Letter 306

Planned Parenthood was arguing before the Senate today, saying that since we allow midwives to deliver babies, we should let similar non-doctors perform abortions as well.

First of all, birth is a natural process that midwives facilitate. Abortion is an invasive surgical procedure that involves sticking sharp instruments into a part of the body very prone to injury and infection. To equate the two is asinine.

Abortion is, by definition, tampering with this natural process in a way that causes the death of at least one person--the baby. It should be no surprise if the tampering causes the death of the mother as well.

Second, we already know that when you decide to tamper with pregnancy through abortion, residents have a higher reported complication rate than licensed doctors. And we could expect the complication rate to be even higher when you have abortions done by people who don't even have the background and experience of a resident.

Clearly, Planned Parenthood's goal isn't safe and legal abortion but cheap and legal ones.

Letter 349

For those of you who missed it, representatives of the California group called The Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers were in town over the weekend. They promote a kind of "do-it-yourself" home abortion procedure. They used to sell a kit for this purpose but the Food and Drug Administration stopped that, so now they just tell women how to assemble their own kit. In their video they encourage women to go to the drug store and buy some plastic aquarium tubing, a cork, a syringe that can be used as a hand-operated pump, a Mason jar, and some medical instruments. Then, in very grisly detail, they show a half-naked woman sitting in someone's living room with a bunch of other women, using this stuff and a flashlight to perform a vaginal examination, followed by a "do-it-yourself" abortion. They claim the vaginal examination is necessary to spot anything abnormal but don't describe what abnormal is, apparently assuming that everyone knows what's normal and abnormal about all the internal body organs of their friends. In any event, their sole warning about safety is that you should only attempt this home abortion in the company of your friends.

Is this the sort of thing we want happening in our state? I'd love to hear what the pro-choicers have to say about it.