Oklahoma! Oh No!
What. The. Fuck.
When I stop to think it over, I honestly can’t say which of Oklahoma’s new anti-choice laws are more repellent and horrifying.
On the one hand, OK House Bill 2780 requires doctors show an ultrasound and describe fetal development to each and every woman seeking the procedure. On the other hand, OK House Bill 2656 protects physicians from lawsuits for omitting facts which, if disclosed, could have contributed to a woman deciding to get an abortion. With so much paternalistic, condescending fuckwittery to consider, it’s just impossible to choose.
Well, wait. Let’s just make sure I’m not overreacting.
First, we have a bunch of fucking politicians and anti-choice, anti-woman pussy police inserting themselves into the procedure room and dictating what a doctor must tell his patients, whether or not his patients want to hear it. I find it rather difficult to believe that any woman who finds herself in a clinic actually requesting an abortion doesn’t realize that there is, in fact, a theoretical human floating around in there. On the contrary, that’s the goddamn point, isn’t it? I’m sure that were I say, raped by some asshole on a date, there is nothing I’d rather look at 10 weeks later than his uninvited spawn swishing around my abdominal cavity.
According to Tony Lauinger of Oklahomans for Life, “‘Many women suffer severe emotional trauma as a result of having had an abortion. . . . With this, women will have the full benefit of having all the information. We believe the effort not only saves the lives of unborn children, but it spares women from emotional or psychological distress that follows an abortion.’” It must be nice not have to worry about severe emotional trauma of having a vaginal ultrasound following a rape; or the psychological distress of being forced to carry an unwanted child; or hell, even the psychological distress of being born an unwanted child.
Before ol’ Tony gets his hair mussed in this information free-for-all, though, let’s take a moment to ponder law number 2. THIS law specifically protects doctors who decline to tell a patient bad news about her fetus, if said news might have lead her to get an abortion. So, doc looks into the magic ultrasound window and sees that oops, the baby has no brain? Well, best not to worry the pretty lady’s head about that. She can just find out later, when her doomed child is born.
I guess not all information is created equal, huh?
Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? I mean, not only doesn’t it interfere with a woman’s right to choose; it even succeeds in denying her the right to plan. There are plenty of families out there who would choose to continue a pregnancy under circumstances that I would not–more power to them. Those families, though, deserve the right to plan: whether that be finding the best surgeons; or finding the best schools and therapists; or making fucking funeral arrangements.
Christ on a crutch.
I don’t know that you can say that one law is really worse than the other–they’re both sufficiently disgusting that it makes me want to throat punch someone. I don’t know how a bunch of morons in Oklahoma City all got together and appointed themselves Physicians by Proxy to every woman in their state. I don’t know that I care. I do know that it is disgusting to me that every time a sperm meets an egg the (un)fortunate hostess is suddenly public property–as though being a chick didn’t make one’s property public enough.
Can you imagine a circumstance where a law would be passed that allowed a doctor to omit key diagnostic information about a male patient’s condition? Or a law that required that not only did man have a particular procedure done prior to another, but also required that he receive a lecture on the procedure on the auxiliary procedure?
Yeah. Me neither.
