Abortion: First, please view the fetus

Abortion may still be legal, but the obstacles to getting one are mounting, said James C. McKinley in The New York Times. With polls showing support for legal abortion declining, more than a dozen states are considering tough new restrictions on the procedure. But few have gone as far as Oklahoma, whose legislature last week passed a measure requiring all pregnant women seeking an abortion to have ultrasounds and mandating that doctors “set up the monitor so the woman can see it,” while the doctor describes the fetus’ heart, limbs, and organs. A second bill essentially authorizes doctors not to tell a pregnant woman that her fetus has birth defects. Oklahoma’s Democratic Gov. Brad Henry vetoed both bills, but the legislature overrode him by large margins.

“Oklahoma, what have you done?” said Mary Alice Carr in CNN.com. “Like every woman who has ever undergone fetal testing, I held my breath at each doctor’s appointment,” relaxing only after the tests confirmed my baby was healthy. But in Oklahoma, a woman “no longer gets to exhale.” Because “a doctor may now lie to her face,” denying her “possibly the most important piece of information she will ever receive.” This bill isn’t anti-abortion—it’s “anti-mom, it’s anti-doctor, and it is anti-family.” It’s actually worse than that, said Robin Lakoff in HuffingtonPost.com. Like Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, the recent outbreak of harsh anti-abortion laws suggests that “many white males are feeling scared” as their once-exclusive hold on power erodes. To feel “more in control,” they seek to turn back the clock, to a time when women and minorities had no rights.

It’s not so simple as all that, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. Women who don’t want to view an ultrasound image of their fetus can look away if they must, but what’s wrong with providing them “with a view of what’s going on inside their bodies before they take a leap that can’t be undone?” Like most Americans, I think that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”—with an emphasis on rare. Once an ultrasound image displays “a human life in formation,” it becomes harder for a woman to delude herself into thinking a fetus is nothing but a “blob of cells” that can be deleted like a typo. That truth may be uncomfortable, but if a pregnant woman is choosing an abortion, there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that she is making an “informed choice.”

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