and other countries. Fetuses would still be aborted as it is driven underground and doctors and daughters and wives would be made criminals and many of those daughters and wives and sisters would die.
In fact it would probably be WORSE than pre-Roe America.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080821212542AAKIWRMIt's important to remember that abortions go on whether legal or not. Before Roe v. Wade authorities never pulled dead rich women from back alleys. Sadly, it was always the poor that suffered. The affluent had their doctors do it anyway in the comfort and safety of their doctor’s office.
I remember before Roe v. Wade when my mother, grandmother, and another woman were at our kitchen table. They had just come back from a funeral of a friend who was a victim of a botched abortion. With tears streaming down my grandmothers face she chokingly said, "It's a damn shame that we live in a country where dogs receive better treatment than a woman."
My father drove an ambulance in Washington D.C. before R v. W. He and my mother cried when it passed as it meant my father wouldn’t have to look at those horrid scenes from botched abortions anymore.
Back then the pillars of the community always knew the abortion doctors that would do it. They made sure they were around. Not just to take care of slip ups at home but more importantly, to take care of their little secrets. The local Sheriff knew all about it too. But if he wanted to win his next election then he’d better watch his P’s and Q’s. Get it? Meanwhile, the sheriff helped pull injured and dead poor women out from back alleys. It wasn’t right that the poor suffered while the affluent didn’t. That scenario is one of many reasons R v. W passed.
The problem with contemporary views on abortion is the element of time. People have forgotten or are too young to know what went on before Roe v. Wade. And the GOP isn’t going to remind us either. Against our best interest, they use the issue to stir our emotions in order to sucker us for our votes.
Pro-Choice is Pro-Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/views/03essa.html?_r=2&ref=viewsESSAY
Repairing the Damage, Before Roe By WALDO L. FIELDING, M.D.
Published: June 3, 2008
With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside.
When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe “bad old days.” Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.
I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals.
There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done.
The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.
This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available.
The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it.
We did not have ultrasound, CT scans or any of the now accepted radiology techniques. The woman was placed under anesthesia, and as we removed the metal piece we held our breath, because we could not tell whether the hanger had gone through the uterus into the abdominal cavity. Fortunately, in the cases I saw, it had not.
However, not simply coat hangers were used.
Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.
Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart.
MORE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092602833.htmlA RIGHT AND THE RIGHT
If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You ThinkBy Linda Hirshman
Sunday, September 28, 2008
In the 1980s, when abortion was severely limited in then-West Germany, border guards sometimes required German women returning from foreign trips to undergo vaginal examinations to make sure that they hadn't illegally terminated a pregnancy while they were abroad. According to news stories and other accounts, the guards would stop young women and ask them about drugs, then look for evidence of abortion, such as sanitary pads or nightgowns, in their cars, and eventually force them to undergo a medical examination -- as West German law empowered them to do.
Sounds like a nightmare of a police state, doesn't it? Like something that could never happen in this day and age -- and certainly not in the United States? But depending upon the outcome of this presidential election, it could happen here. This is how.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes abortion, believing that life begins at conception. Imagine that he's elected to the White House and, not long after, one of the aging Supreme Court justices dies or resigns. President McCain appoints a suitably conservative replacement, and a complaisant or cowed Senate confirms the nomination. Then, an ambitious district attorney in Alabama, Delaware or any one of more than a dozen other states with old abortion laws still on the books or a new, untested abortion restriction prosecutes a local clinic for performing the procedure. (Legal scholars pretty much agree that laws from before Roe v. Wade can be revived.) The clinic goes to federal court; after appeals, the case goes to the Supreme Court, which votes 5-4 to overturn Roe. And we're back to the '60s .
Well, that wouldn't be so bad, you may think. Some states (or even cities and counties) will offer abortion, and others won't. Women will just have to go to New York or someplace else if they want or need to end a pregnancy. A lot of states had pretty liberal laws in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. Even Georgia, one of the two states involved in that case, allowed some abortions for the health of the mother.
But it's not 1972. The climate then was one of growing sympathy for women seeking abortion, triggered in part by stories of those who sought one after realizing that their children would be deformed by the anti-morning-sickness drug thalidomide. Social liberalism was rising; religions weren't much engaged in politics. Today, the politics of abortion have changed. In addition to old laws that would spring back up should Roe be reversed, the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute lists four states -- Louisiana, Missisippi, North and South Dakota -- as having trigger laws explicitly aimed at making abortion criminal upon Roe' s demise, and seven others that have committed to acting to the extent that the court may allow.
The trigger laws are much harsher than the pre- Roe laws; Louisiana's, for instance, would allow abortion only in case of a threat to the mother's life or to a life-sustaining organ. In 1972, roughly 40 percent of the women who got abortions in the United States did so outside their state of residence. There are now more than a million abortions a year. Can you imagine how many women will travel elsewhere if their home states prohibit abortion unless the mother's life is at risk?
MORE
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
