Accosting private citizens going about their business as they seek medical care is tasteless and disgusting.
I’m genuinely surprised that clinics never had sufficient control of the property of their sidewalk and parking lot to have trespassers removed and force any protest out to the curb of the adjacent public street.
I strongly support the right to protest on public grounds. But I also, at least as strongly, support private property rights, to where protestors who choose to try and be disruptive while on private property should be allowed to be removed.
Adding restrictions like requiring free ultrasounds - oooh how restrictive. You’re conveniently leaving out…
You’re conveniently leaving out that a transvaginal ultrasound isn’t actually medically necessary, and it sure seemed like a pretty clear attempt to make the process humiliating as well as adding scheduling delays that would lead to people being over the time-limit in states with these requirements.
But you’re right, it’s just a free ultrasound. We should definitely let the state mandate shoving things up orifices when there isn’t an actual medical safety indication for it.
As opposed to mandating everyone be injected with a trial substance that has kinda been studied but is believed to probably be pretty safe and beneficial to certain segments of the population?
Medically necessary is a concept that has lost all meaning over the past couple years.
Accosting someone isn’t protesting, so lets get our terms straight. It’s generally illegal to block someone in order to say more than a few words to them if they don’t want to talk to you and want to walk by you. Because of that, and because extreme pro-lifers know that you catch more flies with honey, that activity is also not the common practice of almost everyone that pickets outside abortion clinics.
Can you describe what you mean by accosted, because that’s a strong term. “Excuse me Miss, can we pray with you?” “Hi Miss, can we help you with your pregnancy?” isn’t the same thing as, “Baby Killer! You’re going to hell!” Sometimes I wonder if pro-choicers see the people outside abortion clinics and automatically view them the same as the Westboro Baptist Church at a gay pride event. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ve never seen the people in front of my local abortion clinic (who I don’t know and don’t associate with) ever in their parking lot. Only on the sidewalk, so I don’t know how you’re equating the two. So if you really think people shouldn’t be allowed on the sidewalk in front of abortion clinics, you’re essentially claiming that abortion clinics should have a special dispensation for limiting free speech rights of citizens on public right-of-ways. They have the same property rights as Disney, Chick-Fil-A, Exxon, The Museum of the Confederacy, and any other private business. Go to any of those places, stand in the public right-of-way, don’t block people from walking in/out/around, and the police can’t stop you from holding signs or shouting chants. If you want that to change, good luck. You’ll find that the dissenters in Dobbs are not likely to agree with you that people doing that are doing something outside the bounds of free speech.
I thought you were talking about playing by the rules. Now you’re claiming that any restriction you don’t like isn’t playing by the rules even though all those restrictions had to wind their way through courts and several of them were struck down before Dobbs? Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt June Medical Services LLC v. Russo
I’ll be honest. Of course it wasn’t medically necessary. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that women should see that there is a living human inside them before making the decision to kill it. There are probably tens of thousands of women that were on the fence about getting an abortion that decided not to kill their baby because they saw it on an ultrasound. Can you explain to me how exactly that is a bad thing?
Regardless, it was still the pro-life side playing by the rules. We couldn’t pass abortion bans, so we passed things that could be couched in medical necessity that got women to think more deeply about their decisions. I don’t know how many states has transvaginal ultrasound requirements, but my state stripped it from it’s bill before making it law because of the electorate’s uproar over it.
At the time, I actually believed the uproar over transvaginal ultrasounds. That was, until my wife was pregnant and I went with her to her doctor visit where she had one. The level of uncomfortability and embarrassment from a transvaginal ultrasound was less than a normal gyno pelvic exam and doesn’t even approach what is required when an actual vacuum aspiration takes place, let alone and D&E or D&X. That outrage over vaginal ultrasounds was completely blown out of proportion.
At the time, I actually believed the uproar over transvaginal ultrasounds. That was, until my wife was pregnant and I went with her to her doctor visit where she had one. The level of uncomfortability and embarrassment from a transvaginal ultrasound was less than a normal gyno pelvic exam and doesn’t even approach what is required when an actual vacuum aspiration takes place, let alone and D&E or D&X. That outrage over vaginal ultrasounds was completely blown out of proportion.
I’ve been with my wife when she had one as well during her pregnancies.
Your wife definitely, 100%, had a choice about whether she wanted to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, or not. And she wasn’t going to have the rest of her medical care denied to her if she declined.
I really think you’re managing to gloss over the rather significant difference between a person making a choice about what is stuck into their vagina, or it being forced on them. The (also invasive) parts of the abortion process that you object to ARE medically necessary to complete the procedure safely. The transvaginal ultrasound is not at all necessary to the process, no matter how you choose to spin it as “blown out of proportion”.
In finding the links for my last post, it reminded me of the past and provides another reason for showing that Roberts doesn’t base any of his decisions in any sort of consistent constitutional principle.
In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), Roberts voted with the minority. The opinion of the court was that the provisions of H.B. 2 at issue (requiring that any physician performing an abortion have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of where the abortion was performed, and another provision required that all abortion clinics comply with standards for ambulatory surgical centers) do not confer medical benefits that are sufficient to justify the burdens they impose on women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.
