Forced to abort? Why anti-violence advocates aren’t rushing to criminalize “coerced abortion.”
Lynn Harris, at Salon’s Broadsheet, calls Missouri’s legislative billed on so-called “coerced abortion” a red herring. An excerpt:
Violence against women comes in many forms, and “forced abortion,” such as it is, is only one of them. As covered earlier in Broadsheet, researchers are now beginning to notice and study what’s turning out to be another hallmark of relationship violence: forced pregnancy. As in: abusive partners who tamper with, destroy or otherwise refuse to use contraception (which can lead, obviously, to unplanned pregnancy, along with STIs and other health problems). In fact, advocates now say that teen pregnancy should be considered a canary in the coalmine of partner violence.
As Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund (click here for their campaign against all reproductive coercion) has said, “We need laws that promote violence prevention; train health care providers to assess patients for abuse; ensure women’s access to a full range of reproductive health services; and prevent violence and coercion in the next generation by teaching young people the importance of building healthy relationships.” Not specious “forced abortion” laws or — also pending in the Show-Me-The-Irony state, which also just voted not to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — laws that would allow pharmacist refusal for emergency contraception, or that would criminalize pregnant women who carry to term before overcoming a substance abuse problem.
Read the full story here.
At first he thought I had snuck and got [an] abortion until he saw the papers from the emergency room [explaining that she had a miscarriage. He was like, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew you went and got an abortion. You don’t love me. You don’t care about me. You have killed my baby.”"
September 15th, 2009 at 11:53 am
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