I needed that now-banned procedure known as ‘partial-birth’ abortion. Why the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw it was a dark day for American women.

By Ilene Jaroslaw,
President/Chairwoman,
Newsweek
April 23, 2007

April 23, 2007 – It was Friday afternoon at nursery school and Simone just couldn’t wait until Mother’s Day to give me her present, a tote bag printed with a photo of the two of us. When we got home, Toby greeted me with the card he’d made for me in kindergarten. We all looked forward to dad coming home from a business trip. It was the start of a perfect Mother’s Day weekend. I was 40, and I was joyfully pregnant. “It’ll be three kids by next Mother’s Day,” I remember thinking.

When Monday came, I called my doctor for the results of my quadruple screen blood test from the past week, nothing I really sweated because a CVS test a couple months before had told us that our baby’s chromosomes were completely normal. This time though, the doctor said that one of the screening tests concerned him and asked me to go to the hospital right away.

The ultrasound technician’s silence told David and I that something was very wrong. The doctor explained that the baby had anencephaly, a neural tube defect. Large parts of the brain were missing. Babies who survive birth may live days or weeks or months, but they perceive nothing, not even a mother’s touch. There was no mistake, and nothing to be done. I scheduled an abortion. On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, in the early morning, 17 weeks into the pregnancy, David drove me to the operating room and I had my abortion. That night we told Toby and Simone that the baby did not grow all the parts that a baby needs to live, and had died. We hugged and cried.

On Wednesday, April 18, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested that women do not fully comprehend the abortion procedure, and thus may come to regret it. Not this woman. Four years ago, I asked my doctor whether the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act, which was then being considered by Congress, would outlaw the dilation and evacuation procedure he intended to use. Yes, he told me, it would.

Before I became a mother, I’d had two uterine fibroid surgeries that weakened the walls of my uterus. After the second surgery, my obstetrician-gynecologist advised that my children would have to be delivered weeks before my due date by cesarean section to minimize the risk of uterine rupture. Toby was born by early cesarean in 1997, and Simone in 1999 also by early cesarean. Before my abortion, my surgeon knew that my uterus had undergone four prior surgeries, and he also knew that I ached for a third child. I pleaded with him not to do anything in the operating room that could possibly compromise my ability to have another child. My surgeon promised me he would do everything he could to preserve my fertility, and he kept his word. I am forever grateful. And one day my 2 ½-year-old daughter will be too.

My health and future fertility depended on the best available medical care, which in this case meant that I needed the intact dilation and evacuation procedure, or “partial-birth abortion” to use the non-medical, ideological term. This wrongly politicized, legitimate and standard medical procedure results in the removal of the fetus with the least probing and instrumentation, greatly reducing the risk to the woman of bleeding, infection and uterine rupture, all of which may lead to infertility.

Last Wednesday was a dark day for women, and for the men in their lives who care about the health, autonomy, freedom and equality of women in 21st-century America. The high court took a giant step backward when it upheld the federal abortion ban, sweeping aside decades of its own constitutional precedent protecting women’s health, in favor of ideology.

The Supreme Court decision means that judges and lawmakers may now dictate to doctors what they can and cannot do in the operating room. It means that surgeons who want to do what’s best for their patients do so now at the risk of criminal prosecution. And it means that thousands of women will undergo second-best procedures carrying greater risk; many will face dire health consequences, as well as the loss of future fertility. We are now in a country where judges and lawmakers are allowed to tell doctors how best to care for their patients. This cannot stand.

For my daughters Naomi and Simone, for my son Toby’s future wife, and for all girls and women in the United States, today the hard work of repealing the federal abortion ban must begin.

By Anna Quindlen

Newsweek

Jan. 24 issue – There is now only a single abortion clinic in Mississippi. Once there were seven. There are nearly 3 million people living in the state. No other state with only one abortion clinic has as many residents. Mississippi has enacted every restriction on abortion possible within the limits set by the Supreme Court. Among them is a provision that a woman must be counseled in person about the procedure and then wait 24 hours before being permitted to have it performed.

In 2000, researchers published a study of the effects of the waiting period. It showed that the number of later abortions increased sharply among Mississippi residents who relied on local clinics but not among those able to travel to neighboring states. The study showed that after the waiting period went into effect the number of second-trimester procedures in the state rose from 7.5 percent of all abortions to 11.5 percent. That study was done before the legislature passed a bill that would bar all clinic abortions after the first trimester. A federal judge blocked its enforcement, saying he couldn’t understand how it “does anything to further the state’s professed desire to protect the health and safety of women.”

Mandatory counseling includes a lecture that notes that medical benefits may be available for prenatal, childbirth and neonatal care. The woman seeking an abortion must receive a list of services and agencies that could assist her in having a child, including those that handle adoptions.

Mississippi has the highest infant-mortality rate in the nation and ranks 43rd among the 50 states in the number of women who have health insurance, according to a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. In 2004, the state failed to meet national standards on the length of time it took to restore foster children to their birth families and to place a child for adoption.

