IT'S NEWS to no one that politicians regularly spin issues to serve their own (or their campaign contributors') agendas. Last week we witnessed the latest casualty -- and probably the most important one, since the Iraqi war debacle -- to the Republican spin cycle. After many years of deliberately misinforming the public, the media and members of Congress on the issue, Republicans finally managed to narrowly push through a ban on what they call "partial birth" abortions. In response to the most sweeping step backwards for women's reproductive rights in nearly thirty years, President Bush -- whose camouflaged campaign promise to support a "culture of life" won him the vocal support of the pro-life lobby -- signaled his eagerness to sign it as soon as he returned from an official visit to Asia. The passage of this act doesn't only endanger women in America physically, it threatens to nullify many major accomplishments in reproductive rights and ultimately it casts a frightening pall on the future of a woman's very right to choose.
In no medical dictionary or textbook will you find a procedure called "partial birth abortion." It's not a medical term. As with the "marriage penalty," "welfare queens" and the "death tax" (among other examples), conservatives made the term up to serve their emotional but factually vacuous rhetoric.A "partial birth" abortion sounds more menacing, almost brutal, and an observer gets a much different and gruesome impression about it than what the facts alone would suggest. The name groups two very different procedures, "dilatation and extraction" or "dilatation and evacuation," as one and the same; thus keeping the public ignorant about their major and quite relevant distinctions. Both have been recognized to be medically necessary and are important options to reserve for women who either want to terminate their pregnancies or protect their own health in the face of an unsuccessful one.
Protecting the health of the mother is a longstanding concern for the Supreme Court as well. As recently as 2000, the Court struck down a Nebraska ban on so-called "partial birth" abortions largely because the statute did not include an exception for safeguarding the health of the mother. Anti-choice conservative lawmakers in Nebraska, just like those today in Congress, denied that the dilatation and extraction procedure was ever necessary to protect the mother's health, despite clear consensus from the medical community against that sweeping claim. Accordingly, the Court decided that without such a health exception, such a broadly prohibitive statute couldn't stand. Congress' similar ban includes absolutely no provision for protecting the mother's health, meaning that in the court challenge sure to come, the ban's constitutionality is in serious doubt.
The anti-choice lobby accepted many years ago that Roe v. Wade will not be overturned soon. So instead, abortion foes have resorted to a strategy of gradually chipping away at the reproductive freedoms won over the last half-century. Arch-conservative Christian lawmakers, some right here in Virginia, have attacked birth control pills and emergency contraception as immoral, often using thinly-veiled misogynistic and sexist language about encouraging "coeds" to be promiscuous. Conservative state legislatures in many states have creatively imposed major burdens on abortion: requiring parental notification or consent for minors, mandating that women be counseled before having an abortion (implying women are incapable of making their own informed decisions), and even requiring women to have their husband's consent. The "partial birth" abortion ban is the culmination of this anti-choice lobbying, which visualizes as its ultimate goal the eventual prohibition of the practice of abortion itself.
Certainly, some abortion opponents are quite open about this goal. They think abortion is nothing but legalized murder justified by us morally abhorrent liberals. Emotional and usually religious outrage over this simple medical practice that is accepted and performed throughout the world is usually just a result of emotional manipulation on the part of the conservative Christian movement and a failure to be even minimally informed about important aspects of medical science. This lack of willingness or capacity to accept sophisticated moral and scientific rationales goes a long way to explain why most knee-jerk anti-choicers are also against basic cloning and stem cell research. Accordingly, protecting choice in America will require educating the public about reproductive rights, and fighting against those on the anti-choice Right who would have us turn the clock back 50 years. We as a society cannot -- we must not -- risk returning to that grim era when women's health resided in the offices of some back alley "doctor."
(Blair Reeves's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at breeves@cavalierdaily.com)
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