×
"VICTIMS" WHO DESERVE UTERAL BLEEDING. Although it won't contain revelations to people who have been following the issue closely, Judith Warner's Times op-ed on Carhart II is very good. In particular, this part works as a good rebuttal to David Garrow's unfortunate op-ed arguing that doctors should just take the risk that the vagueness of the law will be interpreted in their favor:
But in truth, dealing with the ban is no laughing matter. You see, as it turns out, the Supreme Court didn’t just outlaw “partial-birth” abortions (known in the medical community as “intact dilation and extraction” or D & X,) when it upheld Congress’s ban. It criminalized any second trimester abortion that begins with a live fetus and where “the fetal head or the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”The big problem with this, doctors say, is that, due to the unpredictability of how women’s bodies react to medical procedures, when you set out to do a legal second trimester abortion, something looking very much like a now-illegal abortion can occur. Once you dilate the cervix — something that must be done sufficiently in order to avoid tears, punctures and infection — a fetus can start to slip out. And if this happens, any witness — a family member, a nurse, anyone in the near vicinity with an ax to grind against a certain physician — can report that the ban has been breached. Bringing on stiff fines, jail time and possible civil lawsuits.Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, asserted that prosecution for accidental partial births won’t occur; there has to be “intent” for there to be a crime. But as doctors now understand it, intent could be inferred by the degree of dilation they induce in their patients. What, then, do they do? Dilate the cervix sufficiently and risk prosecution, or dilate less and risk the woman’s health? And if they dilate fully, how do they prove it wasn’t their intent to deliver an intact fetus?Moreover, given the transparent bad faith in which these laws are passed in the first place, doctors must be particularly leery about the circumstances under which they'd be prosecuted. I mean, trust that federal prosecutors can be impartial about a heated political issue under the Bush administration? Please. Warner also effectively makes the point -- particularly relevant in light of the farcical attempts to claim that abortion regulation is about "protecting women" -- that while women are placed at risk by "partial birth" bans, "fetuses will be spared no brutality." It is a weird sort of "compassion" for women indeed that sees the increased possibility that women may get a perforated uterus as a feature, not a bug, particularly given that the legislation is not connected to any even arguably legitimate interest. I guess this is what "compassionate conservatism" means; some women need to be "protected" via internal bleeding because a medical procedure seems kinda gross.
--Scott Lemieux
