The Feminist Journal

Women’s reproductive health practices are constantly under attack by legislature by the last people that should be making these decisions, voting bodies made up mostly of men and some women with little to no medical knowledge or understanding in relation to women’s bodies. Instead many of their decisions tend to be made on basis of their own religions and misguided beliefs. Women, and medical professionals, should be the ones to propose, amend and vote on these bills.

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Politicians are often faced with bills and proposals that can be outside their realm of expertise, but they should be obligated by the system to reach out to people whose expertise it is. They should consult neutral experts to get an understanding of what they are being asked to vote about. Instead in many of these situations, but very obviously when Women’s Health Rights are being discussed, many elected officials do not do any research and hold their often-wild misconceptions. Republicans are particularly guilty of following their misinformed, immoral and sometimes baffling ideas when discussing the main topic associated with Women's Reproductive rights: Abortion. Nina Bahadur of The Huffington Post collected several quotes from different Republican politicians that range from confusing, to downright disturbing. Marco Rubio once claimed that women “look forward to having more abortions [and also to be] able to sell that fetal tissue”. E.W. Jackson said that Planned Parenthood, a non-profit women’s health clinic that offers abortions at some of their locations, has been “far more lethal to Black lives than the KKK”.

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While these claims are baffling some politicians have taken it even a step further when asked about the abortion of pregnancies that occur as the result of a rape. Brian Kurcaba believes rape is awful, which is more than some will come out and say, but adds that the “child that could come from [it] is beautiful” without any concern for the added emotional and mental stress put on a victim of rape from being forced to carry and give birth to their attacker’s offspring. However, no quote in the list assembled by Bahadur quite captures the lack of medical knowledge and understanding many politicians today have more than this one from Todd Akin in 2014. In an interview, he claimed to have heard from doctors that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down”.

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While there will always be people who do not base their opinions on fact the true danger comes when those people also hold positions of power it can become dangerous. In 2016 Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a law that is both potentially dangerous and not based on any scientific evidence. The law states that doctors must provide anesthesia to women having an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy or later. This is based on the widely-disputed notion that the fetus can feel pain during the procedure. There is no concrete proof that the fetus feels anything at this point in development so this law is not helping them at all. The consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health Dr. Anne Davis believes that no ethical doctor would give their patient powerful drugs that could harm their health for an unsubstantiated claim. "Imagine that I sit down with a patient and tell her what she can expect and how I'm going to take care of her and somehow I work in, 'Oh, by the way, the state has told me that I have to give this to you?' She asks, 'Why?' And I say, 'There's no benefit to you, but there will be additional risk. How as a doctor do I live with that? This law is about stopping abortion," Davis said. "This is just another measure to deter women from getting abortions." (Fantz)

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Davis’ claim that this law is more about preventing abortion all together is supported by other details of the law. Anesthesia is not cheap, driving the cost of getting an abortion up beyond that it would have been before, but the bill has no fiscal note attached to it per Utah Health Department spokesperson Tom Hudachko who added that the department did not have the funding to cover the cost. Being responsible for this extra cost, and the potential health risks it could pose, could only serve to deter women in the state of Utah from receiving abortions even if they wanted them. (Fantz)

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This is not the only time Herbert has passed a law with little to no scientific backing in reference to abortions. In March 2017, he signed into law a bill that requires doctors to inform women that a medication-induced abortion can be halted after taking one of the two pills involved in the process. It names the hormone progesterone and claims that taking it in pill form can stop an abortion after the first pill, mifepristone that blocks progesterone and breaks down the lining of the uterus, despite there being no medically accepted evidence that it would work. Essentially this bill is requiring doctors to lie to their patients and give them faulty medical information. Healthcare is one place where this kind of breach in trust cannot be tolerated because of how it effects the patient’s health directly.

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These are only two out of many laws across the country that were created and passed despite the lacking medical accuracy. It is unacceptable for doctors to be forced to administers unnecessary drugs, or to give misleading information to their patients. The fact that bills like this have been signed into law in the past proves that there needs to be a standard that such bills are held to requiring them to conform to current medical and scientific research.