I think that even without the ectopic pregnancy part, that much is obvious.
I’m not familiar with the Texas law you refer to. We’ve discussed the Missouri law regarding medical necessity in this thread (which, of course, isn’t the bill that this thread is about) and there seems to be general consensus that the Missouri “emergency” exception is broad enough to cover treating ectopic pregnancies early (a reading, I agree with). But, of course, that’s all a different statute that was enacted several years ago.
Why did the bill view performing an illegal abortion on an ectopic pregnancy more serious? I don’t know. I asked the same thing. There were a couple of answers proposed, including that it may be designed “prevent non-physicians from providing abortion inducing medication to women with ectopic pregnancies.” I gather that you oppose punishment for doctors who perform illegal abortions, but you haven’t identified any harm that would come from stronger penalties for people who perform illegal abortions on women with ectopic pregnancies.
I’m not even trying to defend the bill. But there seems to be a dogged refusal to understand how the bill would work (that goes beyond a mere inability to parse statutes). I’m not sure I understand that.
The anti-choice crowd seems to operate a bit like the Russian military. They endeavor to create perimeters around key population centers and control those centers from without.
The anti-choice crowd identifies everybody and everything that is even loosely in the orbit of … an abortion … and slowly, methodically begins to craft legislation that criminalizes their activity, in an effort to shut each component down.
Piece by piece.
Building code modifications, admitting privileges, mail-order restrictions, pharmacist regulations, drug manufacturer prohibitions, claims of “public harm” to uninvolved third parties, the laundry list of trigger laws, etc., etc.
They want to make everybody and everything a ‘victim’ of a woman’s right to choose.
The fact that they can – at any point in time – even claim with a straight face that any of this is for the ‘safety of the pregnant woman’ is astounding to me.
If this is true, it is heinous.
Unless there is something very strange about Missouri, approximately half of the voting population must be women. So, if only 25% of the male voters have a conscience, women should easily be able to vote out all of those psycho pseudo religious freaks, right? If they are not doing that, then women are acquiescing to biological slavery.
I (or the Times columnist) obviously misunderstood the point of the bill. But I still don’t understand why it is necessary to mention ectopic “pregnancy” at all. I use scare quotes because it is not really a pregnancy at all. There is no fetus that can become a live baby and it can not be removed through the vagina, but only by surgery, possibly laparoscopic. The situation has nothing to do with abortion; it is more like removing an appendix. Clearly the drafters were just playing to the gallery.
Except that you learn that you have an ectopic pregnancy from a doctor. There isn’t a black market for abortions for ectopic pregnancies, since in normal places, no one ever needs to look for that.
At the very most benign, this is a solution looking for a problem.
No, I oppose criminalizing most abortions. In general, doctors ought to follow the law, but the laws should allow most abortions, imho. And they should always, in every circumstance, allow abortions of ectopic pregnancies.
That being said, the hurt that comes from stronger penalties for people who perform abortions that might possibly be deemed illegal on women with ectopic pregnancies is that it threatens doctors who perform legal abortions on women who have ectopic pregnancies, and so might make it harder for women to obtain that treatment. Because there are a lot of laws out there, some more clear than others, some help up by the courts, some that might come into play. And so it becomes risky for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, at least until she starts hemorrhaging and is obviously in dire straights. THEN it’s pretty clear that it would be legal. But until then, even though everyone knows that it will come to that if left alone, the abortion might be illegal.
So instead of getting a safe, early treatment of an ectopic pregnancy, some women will suffer and a few will end up dying. That’s the harm of this provision.
Hear hear!
Or fairer still, when that happens, the biological father should, by law, be buried with the mother.
ETA: Aha. Upon further reading, I see that this was already immediately suggested. GMTA.
Not really. It was suggested that the be killed, your suggestion is just to bury them.
More appropriate, as they are not actually killing the mother, just putting her in a position to inevitably die, on balance, not killing the father, but only putting him in a position to inevitably die seems equitable.
It’s not like laws against terminating ectopic pregnancies have no precedent, there are several religiously dominated countries that have outlawed such a procedure, resulting in a number of entirely preventable deaths of women, and the anti-choice crowd seeks to emulate those countries in a number of ways.
There should be no confusion or possibility of interpretation of law that would cause a doctor to pause or to consider legal consequences of giving the best medical care possible. Any mention of ectopic pregnancy in law should only indicate the responsibility of medical providers to terminate it, and maybe how it is to be paid for.
