by Karina
Web Editor
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund
Just wanted to call your attention to a very powerful essay from a Dr. Waldo Fielding, a doctor who treated "almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure."
He writes:
The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous "coat hanger" - which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in - perhaps the patient herself - found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it...
...Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion - darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.
Making abortion illegal is not going to stop abortions from happening. He concludes with a discussion about the importance of the Roe decision and what it meant for women:
What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens - and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.
Dr. Fielding's essay is another reminder of the importance of keeping abortion safe and legal. If you ask me, we shouldn't be in the business of making laws that interfere with these personal, emotional decisions. The decision of whether or not to have a child is a very personal decision for women and their families to make-- government should have no role in this moral decision.
Please take the time to read his entire essay in the NY times. And check out StandUpSD.com for how you can help fight the abortion ban in SD.
2 comments:
If South Dakota were to ban legal abortions, women would pay the price. Let's face it: women who choose to have an abortion don't want their pregancies to continue. This feeling would not end with legislation. While many of those women with the opportunity to receive a safe abortion from a physician across state lines would do so, some of those women without such access would attempt to end their pregnancies in the hazardous ways that Dr. Fielding described. The ban would be a public health disaster. We can't let this happen to ANY of South Dakota's women, let alone those in the already disadvantaged contingent who would be unable to access safe abortions elsewhere and would thus pay the heaviest price.
This is so disturbing, yet such a reality that people refuse to focus on. This is why there MUST be safe and legal abortion. Legal abortion = safe abortion. Illegal doesn't mean less abortion, it just means dangerous abortion.
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