Electoral issue

[Gob]

Outside an abortion clinic in Toledo, Ohio, the protesters gather silently. They clutch crucifixes. Some kneel in the road.

Inside it is quiet, calm and the facilities are pretty basic. Because of the protesters, most mainstream hospitals have stopped providing abortions, gynaecologist Dr Martin Ruddock tells me. Here they serve many women from low-income neighbourhoods.

Because of threats to his life by pro-life campaigners, Dr Ruddock travels to work in a bullet-proof vest.

Now Ohio is on the front line of America's abortion furore, which has been cranked up massively during the Republican Party's primary season. While presidential candidates have vied with each other to sound more anti-abortion, the past 12 months have seen a major attempt to tighten abortion laws at state level.

In Texas it is now mandatory for a woman to have a so-called "transvaginal ultrasound" prior to a termination. The law requires the doctor to display images of the foetus and make the heartbeat audible. The woman can decline to view the images and listen to the heartbeat, but the doctor must verbally describe the image - even if the woman does not want to hear it.

When Virginia tried to introduce a similar law, there was uproar; numerous states already ban abortion after 20 weeks. In Oklahoma, a bill to give a foetus "personhood" from the moment of conception creates an implicit challenge to the existing legal settlement that has yet to be tested in the courts.

In Ohio, anti-abortion campaigners are pushing for a so-called "heartbeat bill" - which would define a foetus as alive once a heartbeat is detected and effectively limit legal abortion to around six weeks.

Anita Rios, who has campaigned for abortion access since before the historic Roe v Wade decision made abortion legal in 1973, and who works at the Toledo Clinic, told me the impact of the political furore, and the state level restrictions, is already tangible:

"The strategy is to put these laws into place state by state and erode and destroy access to abortions and that is what's working."

Workers at the clinic told me of women turning up already convinced that the proposed law - which would most likely be deemed unconstitutional - was in force.

The law requiring them to make two visits to the clinic meant, for some of the poorest, long hours of travel and hardship. On entry to the clinic, some are handed small rubber models of foetuses by the protesters.

The combined effect of the rhetoric, the protests and the legal changes at state level, says Ms Rios, "makes it harder to fund and use these services. And it creates a burden of guilt and shame".

And she says, while middle class women will always be able to get an abortion; the restrictions on provision are hitting the poorest hardest.

In the small town of Findlay, Ohio, they see things differently. Here I met some of those campaigning for the Heartbeat Bill: Republican voters from the religious right, they believe America's abortion law to be creating "a holocaust".

Barb McKinch, one of the Heartbeat Bill activists told me they were fully prepared to see the Republicans lose votes on the issue:

"The time has come regardless if our candidate wins or loses. The time has come to stand up for what's right."

"America needs to wake up: it is genocide," another campaigner, Rachelle Heidelbaugh, told me. "You couldn't really have a political candidate who denied that, it would be like having a holocaust denier," I asked her. "Exactly," she replied.

The campaigners told me the aim with the Heartbeat Bill - here and in other states - is to create momentum for a decisive challenge in the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe vs Wade.

The debate is being conducted in language that is shocking and extreme. And while it has fired up a new generation of feminist activists, who see it as a "war over women's bodies", its biggest impact may be among those normally conservative women voters who cannot accept the hard line on abortion.

Among women, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney is now polling up to 18 points behind President Barack Obama in battleground states.

The tipping point came when the Obama administration introduced contraception into its new healthcare system: all the Republican presidential candidates responded in the language of apoplexy. Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts had not rushed to repeal a similar provision, declared Obama's new law "an attack on religious freedom".

Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana and once tipped for the presidential race himself, called last year for the party to engage in a "social truce". Now he is despondent over the way reproductive rights issues are skewing the campaign.

"[The Republican candidates] haven't handled this very well, but they didn't bring this issue up the president did. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but if this was a gambit on the part of the administration, it worked beautifully. Some of our people took the bait."

He believes the party's focus on social issues could doom its prospects in November:

"At this stage our party could be doing a lot better. I like to say that given the failure of his policies, a weak economy and high energy prices, it would be very hard to lose an election to President Obama. But we've just the team to do it."

Outside the Toledo clinic the vigil continues into the evening. Inside, Dr Ruddock vents his exasperation at the intrusion by lawmakers into what he believes should be matters of medical practice.

He shows me the normal ultrasound device, which is used to scan a woman's uterus from outside the body. Then he demonstrates the "transvaginal" probe - a long plastic device which is used only where complications make the normal sensor impossible:

"To mandate the use of this would be an absolute intrusion into women's reproductive healthcare and it is totally unnecessary in the practice of abortion practice," he says.

Anita Rios puts it more bluntly. Like many pro-choice campaigners, she believes it is "state-sponsored rape".

Dr Ruddock says: "They are doing it to drive doctors away, to make the procedure more expensive, to make it more costly to scare women away, basically to put additional obstacles one after the other in the path of a woman who is pregnant, and doesn't want to be, to try and get access to a compassionate abortion provider."

In some ways, this argument is a part of the wider culture war between liberals and conservatives in America. It is certainly fuelling the conflict between conservative-run states and the federal government that will define any second-term Obama administration.

