Tuesday, November 09, 2004

The Post-Roe Era



What will happen if the fundamentalists force Bush to appoint enough anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court? Some people at the Planned Parenthood Federation have been thinking about it in some detail:

For the past four years, Williams and her group's 13 other members have explored the post-Roe challenge on many fronts.
Among other options, they've looked at maintaining services by strengthening state laws and the possibility of providing abortions in places where federal laws don't apply.
To prepare for what would likely be a health epidemic, they've urged physicians to get special training so they know how to treat infections, uncontrolled bleeding and other life-threatening complications caused by botched abortions.


The ideas they toss around are trying to see that states have clear pro-choice laws in their books and looking into alternative sites for abortion providers such as offshore facilities and Native American reservations.

The major problem will face the poor women who now have 57% of all abortions in this country. They would be unable to go abroad or to a nice, discreet provider that daddy or mummy golfs with. It is among this group that we are most likely to find the dead in a post-Roe era. If you don't believe that there will be deaths, consider this:
Abortion rates were higher in the United States before the procedure was legal, Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has said.
More than 200 U.S. women died each year from the complications of illegal abortions in the decade before Roe vs. Wade, Stanley Henshaw, a senior fellow at The Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, has said.