Beyond Roe

Governor Cuomo and proponents of the Reproductive Health Act claim that it simply codifies the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The RHA goes far beyond Roe, and beyond any abortion legislation any state has ever passed in creating a new fundamental human right of abortion and contraception.

The historical corollary to a fundamental human right is a duty. The move from access to right is a slippery slope—the move from an individual choice to a public duty is never far behind. That’s exactly what happened in China 40 years ago. That is not Roe, that’s the RHA.

Roe v. Wade made abortion a legal choice. The RHA would make abortion a legal responsibility. Unless we want to redefine what a ‘right’ is, we shouldn’t consider the RHA. Roe declared that the child in the womb is not a person. The RHA refuses to consider the child at all.

We’ve done this before. We’ve refused to consider the personhood of categories of people—blacks, Native Americans, the mentally disabled, Jews. The powerful can do whatever they want with the sub-human: slavery, land-grabbing, forced sterilization, genocide… abortion.

NY to Criminal Abortionists: “Welcome!”

Under current New York State law, it is a criminal act to perform an abortion on a ‘viable’ child in the womb. (There is another time to discuss the atrocity of the popular, dehumanizing notion of ‘viability.’ Every person bears the image of God regardless of his or her ability to “survive.”) Governor Cuomo and advocates of the Reproductive Health Act want to completely remove all references to abortion from the penal code.

Kermit Gosnell. Heard of him? He ran an abortion mill near Philadelphia, PA where he routinely performed late term abortions for 30 years. He caused the death of Karnamaya Mongar in 2009. In 2010 his clinic was finally shut down after a raid for suspicious oxycodone prescriptions revealed barbaric conditions: blood on the floors and walls, bags of aborted babies, jars full of severed baby feet. A house of horrors. Gosnell is currently serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. His story inspired this feature-length documentary, released in theaters October 2018.

If New York’s Reproductive Health Act were law in Pennsylvania, Gosnell could not have been convicted of homicide.

And Gosnell is not just an isolated case. The corpses of 35 late-term aborted babies were found in freezers of Steven Brigham’s clinic in Maryland. He was arrested and charged with five counts of murder. Brigham’s history of abuse goes back to 1990, but his clinics are apparently still operating.

Douglas Karpen of Houston is currently under investigation by the FBI after four former employees came forward with pictures and testimonies indicating that he killed babies born alive, snipping their spinal chords or “twisting their heads off their necks with his own bare hands.”

After getting kicked out of Florida, James Pendergraft was caught illegally operating a mobile abortion clinic out of his van in South Carolina. Local authorities found bloody surgical implements “with tissue still attached” when they pulled him over for a traffic violation.

The list continues with Rho and Boyd and Hern and Osathanondh and Rutland and Sheikh…

There’s no shortage of stories of late term abortionists behaving badly. Shouldn’t we hold them to a higher standard? Shouldn’t these actions be criminal?

Are Doctors Just Body Mechanics?

All abortion procedures are invasive. Certain abortion procedures require surgery. Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act (RHA) is so radical that it reduces quality of care for women by allowing lower level medical providers to perform risky surgical procedures. Allowing non-physicians to provide surgery (say nothing of non-surgeon physicians) serves only to reduce quality of care for women, not enhance reproductive health.

According to the RHA a woman will be able to obtain an abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, representing higher-risk procedures, which have greater chance of complications, infection, and death. Fully licensed physicians in good standing are trained specifically for managing the condition of patients in potentially dangerous developments. Eliminating the requirement of physicians to perform these procedures increases the likelihood of life-altering and deadly complications for the woman.

Allowing non-physicians to perform an abortion ignores the overall health and well-being of the patient. Medicine is an art. It is the most humane of the humanities and most unscientific of the sciences. Physicians are trained to manage the entire scope of a patient’s health and well-being, employing this art. Lower-level providers are trained in technical skill, not the art of medicine. To employ lower-level providers in the performance of a single procedure virtually ignores the patient altogether. Allowing anyone to treat a patient around abortion alone disrespects the profession of medicine and the patient, treating her as an object to be manipulated—as a mechanic would a car.

Allowing non-physicians to perform surgery makes medicine what it is not. It reduces medicine to a set of impersonal skills to be applied to manipulate biochemical reactions. In so doing, it reduces the good purpose of medicine from the lofty heights of protecting the dignity of each individual to the meaninglessness of heartless, evidence-based, widget-turning, economically motivated population management. No thanks.

If legislators really cared about increasing the quality of care for women in reproductive health they would ensure that only board certified OB/GYNs in good standing could perform these complicated, risky procedures, instead of reducing the qualifications for practitioners.