I’ll go ahead and quote my dad (quoting his dad): To make you ask questions. I agree with your comment, but with a slight amenedment. “This is so disgusting and unfair and ridiculous. How did the Senate ever go for it?”
You’re right, Dierdre. They should have had much bigger grins. Sending women to die for no reason is a time of true celebration of patriarchal dominance, and really, anything less than party hats is unfair.
It is so disgusting and unfair and ridiculous. And thus the cartoon is utterly apropos. Thanks for posting it, Jill.
It’s much more appropriate to think that the men pictured… are doing this without realizing the consequences, Dierdre? I’d rather be thought evil than than thought stupid.
You’re talking like women don’t die of botched abortions today. Check out http://www.justiceforchristin.org. Where’s the outrage?
Here is what non-wingnuts say about the incident Tony references. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is an attack on George Tiller, one of the only providers of third trimester abortions in the U.S. Shutting him down is the major mission of a lot of the antis.
The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts says George Tiller’s care of a woman who died after an abortion met accepted standards. Of course they cleared him. He gave $250,000 to the governor’s campaign, and the governor appoints the board members. By the way, did you hear the 911 call?
You’re talking like women don’t die of botched abortions today. …where did we say that? People die from nearly every imaginable medical procedure. Statistically, abortion is one of the safest surgical procedures out there. You can pick out incidents where women have died, and no one disputes the tragedy of that, just like no one disputes the tragedy of people dying from childbirth, or open-heart surgery, or apendectomies. But no one argues that the procedure should be illegal just because it very rarely leads to death.
Tony, I’m confused. Women dying of botched abortions while in the care of a licensed doctor means…what to you? That doctors who can’t provide late term abortions with good sucess rates should be replaced with more competent individuals? That medicals schools should do a better job of educating doctors on how to perform third trimester abortions? Or that third trimester abortions should never be given, ever, because there have been people who have died from them in the past? (I hope you realize that this reasoning would have to be extended to virtually every other surgical procedure utilized in every hospital.) What exactly are we being outraged about? That there weren’t more third trimester abortion-offering doctors for her to chose from, so she could possibly find one with a better track record or one she felt more comfortable with? Ok, I can get behind that. Is this the equivalent, to you, of someone dying because they have a bad reaction to the anesthesia for a plastic surgery operation? Something elective goes wrong and so rather than recognizing that an adult chose to undergo the procedure, we prosecute the doctor? Is it the equivalent of someone dying during heart surgery? Why did you bring this situation up? I’m genuinely confused about why it matters. Are you trying to imply that women are better off giving themselves abortions, or going to people who claim to be doctors but are not monitored in anyway by the state? Is your argument that 1) people die from legal and monitored, doctor-provided procedures and therefore 2)making any medical procedure illegal doesn’t really have any negative effects? If so, would you be willing to extend that to organ transplants, appendectomies, brain tumor removal? You think that course of action would not have a dramatic impact on mortality rates? Throwing up recorded 911 calls is not making an argument, and it is absolutely unconscionable of you to try to utilize the death of another human being to make a partisan point without actually having any logical thoughts or arguments behind it. If you actually have something to say that involves thinking, please please post it.
There’s a video on cnn.com right now about a woman in Florida who contracted some kind of staph infection while in the hospital having her baby and had to have her arms and legs amputated to prevent her death. Over 8,000 people died last year from complications following bariatric surgery, one of which is sepsis. So, what is the point of bringing up that one case? Shouldn’t you be more worried about, say, the teenager who died because she was too afraid to tell her parents she was pregnant and asked her boyfriend to beat her until she miscarried? Or the women who burn their vaginas with bleach trying to abort because they can’t afford or can’t obtain legal abortions?
People die from abortions performed by doctors (who are accountable to licensing boards) with medical training, in medical settings. The best solution to this problem is to outlaw it, so that people performing it aren’t accountable and aren’t necessarily trained and the procedure is done any old place.
Tony, I’m confused. Women dying of botched abortions while in the care of a licensed doctor means…what to you? That doctors who can’t provide late term abortions with good sucess rates should be replaced with more competent individuals? It means that these butchers should have their licenses pulled, and if criminally liable should be thrown in jail. So let’s see… If abortion were illegal, what exactly would be the difference? Women would die from incompetents performing abortions. The only difference would be that they would die in the comission of a felony, rather than a “medical mistake” that gets swept under the rug by medical boards. Here’s a listing of the women who have died from legal abortion. Safe and rare. Sure. And condoms stop HPV. 😛
so that people performing it aren’t accountable and aren’t necessarily trained and the procedure is done any old place. Ooh! Ooh! And with unsterilized eqipment! And sexual harassment!
So let’s see… If abortion were illegal, what exactly would be the difference? Women would die from incompetents performing abortions. The only difference would be that they would die in the comission of a felony, rather than a “medical mistake” that gets swept under the rug by medical boards. AND THEY WON’T EVER FUCK AGAIN, THE SLUTS!!!!
AND THEY WON’T EVER FUCK AGAIN, THE SLUTS!!!! -zuzu I have got to stop reading in class; I almost had to explain my sarcastic laugh. Of course, the answer to this problem is to follow Milton Friedman’s advice and remove artificial government restraints on the reproductive health services market. Flat earth Communists like Tony and his fellow travelers should be affirmatively prevented from disturbing the market (by criminal prosecution, if necessary), and all laws affecting reproductive services other than those pertaining to the safe administration of any medical procedure ought to be repealed. As more people enter the market and compete with each other to provide the best service at the lowest price, we should see even fewer complications from what is already a relatively safe medical procedure. Perhaps Tony hates freedom because he doesn’t believe in the free market, but his argument is confused (or is it deliberately unclear?) enough that it’s possible he’s just uneducated. Three cheers for laissez faire!
ok tony, I’m putting you in charge of compiling the list of women who’ve died in illegal abortions. Get back to us with that, and tell us more about the outrage part.
