Life, Death and Politics

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/life_death_and_politics/

Life, Death and Politics

Posted on Apr 24, 2007

By Marie Cocco

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At 20 weeks, McNichol had an abortion using a procedure she says fit the description of the intact extraction method that the U.S. Supreme Court banned last week. Afterward, she learned her condition was placental abruption—the placenta, which nourishes the fetus, was breaking up and sloughing off from her uterus. The condition can cause a woman to bleed to death. “It’s one of the causes of maternal death,” McNichol says.

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The anti-abortion movement has fooled the country into believing that all the Supreme Court did last week was ban a particularly odious and medically unwarranted method of abortion. That is the least of it. The court emphatically said that Congress—not doctors or patients—can decide what’s best for women’s health. The high court ruled that when there is “medical uncertainty,” lawmakers can decide what course of treatment is, or isn’t, legal.

We are all Terri Schiavo now. We all can be subject to second-guessing of our family’s medical choices from the halls of Congress.

McNichol’s doctors couldn’t diagnose what was wrong. How could the justices? How could 535 members of the House and Senate—448 of them men—prescribe the best medicine for a woman they’ve never met, let alone examined with a trained eye?

“I have to tell you, I asked everyone—what should I do?” McNichol says. “I never thought about calling up my representative in Congress to ask them what to do. There was no way that someone who has any other agenda but my well-being could make that decision. It wasn’t a political decision. It was a medical, personal decision.”

It is the sort of decision American women no longer can assume they are free to make.