In their glee to deny a woman the right to control their own bodies, the anti-choicers don’t care who gets hurt or killed by their decisions, only that they have control over the autonomy of others.
Did you ever notice the overlap (read: near total) between that American cohort and those apoplectic about the possibility of Sharia Law ruling the land ?
Their irony-impairment is metaphysically boundless.
Absolutely, and I’ll also note that Christian law is not all that much different. Slightly different flavor, but it’s entirely about controlling people and their actions, limiting freedoms and making sure that certain people know their place in society.
They aren’t trying to preserve separation of church and state and a secular society, they are just complaining about competition.
How about we just make it clear that doctors have an unambiguous obligation to terminate an ectopic pregnancy, and that the only legal penalties are for denying needed treatments, and not kill ANY innocent people.
Agreed, it should be very clear that the obligation is to the health of the mother, and no confusion as to what consequences may come about.
The Texas law has already caused such a chilling effect.
Now, would a doctor be sued in this case? Maybe, maybe not. But making a doctor balance possible legal repercussions against providing the best care for their patient is abhorrent and dangerous.
And, slightly off-topic, but ectopic pregnancy is not the only contraindication to taking a pregnancy to term. There are various pre-existing conditions that may make the pregnancy dangerous, even if not as inevitably so as an ectopic situation.
If a woman has a 50% chance of dying from carrying to term, then I support her right to make that decision, if that’s what she really wants, but I don’t want someone else making that decision for her. And I don’t really want to make some arbitrary cut-off point like 10% or 5% either. (I’m not sure where I would go in the other direction. If someone has a 95% chance of death if they carry to term, I don’t know that I would trust their judgement if they wanted to roll the dice on that.)
And it always comes back to it being in the best interests to leave decisions up to the mother informed by doctors working in her best interest. Anyone else getting involved is simply trying to control her, most often against her best interests.
The issue is that a straightforward reading of the Texas law makes the abortion questionable until the mother is hemorrhaging, or otherwise in immediate danger of death. If she has time to buy a bus ticket to another state, it’s not at all clear it’s legal to abort her ectopic pregnancy.
I think Missouri is trying for the same thing, only with enhanced penalties if the pregnancy is ectopic.
Yes, of course this causes harm. Thanks for the cite, k9bfriender.
I have read it in context:
Besides charging someone with a class A felony for inducing or attempting same on a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, what context is there?
ETA: Okay, they’ve dropped the ectopic pregnancy provision. Only because people who actually know what they are talking about raised a stink.
Where is this “abortion industry” located? Pittsburgh?
It’s highly profitable as it lives rent free in the right wingers’ anti-choice minds.
It seems to me your objections do not relate to this bill (which doesn’t make any abortion more or less legal). Rather, they relate to the existing codified definition of medical emergency under Missouri law. (And, actually, they don’t relate to the definition under Missouri law, they relate to a pro-choice organization’s claims regarding a differently worded provision of Texas law.).
I expect doctors and pharmacists, who operate in a heavily-regulated field, to be aware of their obligations under the law. And I assume that performing an illegal abortion would be a deterrent and any confusion over the scope of those laws would have effect there (and not on the bill we’re discussing). The confusion over this bill comes from people misrepresenting (deliberately or not) what it does and then publicizing that incorrect interpretation as fact.
Edit:
I don’t read the bill as requiring the abortion to be performed for an ectopic pregnancy or that anyone know that the woman has an ectopic pregnancy. Assuming it complies with other legal requirements, everyone else seems to recognize that Missouri’s “emergency” provision would permit an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy. But I can imagine a situation in which a non-physician provides mifepristone for use at home (a violation of Missouri law) to a woman seeking an abortion who has (but does not know she has) an ectopic pregnancy. I understand that mifepristone is contraindicated for ectopic pregnancy, but I don’t know how dangerous it is to try to abort an ectopic pregnancy with mifepristone. That would seem to fall within what the statute proscribes (and really only situations like that since the necessary element of “illegal abortion” isn’t going to apply to most abortions for ectopic pregnancies).
Lol nice insult. Subtle.
Moot or not, you still haven’t grasped the actual sense of the sentence:
The offense of trafficking abortion-inducing devices or drugs a class A felony if:
>(1) The abortion was performed or inUduced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman
(2)
The abortion was performed or induced or was attempted to be performed or induced on a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy
The reason for specifying ectopic pregnancy is because treating it with a pill could be fatal to the mother.
That IF’ll get you every time.