People die during heart surgery, amputations, aneurysm repair, cancer surgery and spinal-disc surgery, and there’s mistakes done while doing any of those procedures, so let’s not do them. Tony, FYI: botched abortion does not equal incompetent doctor. Although a poor surgeon will make more mistakes (and probably shouldn’t be practicing), even the best doctors make mistakes and, yes, kill patients. Human bodies don’t match those nice, neat anatomical diagrams, nor are they labelled in red/blue/yellow for the convenience of the doctor (and those of you who took biology and dissected anything probably remember poking around and wondering which bit is the liver). Mistakes happen. You really don’t understand that, if abortion were illegal, doctors performing them would not undergo standard training in the techniques of abortion; their mortality stats would not be available to check against normal numbers; more women would self-abort or go to incompetents because they’d have no way of knowing who was competent? Or are you just arguing this way because you know you don’t have a logical leg to stand on?
People die during heart surgery, amputations, aneurysm repair, cancer surgery and spinal-disc surgery, and there’s mistakes done while doing any of those procedures, so let’s not do them. Tony, FYI: botched abortion does not equal incompetent doctor. Although a poor surgeon will make more mistakes (and probably shouldn’t be practicing), even the best doctors make mistakes and, yes, kill patients. Human bodies don’t match those nice, neat anatomical diagrams, nor are they labelled in red/blue/yellow for the convenience of the doctor (and those of you who took biology and dissected anything probably remember poking around and wondering which bit is the liver). Mistakes happen. You really don’t understand that, if abortion were illegal, doctors performing them would not undergo standard training in the techniques of abortion; their mortality stats would not be available to check against normal numbers; more women would self-abort or go to incompetents because they’d have no way of knowing who was competent? Or are you just arguing this way because you know you don’t have a logical leg to stand on?
Tricia, a word of advice from someone who spins for a living: the trouble with that tack is that women have, in fact, died from legal abortions. If your line of argument is “this doesn’t happen,” it only takes one counterexample to undermine your whole argument. Lauren, I forgot about the sterility of the equipment. Although from wat little I’ve read about back-alley abortions, I gather there are better than 50-50 odds that the instruments will be at least as clean as the flatware in your average diner.
So let’s see… If abortion were illegal, what exactly would be the difference? Women would die from incompetents performing abortions. The only difference would be that they would die in the comission of a felony, rather than a “medical mistake” that gets swept under the rug by medical boards. I love this. Because surgeons who perform abortion, like surgeons who perform every other kind of procedure, sometimes malpractice and sometimes lose patients through no fault of their own, the people who need abortion would be best served by making that procedure completely illegal instead of treating it just like every other medical procedure. Also, it doesn’t matter that more women would die, so long as the people who killed them would (theoretically) be punished for reasons totally unrelated to the whole dead-woman thing.
You really don’t understand that, if abortion were illegal, doctors performing them would not undergo standard training in the techniques of abortion; their mortality stats would not be available to check against normal numbers; more women would self-abort or go to incompetents because they’d have no way of knowing who was competent? Oh, he understands it, Ledasmom. He just thinks that it’s a fitting price for those nasty women to pay for trying to get around paying the consequences for their sin. The wages of sin is death, after all.
Hershele said: Of course, that said, more women die from illegal abortions — not to mention labor. Speaking of spin, are you talking about rates of death, or raw death numbers. If you’re talking raw numbers, I’d be interested to see where you got them.
Oh, he understands it, Ledasmom. He just thinks that it’s a fitting price for those nasty women to pay for trying to get around paying the consequences for their sin. The wages of sin is death, after all. zuzu: Pretty soon, that strawman of yours is going to get up and start dancing singing “if I only had a brain”.
Hershele said: Of course, that said, more women die from illegal abortions — not to mention labor. Speaking of spin, are you talking about rates of death, or raw death numbers. If you’re talking raw numbers, I’d be interested to see where you got them. I think Hershele meant that more women die when abortion is illegal than die when it’s not illegal. This is evidenced in maternal mortality rates around the world, and there really isn’t much worth arguing about when it comes to this point. In the United States, more women die from childbirth than from abortion. This is true raw numbers wise, and percentage wise. The current maternal mortality rate is 7 or 8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. However, From 1993 through 1997 (years for which data have not been published previously and the most recent years for which such data are available), 36 women died as a result of complications from known legal induced abortion, and three deaths were associated with known illegal abortion. The annual case-fatality rate of legal induced abortion ranged from 0.3 to 0.8 abortion-related deaths per 100,000 reported legal induced abortions. Since more women die from childbirth, should we illegalize that? Does that make childbirth a universal ill? As a small sidenote, hundreds of men have died from legally using Viagra — far more people in the U.S. have died using Viagra than from having legal abortions. Tony, I look forward to your campaign to pull Viagra off of pharmacy shelves.
Well, if that’s not your argument, Tony, how about you explain the logical chain that says a botched abortion necessarily equals an incompetent provider, and that then says that the number of incompetent providers is greater with legal abortion than illegal abortion, ’cause without those logical links your argument pretty much doesn’t make sense.