Today is a bad day for Oklahoman women, families and privacy advocates. As reported, the Oklahoma legislature overrode Governor vetoes of two disturbing, highly invasive and restrictive anti-abortion bills, thereby passing these measures into State law.
for rape or incest victims, for those choosing to end pregnancies due to severe fetal anomalies, or or for those choosing abortion because of life threatening complications.
HB 2780 is the most hostile ultrasound law in the country. It forces women to undergo an unnecessary medical procedure, to observe the ultrasound monitor and to listen to a description of the heart, limbs and organs of fetus - all within an hour of an abortion. There is no exclusion
The second bill, HB 2656, permits doctors to withhold from parents vital information about the health of their unborn baby or of the mother. Under this law, doctors who intentionally withhold information from expecting parents, for example about terminal birth defects, will be protected...regardless of the serious emotional, physical and financial suffering they cause.
As described in one frightening example , "A lab employee who discovers a pregnant woman has breast cancer could withhold that information, because chemotherapy may cause the termination of a pregnancy."
I agree with Gov. Brad Henry, who bravely and rightly vetoed both bills last week who is quotes as saying, “It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient.”
In a state like Maine, laws like this seem almost unthinkable. But they are a lesson to us, about the lengths abortion opponents will go to to prevent women from exercising their Constitutionally protected right to control their reproductive health.
It seems, from these laws, that the health of the fetus doesn't matter. The health of the mother doesn't matter. The ethics of the doctors don't matter. And, certainly, the Constitutional privacy rights of the mother are dispensable.
What can we take from today's disastrous result?
We should all be outraged; we should be forewarned; and we should recommit to protecting women's right to choose.
We can also follow closely and support legal and legislative challenges to anti-choice laws.