Four years later, the same issues came up in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo. SCOTUS had to take it up again because a lower court found the law constitutional because the facts in Russo (in Louisiana) were different than the facts in Hellerstedt (in Texas). But guess what Roberts did? He changed his vote and sided with the majority that upheld Hellerstedt and struck down the Louisiana law. So to Roberts, in 2016, TRAP laws didn’t create an undue burden, but in 2020, the 4 year old precedent was enough to keep him from holding that same view. Yet 2 years later in Dobbs, Roberts somehow thinks a 15 week ban doesn’t create an undue burden. Can anyone explain how these conflicting opinions from Roberts in the span of only 6 years are even remotely grounded in anything related to the constitution?
You’re not following my logic. The same people that are saying that a transvaginal ultrasound is invasive and terrible are the same people about to have an abortionist stick a vacuum inside them to suck out a fetus. If the ultrasound was even remotely as invasive as the vacuum, they would have a point. But since it isn’t, they don’t.
That said, while most women that get abortions have been to the gynecologist for pelvic exams, have dealt with women’s health issues in a clinical setting before, and shouldn’t really have that much of an issue with getting a transvaginal ultrasound if they have no bones about getting a suction abortion, I do acknowledge that there are some young women (and girls) that don’t fall into that category. They may not have been to the gynecologist before, they don’t have a bunch of casual unprotected sex, and they never really thought about ending up pregnant before engaging in what turned out to be a huge mistake for them. For those women and girls, I can see how a transvaginal ultrasound could be quite invasive and unnecessarily embarrassing. All I’m saying is that the outrage over it wasn’t proportional to the actual experience most women would face if required to undergo the procedure before getting an abortion. And the embarrassment those young women and girls faced was nothing compared to the trauma they would experience when actually going through the abortion procedure (and what sometimes follows).
They arent mandating they undergo an ultrasound, either. Both procedures are a consequence of the woman’s choice that she alone has made.
It’s no different than the fallacy that an abortion has anything to do with reproductive rights. Pregnancy is the consequence of a woman having already exercised her reproductive rights, and an abortion is merely her attempt to avoid responsibility when the risk she chose to take didnt turn out how she hoped.
You’re not following my logic. The same people that are saying that a transvaginal ultrasound is invasive and terrible are the same people about to have an abortionist stick a vacuum inside them to suck out a fetus. If the ultrasound was even remotely as invasive as the vacuum, they would have a point. But since it isn’t, they don’t.
I followed where you were going, and you’re just wrong in your reasoning.
An abortion is medical care in the same vein as a face lift or tummy tuck is medical care. It’s [most often] an elective procedure done for non-health reasons. The whole “denying medical care” argument is a red herring, trying to spark emotional equivalency to denying cancer treatment since emotion trumping fact is the only hope they have of getting what they want.
Proactively removing one’s appendix would be more medically sound procedure than most abortions. And doctors generally refuse to do that regardless of what the patient wants.
The whole “denying medical care” argument is a red herring, trying to spark emotional equivalency to denying cancer treatment since emotion trumping fact is the only hope they have of getting what they want.
The whole “an embryo is the same as a living human baby” argument is a red herring, trying to spark emotional equivalency between removing an undeveloped clump of cells and killing an actual child since emotion trumping fact is the only hope they have of getting what they want.
No one claims it is “the same as”, as if you can put them side by side and declare them indistiguishable. That’s just another attempt to be beligerant in order to avoid the reality of the argument. The argument is that it is one “thing”, that grows and develops. Put an 80 year old next to their picture as a 3 month old, and they wont look anything like each other either (ok, maybe I should say 40 year old, because an 80 year old does tend to start resembling their 3-month-old self). Would you argue they’re not the same, single life even though they’ve changed drastically over time?
Hell, no one gets an abortion because there is a tiny clump of cells inside them, the only reason abortions even exist in the first place is the fact that the woman knows the tiny clump of cells is the beginning of the baby they will eventually develop into. If that tiny clump of cells in in fact nothing, then there is nothing to be aborted since their presence is entirely inconsequential to the woman much like your appendix. It’s only the knowledge that the tiny clump of cells is in fact actively growing and developing into a baby that necessitates action be taken to abort it.
Just because thing one is more invasive than thing two, doesn’t mean that a woman should be forced (by the state) to do the less invasive thing two before doing the more invasive thing one. The proportionality comes in because it’s a medical procedure that is mandated by the state, enacted by men who lack the necessary medical expertise. The story (and the outrage) would likely be different if some national association of OBGYNs recommended it, but that’s not the case. Mandating this medically-unnecessary procedure is an obvious violation of personal liberty and privacy.
The other problem is that the ultrasound (which likely needs to be scheduled in advance) means delaying the abortion by days or weeks, which may then make it more dangerous or even illegal. Delaying the abortion beyond the legal limit is probably the real purpose of mandating the ultrasound.
