Essence: Texas's Legalized Guilt Trip
Friday, February 24, 2012 at 10:34AM This week, many folks were outraged over a proposed law in Virginia that would have required women seeking abortions to first undergo invasive transvaginal ultrasounds. Politicians wisely ditched that bill -- but earlier this month in Texas, a law similarly regulating abortion procedures actually went into effect. Today in the Lone Star state, any woman seeking an abortion must get a sonogram at least 24 hours in advance -- and although she may decline to look at images of the fetus or hear the heartbeat (both things her doctor must make available), she is required to listen as her doctor describes the sonogram results.
Though it's too soon to track the impact of what's being called “the sonogram law,” pro-lifers believe this new set of procedures will reduce Texas abortions by 30 percent. And while you could argue that at its heart the law has the right intent -- everyone wants to decrease abortions, and some want to ban them outright — Texas is going about it the wrong way. The new law is trying to make a hard decision even harder by tugging on the emotions of a usually scared and confused woman, encouraging her to choose a path for which she's not prepared -- hence her arrival at her doctor’s office in the first place.
There's a reigning belief that women who have abortions do so casually, without giving great weight to the decision; that they slide their legs into stirrups with the same ease they would pop a birth control pill (one they evidently forgot to take); that once the "situation" is "taken care of," it's like the whole thing never happened.
Surely there is a woman for whom this is true. I haven’t met her yet.
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