It took Mary Vargas six months and repeated hormone shots to get pregnant with her second child. “We were so excited,” Vargas, 35, remembers about the day she learned the treatments had worked.
Remember this information because according to the anti-choice industry she's a heartless bitch who doesn't care a bit about the fetus she aborted.
Now nearly 22 weeks pregnant, Vargas had two choices: terminate immediately or wait, in which case she would miscarry at any point or spontaneously go into labor at as early as 28 weeks. If her son was still alive at his delivery, doctors warned, he would perish within a short time. And that death would likely be very painful for him. “As a parent, your job is to make sure your child doesn’t suffer unnecessarily,” she says. “He had no chance at life. What we had to think about was how he was going to die. It wasn’t about choice, because the option we wanted — to have our baby — was no longer available.”
This is the real face of late-term abortion. The anti-choice movement doesn't give a shit about this fetus. They wanted him to be born into this world, if he even beat the odds and lived long enough to be born, and spend his very short life in absolute agony. No rational human being would wish that futile, painful existence on anyone.
Later-term abortions — those performed at 16 weeks and beyond — account for only 4.3 percent of the 1.21 million pregnancies ended in the United States each year, according to the Guttmacher Institute in New York City.
Don't tell that to the anti-choice racket. To hear them speak, you'd think there were roving gangs of doctors traveling the countryside by bus enticing young, pregnant women to get abortions at the last minute.
Now, unless a physician can offer unequivocal proof that a patient would die without a D&X, the doctor risks being fined $250,000 and sent to prison for up to two years.
No doctor should have to fear for himself or his family because he performs a needed medical procedure.
At first they considered an induction and delivery, which would give the Vargases a chance to hold him.
“But that didn’t seem like it was best for him,” Vargas says. “I can’t imagine that I would choose to be born into bright lights and alarms and not being able to breathe, even with my mother holding me.”
The fact that they even thought of this shows how even people who end up making the right decision are poisoned by the propaganda of the far-right anti-choice crowd. They were actually considering torturing their unborn child for who knows how long just to make some moron they don't even know feel better about his/her prejudices.
She gets her insurance via her husband’s employer, the federal government, which has a long-standing policy forbidding employees from purchasing any health plan that covers abortion.
That's absurd, we really need to get these Republicans out of office immediately. They are ruining our country.
The nonmedical term partial-birth abortion, coined by the anti-abortion movement, grew out of the idea that the D&X procedure “most resembles infanticide because the baby’s body is outside the uterus already,” says Mailee Smith, a staff counsel for Americans United for Life, a pro-life law and policy group in Chicago.
So she admits that they invented the term, which has no basis in medicine, to scare people.
“In order to prevent the blurring of the lines between infanticide and partial-birth abortion, it’s necessary to ban partial-birth abortion,” she adds.
Or we could continue to allow medical professionals to make medical decisions and tell these people, who have no medical knowledge whatsoever, to go to hell.
The Vargases, like other families, were intent on minimizing their son’s suffering.
That's what normal, loving people do. The anti-choice crowd, on the other hand, gets off one causing as much suffering as possible to both mother and fetus.
In a 2005 study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco found that, based on existing studies of how babies’ brains develop in utero, pain is unlikely to be experienced before around 29 or 30 weeks. Yet a proposed federal law would require doctors to warn women aborting at 20 weeks or after that their baby may feel pain and to offer anesthesia for the fetus; several states have also passed or proposed bills on the issue. Little or no data exists on whether attempts to provide fetal anesthesia would help the fetus or harm the mother, leading the UCSF researchers to write that it “should not be recommended or routinely offered for abortion because current experimental techniques provide unknown fetal benefit and may increase risks for women.”
So you're telling me that even though all available science tells one story, the anti-choicers are pushing an irresponsible and possibly dangerous procedure on women just for the sake of scoring political points. I'm shocked.
Forcing women to undergo unnecessary medical procedures that have no rational benefit for mother or fetus, and may in fact hurt one or both of them, is disgusting but unfortunately par for the course with these people.
