The next front in the war on reproductive freedom
by digby
Don’t miss this informative article by Linda Greenhouse on what’s at stake in the next Supreme Court abortion case. The case is so scientifically bogus it signals once again, in living color, just what a neanderthal culture we’re becoming.
It’s about medication abortion, which has the forced childbirth zealots in a near state of panic:
But if you think about it, it’s evident why opponents of abortion have begun to focus on the early nonsurgical procedure. Medical abortion is the ultimate in women’s reproductive empowerment and personal privacy. All it takes are two pills: mifepristone, sold as Mifeprex, which blocks the hormone progesterone, without which a pregnancy can’t continue, and misoprostol, taken two days later, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the early pregnancy. In many states, women can take the second pill at home.
As abortion clinics are forced to close because of onerous state regulations (54 clinics in 27 states have closed in the last three years, and many women live hundreds of miles from the nearest provider) and as women entering clinics often have to run a gauntlet of protesters seeking to “counsel” them (in its new term, the Supreme Court will hear a First Amendment challenge to a Massachusetts “bubble zone” law that keeps speakers 35 feet away from the entrance to a “reproductive health care facility”), medical abortion offers an end-run around the obstacles that for years have been a core part of opposition strategy.
That’s why, for example, 17 states have recently passed laws or issued regulations barring doctors from using video conferencing — “telemedicine” — to prescribe the abortion pills. Although video conferencing is increasingly popular in other medical settings, abortion is the only context in which states have sought to ban it. For a medical abortion, a nurse examines the woman by ultrasound as the doctor views the results over a video link. Having determined the stage of the pregnancy, the doctor then advises the woman on what to expect from the medication and dispenses the pills by sending a command that opens a drawer in the office. After taking the sequence of pills, the woman returns two weeks later for a follow-up visit.
We can’t have that. Women must be forced to run the gauntlet of screeching harpies spouting bullshit in order to exercise their rights:
And naturally, the bans on this procedure are being spearheaded by yet another national anti-abortion group:
The law at issue in the Supreme Court case wasn’t drafted in Oklahoma. It was written in Chicago by an influential anti-abortion organization, Americans United for Life, and included as the “Abortion-Inducing Drugs Safety Act” among 30 model laws made available for sponsorship by state legislators. In the name of patient safety, the statute makes it a crime for doctors to deviate from the dosage and other instructions published by the Food and Drug Administration when it approved the medication in 2000.
This concern for off-label use is ridiculous. The off-label instruction is to reduce the dosage recommended by the FDA because after millions of medication abortion around the world and many thousands in the US, doctors now know that it doesn’t take as much of the drug to accomplish the same end. They are actually prescribing a much safer dose. And yet these creeps are making their case based upon the idea that the doctors are rogues who are hurting women’s health. But then these are the same people who claim to be helping women when they force 10 year old rape victims to go through a full term pregnancy and give birth. So, let’s just say they shouldn’t have much standing to hold any opinions on whether or not any medical procedure is either scientifically sound or philosophically moral.
Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent primer on one of the primary new reproductive rights fronts on which women are already fighting different states all over the country and will soon be dealing with on a national level. These people never give up.
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