What is new are the results at local level. Almost silently, legal abortion for women from the poorest neighbourhoods of America has become harder and harder.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-17709398

[Grim Reaper]

And of course pretty much all of the pro-life people stop caring about these bundles of cells the second they're born.

[dgs49]

I am in the happy circumstance of having my son, as well as several of his cousins "expecting," at the same time. There was also a miscarriage last week.

As I hear the fairly constant "news" of these couples announcing they are pregnant, going to the doctors' offices for consultations and sonograms, exchanging phone-photos of babies in utero, it highlights the perversity of the abortion dialog in this country (and indeed in the Western World).

These are BABIES, not "tissue."

Maybe if the states make it inconvenient enough to get an abortion, people (mainly women) will be more prudent about engaging in behavior that bears the possibility of resulting in a pregnancy. Just maybe.

But of course one could believe that the hundreds of thousands of women getting abortions every year were all raped, and had no control over the seed that was being planted in their wombs.

The greatest sign of the decline of civilization and the abject evil of the Democrat Party is the talking point that trying to prevent or inhibit women from aborting their BABIES is part of a "War against Women."

God help us.

[Grim Reaper]

Maybe if the states make it inconvenient enough to get an abortion, people (mainly women) will be more prudent about engaging in behavior that bears the possibility of resulting in a pregnancy. Just maybe.

Maybe if the states would also do a much better job about sex education beyond abstinence only and make contraceptives easier to obtain we wouldn't even need as many abortions.

But that would require putting some actual thought into the discussion beyond "abortion bad".

The greatest sign of the decline of civilization and the abject evil of the Democrat Party is the talking point that trying to prevent or inhibit women from aborting their BABIES is part of a "War against Women."

And thinking that forcing women to have babies, and thinking you're doing a good thing for them, is horrifying. Especially when you're also for cutting the social services programs that would help these babies that you care so much about. Once they're born though? Fuck 'em. They're on their own. They could lead brutally short and painful lives for all you care, you just don't want them to be aborted.

[dgs49]

The expression, "...forcing women to have babies..." is sophomoric and grossly illogical. It's like saying that denying me a liposuction procedure is "forcing me to be fat."

Neither pregnancy nor obesity occur randomly and without cause. If stop engaging in the behavior that is making me fat (which costs less than nothing), I will not need liposuction. If a woman either stops engaging in the behavior that is likely to make her pregnant - or takes reasonable precautions to prevent pregnancy, then she will not need a (state funded) abortion.

And nobody in this country gets pregnant due to a lack of education about human reproduction and/or birth control. We virtually teach it in Kindergarten as I have personally witnessed with my own son, nephews and nieces.

The following question is apropos: If Abortion were taken completely off the table, nationally and with great fanfare, effective ten months from today, would people alter their behavior to avoid pregnancy?

I suspect that they would. People who use the expression "...forcing women to have babies..." have so little faith in peoples' ability to control their own behavior that they would no doubt spout nonsense about "...hundreds of thousands of women dying due to botched back-alley abortions..."

Not that they are predictable or anything.

[Grim Reaper]

And a lot of people do require liposuction in order to lose weight thanks to issues with their bodies. So denying them surgery would be forcing them to remain fat.

And last I checked, rape was a pretty random cause of pregnancy. Bad sex education makes pregnancy seem pretty random too.

And, yes, people do get pregnant due to lack of education. To say otherwise is to be completely in denial of reality.

What you would see is a lot of women dying while getting illegal abortions. It happened before, it'll happen again. Apparently the idea of learning from past mistakes is a foreign concept to you. You'd rather we blithely run off the edge into oblivion as long as you keep true to your 2000 year old book that's been edited and revised several dozen of times over the years.

[Crackpot]

Blow it out your ass Grim I'm tired of you bashing an entire religion the basis of not liking what someone who claims to hold to that religion even though the discussion hat hand really has nothing to do with the subject at hand. (Biblically a fetus isn't live until "the quickening" the IIRC happens some time near the end of the second trimester)

Seriously you expect to be taken seriously laying out brain dead talking points that are merely the polar opposite of Dave's? Sorry the only person you'll impress with those are Rubato

[Grim Reaper]

Last I checked, dgs49 was the one who wanted to punish people because he thinks his religion said it was OK. Christianity has a lot of flaws, but the people who use it as a weapon against others are the bigger problem.

[Crackpot]

THere you go trading Catholicism for the whole of Christianity. And dave can come up with a bad argument to support whatever is on his mind but it is you not him basing your argument on his religion.

[Grim Reaper]

His religion is what his argument is based upon, what do you think he meant by "God help us"? And I'm not trading Catholicism for Christianity. I just don't know which specific brand of Christianity that dgs49 believes in.

[Crackpot]

He's catholic. and "God help us" is pretty much a standard exclamaition and should be treated as such. is argument would be no different if he'd have said "gadzooks".

[rubato]

To some people a blob of protoplasm the size of a lima bean is a person, or with even less logic and more emotion, a 'baby'. To others it is a blob of protoplasm which does not have the neurological structures which we know are a necessary condition for consciousness.

To the former group it makes perfect sense to say that women have no right to protect themselves from death or enslavement.

And they actually wonder why we think they hate women?


yrs,
rubato