Let Women Have an Informed Choice
On Good Friday, Governor Northam signed the ironically entitled “Reproductive Health Act,” which strips away common-sense, critical protections for both unborn babies and their mothers. Specifically, this legislation removes basic health and safety regulations for abortion facilities, allows nurse practitioners and midwives to conduct invasive abortion procedures, rolls back building safety standards in abortion clinics that are required of other outpatient facilities, eliminates virtually all requirements of informed consent prior to an abortion including an ultrasound, and eliminates the 24-hour waiting period between viewing the ultrasound and having the abortion.
It’s hard for me to comprehend why the Left thinks it isn’t necessary for abortion facilities to be required to maintain the same fundamental health and safety regulations as other outpatient surgery centers and hospitals in Virginia. Equally baffling is that these same facilities are no longer going to be required to have doctors perform abortion procedures. However, it’s the elimination of the ultrasound requirement followed by a 24-hour waiting period – both benign and nonintrusive measures – that make me question the true motives of the Left, and here’s why…
The legal and ethical doctrine of informed consent actually encourages those undergoing medical procedures to familiarize themselves with the procedure and the associated risks, and ultrasounds provide the perfect means for supplying this important information to women before they have an abortion. Affirmation for this assertion is garnered from the creator of the three and four-dimensional obstetric ultrasound, Stuart Campbell, who stated that the sonogram requirement “equips a woman with the tools to make her own decision as to when life begins.” Moreover, evidence demonstrates that women who view ultrasound images of their unborn child prior to an abortion are less likely to go through with the procedure than those who do not view the image, and states with ultrasound requirements have abortion rates lower than the national average. So, please explain to me, why ultrasounds are not a good idea…
This leads me to the other dilemma. What is wrong with requiring a woman to wait 24-hours – one day – after viewing an ultrasound image of her unborn child before making the life altering decision to terminate her pregnancy? There are many who believe that this time period won’t make a difference – that nothing is going to change the mother’s mind – but this isn’t necessarily true. Besides, if these folks are right, and waiting 24-hours won’t change the woman’s mind, then what harm would it do to wait?
Pregnancy Centers across the country are filled with stories where a mom viewed an ultrasound and chose to keep her precious child. In fact, my local Pregnancy Center in Edinburg, Virginia, which has been run by an amazingly wonderful woman named Jean for 25 years, recently ran a heartwarming story in their newsletter relaying this type of story. Jean was contacted by a former client who had come into the center many years ago planning to abort her daughter. After viewing her unborn child on an ultrasound, the client left the Center but was unable to stop thinking of her baby’s beating heart and decided to have the baby. Today, the “daughter” is married and has a son of her own. In the end, viewing one ultrasound resulted in the precious gift of two babies!
Sadly, there are just as many stories of women who weren’t afforded the opportunity to view an ultrasound and then contemplate the life altering decision of having an abortion. My dear friend, whom I will refer to as Jill out of respect for her privacy, recently shared with me that she had an abortion when she was in high school in the 1980’s. Jill was young, unable to care for a baby on her own, and living in a chaotic environment with her parents who struggled to just get along with one another. To top it all off, Jill didn’t have the best relationship with her mother. Because of the stress at home, and a combination of pressure from her parents and a fear of disappointing them, Jill believed terminating her pregnancy was her only option – and that’s what she did.
Because she was young and had very little life experience, Jill didn’t completely understand or anticipate the lasting emotional and physical repercussions of having an abortion. Now, thirty years later, Jill still carries enormous guilt and regret for this very difficult decision. Jill also didn’t know that she would always wonder who that child would be today or what great accomplishments he or she might have achieved had this precious child been given the blessing of LIFE. In fact, with sadness and remorse, Jill said to me, “Every August til this day, I think of how old my baby would have been – 30 years old this year. I took a life. No matter how you look at it. A life was created that I ended.”
For Jill, there was no ultrasound or waiting period – no opportunity to see the heartbeat or view the image of her unborn child. She wasn’t given that one day to seriously contemplate her options based on informed consent. Because of this, Jill will never know if having an ultrasound and then waiting 24-hours would have made a difference – at a minimum she and her unborn baby should have been given this option.
Today, Jill is an amazing mom to four intelligent, kind, and considerate children, and I am enormously blessed to have her as a friend. I thank Jill from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to share her story with all of you – it took immense courage on her part, and I pray sharing this will help her to heal and shed some of the guilt she still feels. I hope hearing Jill’s story will encourage all of us to be more understanding and compassionate toward women who have made this very difficult decision.
Most of us make life altering decisions with thoughtful consideration using as much data as we can possibly gather to make an informed decision. We laboriously research what refrigerator or heat pump to buy; we research and test drive car after car before buying one; we look at countless numbers of houses before making that big purchase, yet for some reason, the Left would have us believe that waiting 24-hours before terminating a pregnancy – taking the life of an unborn child -- is unreasonable. What the Left fails to understand, however, is this -- if we buy a refrigerator or a heat pump and it doesn’t work, we can return it. If we buy a car or a house and decide it just isn’t the right fit for our needs, we can sell it and buy a new one. But, if a woman has an abortion and regrets her decision afterward, there is no turning back for her. The repercussions are lifelong and everlasting for both the mother and her unborn child. There needs to be more concern among the Left for the lives of both these individuals than for the frivolous purchase of materialistic objects.
Without a doubt, deciding whether to abort a child is one of the most difficult decisions a woman will ever make, and we should find compassion and empathy in our hearts for all of the women like Jill who had to make this painful choice. To this end, I offer the sage words my 80 year old father offered to a family friend who was in a similar situation, “I can’t promise that you will regret having an abortion, but I can promise you that you will never regret having the child.”
