“Focusing on abortions after 20 weeks tells me that politicians have invested nothing in learning what that means. That forcing a woman to carry a fetus not compatible with life to term is kind. That serious intrauterine infections at 23 weeks don’t happen. That women have thought nothing about what they are doing. Let’s be clear, if you are truly “pro-life” you’d agree with these procedures because they save women. Not in an abstract way, but sometimes it is in a this-infection-is-killing-you-and-we-need-to-help-you-right-now kind of way.
The one thing I’ve learned from my experience is that efforts to stop abortion after 20 weeks are nothing about life or compassion or good medicine, it is simply wielding the misery of women (and those who love them) as a political tool.”
An incredibly insightful, and moving blog post by a doctor who performs late-term abortions. Something to think about, for those who never do.
Dr. Colleen McNicholas provides abortion at the only health center in Missouri that provides safe, legal abortion. This comes as the attacks on women’s health care in Missouri continue to escalate. After shutting down access to abortion in Columbia, Missouri politicians are now targeting access to birth control, cancer screenings, and other care at Planned Parenthood through Medicaid.
The anti-choice movement likes to claim that abortion is a big business, that the doctors who risk their lives to help women are in it for the money.
Of all the stupid things to claim, this is a topper. While abortion has never been a lucrative procedure, it is largely a money-loser today, only sustainable through intense fundraising through charitable foundations. Between the punitive regulations visited upon clinics through the TRAP laws passed by Republican statehouses, the dirty tricks and mischief perpetrated by anti-choice contractors and technicians (one clinic got stood up by its phone installer four times), and the need to pay for security against the rampant domestic terror cells that operate with impunity, abortion clinics are in such dire financial straits that they’re shutting down at record rates.
To top it all off, state agencies routinely and illegally discriminate against abortion providers. Even NPR stations won’t let them buy airtime; KMUW in Wichita refused to allow Julie Burkhart to buy ad time for a nonprofit pro-choice charity, comparing it to taking money from the Ku Klux Klan.
