Abortion, necrophilia, and the D&E ban

Martha Mendoza is a Pullitzer Prize winning journalist and mother of four. Between a Woman and Her Doctor is Mendoza's account of how mystics and moral busybodies turned her personal tragedy into a nightmare.

Mendoza's ordeal began when her doctor announcend that her eagerly-anticipated baby was dead inside her:

I didn’t realize that pressures well beyond my uterus, beyond the too bright, too-loud, too-small ultrasound room, extending all the way to boardrooms of hospitals, administrative sessions at medical schools and committee hearings in Congress, were going to deepen and expand my sorrow and pain.

On November 6, 2003, President Bush signed what he called a “partial birth abortion ban,” prohibiting doctors from committing an “overt act” designed to kill a partially delivered fetus. The law, which faces vigorous challenges, is the most significant change to the nation’s abortion laws since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled abortion legal in Roe v. Wade in 1973. One of the unintended consequences of this new law is that it put people in my position, with a fetus that is already dead, in a technical limbo.

The effects of the D&E ban were far-reaching. Even under the ban, Mendoza was legally entitled to have the dead fetus surgically removed. However, she found it very difficult to find a doctor who was qualified to perform the procedure. This healthcare gap is partly due to the ban. Residency programs are reluctant to waste time teaching a procedure that's usually illegal.

Mendoza doesn't says so, but I suspect cowardice and intimidation also have a lot to do with the shortfall. Many hospitals are businesses or religious charities. The D&E is neither glamorous, traditionally virtuous, nor lucrative. Why would we expect such outfits to risk the ire or Operation Rescue?

Mendoza couldn't find a provider right away. Her own doctor wasn't qualified to assist because she had been trained at a Catholic hospital. Mendoza had the bad luck of picking and OB-GYN who had been deliberately kept ignorant because of the ideological orientation of her training program. So, Mendoza was forced to carry a dead fetus for a week while she searched for a doctor qualified to remove the tiny corpse.

Bush claims that Republicans care for the weakest members of society. Somehow, they appear to have overlooked women like Mendoza.

[Via Respectful of Otters, and Pharyngula.]

Comments

[Neil Sinhababu]

Just wondering, but why is necrophilia in the title of this post? If it's because a dead person is passing through a vagina, that seems to imply that all birth is sex.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Hey, Neil. Thanks for the comment. I didn't see it until now. The reason "necrophilia" is in the title is because I think that pro-lifers (figuratively) fetishize the fetus. Some people have such a disproportionate attachment to fetal life vs. ordinary human life that it becomes like a fetish.

Analogously, some people are so turned on by shoes that they lose sight of human sexiness. That's more or less the clinical definition of a fetish. I mean, shoes can be sexy, but have some perspective.