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Thursday, January 23, 2003Abortion rights advocates, however, said that in a nation in which 44 percent of women will have at least one abortion, the dwindling number of trained providers is tantamount to a denial of basic health services. "Even though the goal is to make abortion less necessary, reproductive health care is totally incomplete without the component of pregnancy termination and abortion," said Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. So, what is their solution? To force people to learn to do the procedure: "We've reached a point in our country where ideology is determining health care," said Jane van Dis, president of the Medical Students for Choice chapter at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine. "It has slipped out of the curriculum." The organization is lobbying for mandatory abortion education in medical schools and in residency programs, aiming to return abortion to the realm of mainstream medicine. "This has been so politicized there is now an unnatural segregation between abortion care and regular medical care," said Robert Roose, 23, who recently revived a chapter of the group at George Washington University Medical School. It’s become politicized all right, but that isn’t necessarily why it’s slipping out of the curriculum. The thirty years since Roe v. Wade has seen a revolution in neonatal technology. Premature babies that would have died at birth thirty years ago are thriving and living today. Heck, now we even have a speciality devoted to maternal-fetal medicine, that specifically views the fetus as a patient. We perform corrective surgeries (warning:graphic photos in both cases) on fetuses while they’re still in the womb. It’s much harder now than it was thirty years ago for physicians to deny the humanity of the fetus. I can understand why abortion advocates deny rights to the fetus, despite all of the advances in fetal medicine. They either don’t consider it fully human, or they consider the mother’s rights more important. But I don’t understand why they can’t respect the right of full grown physicians and medical students to defer from doing something they find morally reprehensible. UPDATE: Here's a look at a less-than-noble raison detat for abortion: But for Roe v. Wade, millions more children would have been born into poverty, where they would be greeted by Congress and the state legislators who failed to provide money for day care, health care, education or job training. Millions more would have joined the ranks of welfare recipients and the homeless, the populations of prisons, prostitutes and drug addicts. All that, simply to pander to the religious beliefs of a minority who persist in claiming that a collection of cells, without reason or awareness, is human life with something called a soul. Jeesh. Margaret Sanger would have been proud. UPDATE II: A civil discourse on the topic. posted by Sydney on 1/23/2003 12:19:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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