Choosing Choice

For anti-choice advocates that have been seeking to pass legislation regulating abortion procedures, the third time has proven to be a charm. Last Tuesday, the House approved a bill banning a method of late-term abortion performed during the second-trimester. Now, after two failed attempts at getting the bill signed into law over the past eight years—President Clinton twice vetoed the ban—Republicans control the White House as well as Congress, and President Bush will soon sign its new restrictions into law. The legislation would hold doctors attempting the procedure liable to two years in prison and unspecified fines.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ascertained that constitutional rights guarantee “a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” This new bill infringes upon this right and also deprives pregnant women of individual consideration of their health.

The procedure has been greatly distorted as proponents have politicized the practice, dubbing it “partial-birth abortion” and barraging Congressional discourse with anecdotal narratives entailing grisly depictions of the procedure. They fail, of course, to iterate that this procedure is used in less than one percent of abortion cases, is the safest method of second-trimester abortion and is often essential in protecting the life of the woman—clearly one of the more salient details in its defense.

The bill strips doctors of discretion over their patients’ cases—banning the procedure in all cases when it is not necessary to save the woman’s life. But the bill and potential punishment is still a deterent for doctors who may be weary of performing the procedure in cases when it may or may not be necessary. This legislation will be the first mandate from Congress that bans a medical procedure and, thus, is the first time that Congress has deemed itself more fit to determine proper medical procedure than doctors. Why legislators feel impelled to eclipse the power of doctors in deciding the best course of action is not only unclear, but illogical.

Many women’s rights organizations are rightly concerned that the bill’s usurpation of doctor discretion will lead to further encroachments on abortion rights. In what is perhaps the only hope left to block the bill, several abortion rights advocacy groups have declared that they will challenge the constitutionality of the legislation in court before it can take effect.

In the meantime, the bill will likely find its way under Bush’s pen—he has anxiously awaited the chance to sign away “an abhorrent practice and continue to build a culture of life in America.” But the only abhorrent thing about this bill is that, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) declared, it denies women their rights of privacy and choice and demotes them to the rank of “second-class citizens.”

DISSENT: Choosing Death

The American Medical Association, in their position paper H-5.982, advises that “according to the scientific literature, there does not appear to be any identified situation in which [the method] is the only appropriate procedure to induce abortion.”

Essentially, The Crimson Staff opposes a bill that makes it illegal to deliver a living fetus with the specific intent to euthanize it.

While we have disagreed with their consistent support of abortion rights in the past, it is completely beyond our understanding why, unlike 70 percent of Americans, The Staff feels compelled to support partial birth abortion, a procedure that oversteps all moral and ethical limits.

—Travis R. Kavulla ’06, Margaret M. Rossman ’06 and Paul C. Schultz ’04