My friend—let’s call her Amy—hasn’t had a period in six months. It’s not unusual for her; she’s a very athletic, very strong young woman and it just happens sometimes. She never knows if or when she’ll have her next period, but until now, this has never been an issue.
But it is now. Why might that be?
Amy lives in Arizona. And Arizona’s legislature has decided that, as women must be incapable of making decisions regarding their own health, bodies and families, they can decide exactly how to define pregnancy and what a woman can do about it.
In the last month, Arizona has passed three laws that push the boundaries of Roe v. Wade to the fullest extent possible.
In a nutshell, a woman is pregnant before conception; her doctor is free to lie to her about the viability of the fetus; and, should she figure out something’s wrong with her or the fetus after about 18 weeks, there’s no way she can terminate the pregnancy to preserve her own life or well-being unless she is actively dying.
Sounds crazy, right?
Arizona is turning into the perfect example of what not to do for women’s reproductive health.
Let’s start with the first bill: the 18th Week Bill. Among other things, this bill redefines when life begins. Specifically, the bill defines the beginning of life as the first day of a woman’s last menstrual cycle, which usually occurs two weeks before conception.
This sort of estimation has been used by doctors for decades to estimate the length of gestation, but in the medical community, the “last period” method is precisely that: an estimate. It wouldn’t hold true for all cases.
In Amy’s case, for example, a doctor would be an idiot to use her last menstrual cycle. But should she become pregnant tomorrow, Arizona’s new law would state that she was already six months pregnant. This puts her well over the 20-week limit established by Roe v. Wade.
Next up, let’s have a look at the Wrongful Birth Bill. With this bill in place, a doctor can not be sued for malpractice for withholding information that might lead a woman to seek an abortion, something which literally goes against the Hippocratic Oath, which states: “I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required.”
Not “the measures I feel are required.” All measures.
It does a fetus with a serious genetic or congenital deformity no benefit if the physician does not at least inform its parents of what will be required to treat its illnesses or help provide some quality of life.
As an example, let’s speed up Amy’s hypothetical pregnancy a couple of months. She’s in her doctor’s office. Amy, being of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, is very concerned that she and her husband might produce a child with Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative condition that almost universally results in the slow, painful death of its victims within 4 years.
Her doctor performs the tests Amy has requested, and he finds that the fetus shows signs of Tay-Sachs. But he’s against abortion, so when she asks, he lies, telling her she’s going to have a perfectly healthy little boy—no abnormalities in the genes whatsoever.
Three years later, Amy and her husband are falling apart as they watch their son deteriorate. He can’t speak, walk or even smile. Their little boy is in constant pain, and the measures they take to preserve his life or ease his suffering have put them tens of thousands of dollars in debt. But they can’t sue the doctor, despite the fact that his negligence caused all this suffering, and they still end up with a dead child a year later.
Finally, we’ll look at the last piece of legislation, which all but outlaws abortions beyond 20 weeks, regardless of the health of the mother and fetus. While there are emergency exceptions wherein death is imminent, the law makes it virtually impossible to terminate a pregnancy right around the time most serious genetic and congenital defects become detectable.
Continuing our example, let’s say Amy’s doctor ’fesses up about the Tay-Sachs test results at 21 weeks. Amy and her husband, distraught, seek to end the pregnancy to protect their family; they don’t want their son to live a short, painful life with no chance of recovery. But because Amy is healthy and her fetus shows no signs of distress, there is nothing they can do. In order to end the pregnancy, they would need to leave the state or procure an illegal abortion.
Maybe this is just the educated woman in me talking, but I’ve come to the conclusion that literally everything in these laws is bad for women. Eliminating safe avenues for abortion has traditionally resulted in women mutilating their bodies out of desperation—whether by chemical agents, wire hangers or stairwells.
Changing the cutoff for abortion to more or less 18 weeks is likely to result in similar behavior. And allowing doctors to lie to or mislead their patients violates patients’ trust and denies them the opportunity to make informed decisions.
What Arizona is doing by enacting these laws is nothing short of reckless endangerment. While it’s too late to keep the legislation from becoming law there, we should learn from their outright idiocy and ensure that no such legislation passes anywhere else.
One state is already too many.