Bodily Autonomy

Here's why abortions as a strictly medical procedure should be safe and legal.  That's reason enough, without even touching the fact that it should be an inherently no-brainer issue that women should have bodily autonomy and the power to decide whether they choose to be pregnant.  Her business, not the government's.

I was taking an afternoon nap when the hemorrhaging started while my toddler napped in his room when I woke up to find blood gushing upward from my body. Though I didn't know it at the time, I was experiencing a placental abruption, a complication my doctor had told me was a possibility. My husband was at work, so I had to do my best to take care of me and my toddler on my own. I managed to get to the phone and make arrangements for both of my children before going to a Chicago hospital.

Everyone knew the pregnancy wasn't viable, that it couldn't be viable given the amount of blood I was losing, but it still took hours for anyone at the hospital to do anything. The doctor on call didn't do abortions. At all. Ever. In fact, no one on call that night did.

My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway.

Back to Yellow Dog:

The story also highlights the subversive strategy the right wing has followed: there is now a serious dearth of doctors trained to do abortions, so when a necessary abortion case shows up in an emergency, you've got a muddle of the self-righteous and the ignorant, all incompetent to do anything, milling about with their thumbs up their asses. She might as well have stumbled bleeding into a church and asked for help...which is exactly what the Coathanger Coalition wants them to do.

Imagine if someone showed up in an emergency room having a heart attack, and for religious reasons, no one had any training in using a defibrillator, and the only one available was in an underfunded clinic across town. That's the direction we're going, only we're suppressing information and skills that would help just women's lives. Which makes it OK, I guess. No men will die of a placental abruption, so it's a low priority.

Can't add much to that, other than to observe that if were men's bodily autonomy that was being messed with, we would not be having this discussion.  Personal autonomy would prevail, natch.