The D&X technique is so uncommon that many doctors who perform second-trimester abortions, including Dr. Nichols and Dr. Greene, have never used it.
Again, don't let Operation Rescue hear you. To hear them speak you'd think there were abortion mobiles driving around cities performing late-term abortions on demand.
In this new, threatening climate, doctors don’t want to leave any opening for prosecutors. As a result, hospitals around the country have begun to require that all abortions after 20 weeks be preceded by lethal injection — when the fetus is killed in utero via a shot of digoxin or potassium chloride. The doctor typically injects the drug into the umbilical cord, amniotic fluid or fetal heart via a needle through the patient’s belly the day before the scheduled termination. These injections can be painful for the woman and increase her risk for infection and spontaneous delivery away from the clinic or hospital.
Silly women, you think the people who make these rules give a shit about your life? It's all about that fetus, the more pain the mother experiences the better for these sickos.
“Nowhere else in medicine do doctors require a patient to go through an invasive procedure like this purely for legal reasons,” Dr. Nichols says.
Nowhere else in medicine do you have a medical procedure so unique to women, so tied into every backwards right-wing idea of female subservience, that these anti-choice whackos can't wait to pile on laws to ensure maximum pain and suffering for the women unfortunate enough to get pregnant.
“As doctors we take an oath to do no harm, yet these injections — while the risk is low — are potentially harmful to the mother. And we make patients get them not to benefit them, but to protect ourselves from going to jail. I’m forced to choose my well-being over that of my patients.”
And that is why non-doctors should never be allowed to trump doctors for petty political reasons.
She asked her obstetricians when she could terminate. The head of the practice replied, “We call that murder.” Another doctor in the practice was willing to induce, but, Audrey says, warned her “she couldn’t prevent a nurse from running into the OR with life support. The idea of holding a baby as its organs failed — we couldn’t think of anything worse.”
So evidently there are also doctors and nurses who don't know anything about medicine. I guess someone has to graduate at the bottom of their class.
Directly across a parking lot from Dr. Tiller’s clinic is a facility with a different take on what to do about ill-fated pregnancies. Choices Medical Clinic, a privately funded nonprofit, opened in 1999 and is one of as many as 2,500 “crisis pregnancy centers” nationwide that exist to persuade pregnant women to avoid abortion. Choices was one of the first centers to offer perinatal hospice: end-of-life services for fetuses akin to the standard hospice care available to the sick and the elderly.
These places sicken me. They pretend to be medical centers when in reality they are just places where women are guilted into continuing pregnancies until the fetus is born or it is too late to get a legal abortion. They practice quackery and provide pseudo-medical services such as this hospice care, which I'm sure they charge highly for. In the end they prolong the pain for both fetus and mother and help no one.
The facility doesn’t provide primary medical care; deliveries or inductions are done at local hospitals.
That's because they're not actually doctors, though they pretend to be doctors in order to confuse impressionable young women.
But women who enlist its hospice services are invited to have free sonograms every day of their doomed pregnancy
All those unnecessary procedures can't be good for anyone's health.
and, if they find it a comfort, can have free professional pictures taken of them and their dead or dying children after they are born.
That's just morbid, really sick stuff.
Kim Ortmeier, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, first learned about perinatal hospice from her obstetrician.
Prescribing voodoo shit like this should be illegal.
“Abortion was never a consideration,” says Ortmeier, a devout Catholic. “We told our doctor we’d do whatever we could to give her the best possible life she could have.”
Maybe big words are a problem for them but the doctor made it clear the fetus wouldn't have a life. Gasping for air for 20 minutes and then dying doesn't constitute a life. They increased their own suffering, and the suffering of their fetus, for no other reason than the invisible voice in the sky told them to.
When her obstetrician recommended they contact Choices, Ortmeier hesitated. “Because the services were free I wondered if they were quality,” she says.
They should have gone with that thought. Not everything free is low-quality, but in this case that is certainly true.
in Minnesota, women seeking to abort fetuses with fatal anomalies are required by law to be informed about hospice as an alternative.
Another instance of unnecessary obstacles being placed before confused, scared women for no legitimate medical reason.
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