Virginia Republicans Prepping to Push Women into Back Alley Abortions

As a pro-choice woman, I've been in a position to hear a lot of stories about abortion. The earliest story I remember (and the one which I pinpoint as the reason I'm pro-choice) is that of my Great Aunt Katherine. She was young and newly married when the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband threatened to abandon her if she got pregnant. Of course, he would use no contraception and birth control as we know it today was not legal and available to women at this time. It wasn't long before she ended up pregnant.

Fearing the worst - that she would be left as a single mother, destitute and with no education or job during the Great Depression - my Aunt did the only thing she thought she could do. She got out a coat hanger and gave herself an abortion. She nearly bled to death and then spent months recovering from lead poisoning as a result of the hanger being painted with lead paint. The only reason she survived was that her sister was a nurse.

In college I knew a girl who tried to drink her pregnancy into a miscarriage, and when that didn't work she tried chugging bleach. Apparently this is a fairly common activity in states like Texas where teenagers have to get parental permission. I once spoke to a nurse who worked in a Dallas, TX Emergency Room who said that she saw a dozen cases like this a week from high school girls, undocumented immigrants, and those too poor to afford abortions when the GOP has required a waiting period.

In a report from 2006, the Guttmacher Institute shows that countries where abortion is illegal have high maternal death rates, whereas countries where abortion is legal have low maternal death rates.

ABORTION LAWS, RATES AND MATERNAL MORTALITY
Country	Abortion rate per 1,000 women, 15-44	Maternal Deaths per 100,000 live births
Where abortion is Broadly Permitted
Australia	22	6
England/Wales	16	10
Finland	10	6
Netherlands	7	10
United States	21	12
Where Abortion is Severely Restricted
Brazil	38	260
Chile	45	33
Colombia	34	120
Dominican Republic	44	110
Mexico	23	65
Peru	52	240
Note: Most recent data available. Sources: Abortion data—AGI, Sharing Responsibility, Appendix Table 4, p. 54; Finer LB and Henshaw SK, Abortion incidence and services in the United States in 2000, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2003, 35(1):6-15. Maternal mortality rates—United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), The World's Women 2000: Trends and Statistics, New York: UNSD, 2000/updated 2002.

So, when I read today that Republicans in Virginia want to use an emergency rule to close 17 of the state's 21 abortion clinics, I was left wondering why Republicans want to put policies in place that will result in dead women.

Virginia Republicans are now following suit. Last month, the Virginia legislature passed a bill requiring the state’s 21 abortion clinics to be regulated like hospitals. Currently, the clinics — which handle only first-trimester abortions — are subject to “the same regulations as physician practices that perform any number of invasive procedures” like cataract surgery, spinal taps, or plastic surgery. But the health bill now before Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) mandates hospital regulations that “would compel them to undergo retrofitting of their facilities that at least 17 of them could not afford” and that would ultimately force them to close.

But to make sure of this result, the anti-choice bill also “triggers the state’s emergency regulatory process,” meaning that the new regulations must be written “no more than 280 days” after McDonnell signs the bill into law. This process would give the State Board of Health only one chance to weigh in on regulations that “longtime opponent of abortion” McDonnell will essentially write, alter, and implement however he chooses

Some would like to believe that Republicans are using magical thinking - that if abortion were illegal, no woman would get one. I'm not one of those people. I think many Republicans deliberately pass laws like this with full knowledge that many women will have abortions anyway - and that some of them will die as a result. I think many Republicans believe that these women deserve to die for what they view as their transgressions.

In fact, just to put the magical thinking to bed once and for all - in case some Republicans did fall into that category - according to Guttmacher,

Prior to the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, illegal abortion in the United States was common; some 700,000 to 800,000 abortions were estimated to have taken place annually in the 1950s and 1960s.

And just in case you're thinking that abortion is something that happens to people you don't know? One in three American women will have an abortion in their lifetime - and many of those abortions are for women who have already had one child. Abortions aren't just for the girl rumored to sleep around in high school. They are for your mom, your sister, your niece, your aunt, grandma, great grandma, cousin, friend, etc.

Someone should inform Republicans in Virginia that it's indeed very likely that their family members - women that they love - have had abortions. I would like to think that then they would want to help prevent unnecessary deaths, but who knows these days, with Republicans suggesting we shoot undocumented people like feral pigs, and send mentally ill people to die in Siberia.