According to the Census, the average household in Mississippi has an income of just over $31,000 annually, about $10,000 below the national average. According to the Department of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child to age 18 is around $200,000.

The counseling provisions also require that patients in Mississippi be told that abortion may increase the risk of breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute reported last year that there is no scientific evidence to support that contention. The British medical journal The Lancet looked at dozens of studies and concluded there was no link.

Mississippi is one of only two states that require a minor to get the consent of both parents to have an abortion. If the minor has been impregnated by her father, she needs only the consent of her mother.

The state has the highest teen birthrate in America. While nationwide the teenage-pregnancy rate has declined in recent years, in Mississippi it increased. In 2001, nearly 200 babies were born to girls under the age of 15. In 2002, almost 55,000 Mississippi grandparents had primary responsibility for the care of their grandchildren, according to the Child Welfare League of America.

In 2001, 22 out of every thousand children in the state were reported to be abused or neglected. There was a 41 percent increase between 1998 and 2002 in the number of children younger than 18 arrested in the state.

Black residents account for only 37 percent of the state’s population, but for nearly three out of every four abortions.

A typical woman in Mississippi earns 74 cents for every dollar a man makes. A typical black woman in Mississippi earns 79 cents for every dollar a white woman makes. Black children make up more than half of those in foster care and in the state adoption system, according to the Mississippi Department of Human Services.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Mississippi ranks 51st in the percentage of its citizens living above the poverty level. (The District of Columbia was included in the sample.) Mississippi has the highest number of women in prison of any state. Between 1995 and 2003 the percentage of women inmates grew by more than 13 percent.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group supported by foundation and government grants. In its most recent assessment of the overall condition of American women, it named Mississippi the worst state in the country. It was also named the worst state for women in 1998, 2000 and 2002. It ranked 49th in terms of women in elected office, and at the bottom of the list for health and well-being, including the incidence of diabetes and deaths from cancer and heart disease.

The institute ranked Mississippi worst in the nation for reproductive rights.

Protesters have vowed to shut down the state’s sole remaining abortion clinic, which is in Jackson.

Sometimes you don’t even have to state an opinion.

You just have to state the facts.

April 25, 2002

By MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA
HANOVER, N.H. When President Bush convened his advisory panel on bioethics in January, he told those of us serving on it to engage in that age-old technique of intellectual exploration called debate. “That’s what I want,” he said. “You haven’t heard a debate until you have heard Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld go at it.”
So “it was a surprise when, on April 10, the president announced his decision to ban cloning of all kinds. His opinions appeared fully formed even though our panel has yet to prepare a final report and will be voting on the crucial point of biomedical cloning — which produces cells to be used in researching and treating illnesses. While it is true that the president’s position is one held by some of the members of the panel, not all agree.
Most people are now aware that medical scientists put cloning in two different categories. Biomedical cloning is distinct from reproductive cloning, the process by which a new human being might be grown from the genetic material of a single individual. At this point, no scientist or ethicist I know supports reproductive cloning of human beings. The debate is solely about biomedical cloning for lifesaving medical research.
Scientists prefer to call biomedical cloning somatic cell nuclear transfer, because that is what it is. Any cell from an adult can be placed in an egg whose own nucleus has been removed and given a jolt of electricity. This all takes place in a lab dish, and the hope is that this transfer will allow the adult cell to be reprogrammed so that it will form a clump of approximately 150 cells called a blastocyst. This will be harvested for the stem cells it contains.
At this point we encounter a conflation of ideas, beliefs and facts. Some religious groups and ethicists argue that the moment of transfer of cellular material is an initiation of life and establishes a moral equivalency between a developing group of cells and a human being. This point of view is problematic when viewed with modern biological knowledge.
We wouldn’t consider this clump of cells even equivalent to an embryo formed in normal human reproduction. And we now know that in normal reproduction as many as 50 percent to 80 percent of all fertilized eggs spontaneously abort and are simply expelled from the woman’s body. It is hard to believe that under any religious belief system people would grieve and hold funerals for these natural events. Yet, if these unfortunate zygotes are considered human beings, then logically people should.
Moreover, the process of a single zygote splitting to make identical twins can occur until at least 14 days after fertilization. Also, divided embryos can recombine back into one. How could we possibly identify a person with a single fertilized egg?
Modern scientific knowledge of the fertilization process serves as the basis for the British government’s approval of biomedical cloning and embryo research. Britain does not grant moral status to an embryo until after 14 days, the time when all the twinning issues cease and the embryo must be implanted into the uterus to continue developing.
The blastocyst, the biological clump of cells produced in biomedical cloning, is the size of the dot on this i. It has no nervous system and is not sentient in any way. It has no trajectory to becoming a human being; it will never be implanted in a woman’s uterus. What it probably does have is the potential for the cure of diseases affecting millions of people.
When I joined the panel, officially named the President’s Council on Bioethics, I was confident that a sensible and sensitive policy might evolve from what was sure to be a cacophony of voices of scientists and philosophers representing a spectrum of opinions, beliefs and intellectual backgrounds. I only hope that in the end the president hears his council’s full debate.
Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga is director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College.