: Arizona and Abortion

    We interrupt this silence to bring you the latest round of legislative horrors:
    http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/arizona-outdoes-everyone-new-anti-abortion-bill
    http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/04/01/arizona-legislators-trying-to-declare-pregnancy-two-weeks-prior-to-conception

    As far as I can tell, the law, like many others passed recently, will ban abortions after 20 weeks of development. Exceptions vary from state to state, but in Arizona, there is no exception for nonviable fetuses.

    Back up a moment. At 20 weeks, the average fetus is 6.5 inches long. It sometimes happens that perhaps the brain is not forming, or the lungs are growing outside the fetus's body, which means it cannot survive, and then a woman will want to abort it. But because it's so small at 20 weeks, the doctors can't tell until later. There's no exception for that! If a doctor says to a woman at 22 weeks, your baby can't survive because its brain is not developing, then the woman has to carry out the pregnancy anyways, even though it's impossible for the baby to survive!

    But it's worse. Doctors usually count pregnancy as starting on the day the last period ended. The actual date of conception is usually about halfway through the cycle, when ovulation happens, and not more than five days earlier. The Arizona bill defines the pregnancy as starting on the day the last period began.

    Now isn't that cute. Some stupid legislator deciding that he can go and legislate that women are pregnant during their last period, about two weeks before they conceive at all.

    As any middle-school schoolchild knows, women who are having a period are not pregnant.

    That is not the way biology works; legislating it isn't going to make it so.

    Doctors are also to be required to perform an ultrasound and then show photographs of the fetus to the woman. People who don't know medicine telling doctors what procedures to perform. The Blind leading the Sighted.

    I really didn't care much about the whole issue beforehand, but now I care a great deal. If there were institutions set up to care for unwanted children, then we can talk about whether abortions are ethical or moral or whatever. This though, this is too much. Sometimes things are just not reasonable, and defining a woman to be pregnant during her period is not it.