Letter to the Editor / ACLU meeting
At a recent ACLU/NOW forum there was a discussion of the newest abortion legislation awaiting Gov. DeSantis’s likely signature. Any abortion at or after 15 menstrual weeks would be outlawed unless a fetus with anomalies were medically determined to be unable to ever survive.
I am a high-risk pregnancy physician who has devoted a long career to finding ways to save fetal lives or to effect changes before birth that would improve their lives throughout their lifespans. However, when serious problems emerge that cannot be reversed, I have witnessed the agony women and their partners go through while making complex personal decisions about whether to continue their pregnancies (emphasis on their). This process is further complicated today by politicians who draft abortion rules based on their own, often religious, ideas of when life starts, or pseudoscience about the timing of fetal cardiac or neurological function. Yet, this is exactly what is happening in Florida and elsewhere – sometimes accompanied by punishment for those seeking abortion or for providers doing them.
What will happen from these misguided deterrents? They will not stop determined women from discontinuing their pregnancies, sometimes by desperate means. Prior to Roe v Wade, as a fourth-year medical student in a large NYC hospital I saw many women die in a special section designated for infectious complications from “illegal” abortions.
So, in Florida, while some legislators are protecting, no matter the circumstances, someone else’s 15 week, 2 ounce, fetuses, we could lose many women who, by any definition, are living and breathing human beings. Carried to extremes in other states, removing a small cluster of embryonic cells from the uterus would be a criminal act.
This clear intrusion into women’s rights should never have become a political issue. But it has, and it needs to be countered by appealing to the compassion and, importantly, reason of voters and their representatives.
John Hobbins MD
Key West/Denver
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