As an aside, I like the start of her column, in which she gives the lie to the old feminist bumper sticker about abortion becoming a sacrament if men got pregnant. I've always thought that formulation got it precisely wrong, as Ms. Knight explains:
I think we can assume that if men gave birth, the NHS would find itself providing four-poster beds with goosedown pillows, “sexy” cars to serve as ambulances, comely midwives with soothing bedside manners, and pain relief on tap – none of this nonsense about pushing.But then she's on to her main point:
Equally, if said men found themselves in need of an emergency abortion, I don’t expect their doctors would chuck some kind of horror-pill at them and tell them to go home and sit on the loo until the foetus was expelled. And yet government advisers are, as we speak, paving the way to make DIY abortions “easier” for women. I like “easier”. It’s a bit like the NHS providing penknives and Savlon to anyone who fancies a caesarean.Given this kind of thing, it's probably best not to give the NHS ideas, but let's not go off on another tangent so soon:
Nobody thinks, “When I start having sex, I’ll have loads of terminations, hooray.” Abortion isn’t nice, and I’m talking about women now, not about foetuses. But the idea that it should be made even worse seems incredible to me.Forget the fact that the abortion pill is “safe” and “effective”, and rather imagine the mother of four who simply can’t contemplate another child. She’s been to the clinic and taken her first pill, and she doesn’t feel great. She supervises the homework, puts another batch of laundry on, sorts the children’s tea, bathtime, bedtime, then she swallows the second pill and goes to her bathroom.
I mean, if that woman was your worst enemy, you’d break into her house to rescue her, or at least hold her hand. And in the morning she’s expected to get up as though nothing had happened and get on with life, with nary a look back at the lavatory pan. I know we’re “copers”, but this is ridiculous. It is also completely obscene.
Indeed it is. Yet that obscene policy is the same one Planned Parenthood --hopping back over the Big Pond to the US now-- thinks is good enough for American women --against FDA protocol, and in spite of the fact that at least 6 women are known to have died from using RU-486 in the past 3 years --4 of them having received their dose at PP clinics.
Because mifepristone, which breaks down the uterine lining in order to starve the fetus, can cause severe bleeding and other life-threatening side effects, the FDA's guidelines state that both mifepristone and a second drug called misoprostol that induces labor and expels the fetus should be taken orally within two days of each other "under a physician's supervision"--that is, at a doctor's office.Not that we should care: it's only women. And not just adult women, either. The information comes from Charlotte Allen's, "Planned Parenthood's Unseemly Empire," in which she documents Planned Parenthood's "insouciance" in reporting suspected incidence of sexual abuse. She includes the dramatic case of Adam Gault:
Planned Parenthood, which had been running its own clinical tests on mifepristone throughout the 1990s (thus making it available to some women before FDA approval) decided as a matter of policy to skip the second office visit and instead give its clients the misoprostol in the form of a vaginal suppository (instead of the pill the FDA recommended) to insert on their own at home. Finally, after the third and fourth Planned Parenthood clients died last year (the causes of death for all six have included bacterial infections and an undetected ectopic pregnancy), the organization, which had ignored warnings from the FDA after the first two deaths, relented and switched to oral administration of the misoprostol--although it still permits its clients to take the drug at home, not at the clinic as the FDA advises.
On August 1 in West Hartford, Connecticut, charges of criminal abduction were filed against a 41-year-old dog trainer named Adam Gault. For nearly a year, Gault had allegedly hidden a runaway girl, now 15, in the house he shared, Hugh Hefner-style, with two other girlfriends (ages 26 and 40 and also charged with crimes arising from the incident). He had gotten the teenager pregnant and procured an abortion for her on May 1 at a Planned Parenthood clinic in West Hartford. About a month later, police discovered the 15-year-old, whose mother had been searching frantically for her since her disappearance from home in June 2006, locked in a storage space under a staircase at the residence of Gault, a onetime workplace acquaintance of the girl's stepfather. A DNA test on the corpse of the fetus indicated that Gault was its father. It is not known what sort of identification the girl, too young for a driver's license, presented the clinic's administrators. She apparently wouldn't name the father, and it is all but certain that no one at Planned Parenthood went out of their way to inquire into the circumstances that led to her pregnancy.Which is commonplace:
Brian Hurley, a lawyer representing the daughter molested for five years by the recently convicted John Blanks Jr. of Mason, Ohio, says the girl reported the years-long abuse to a Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio employee when her father drove her there to have an abortion at age 16 after getting her pregnant--their response, according to Hurley, was to send the girl home in her father's car with a packet of birth-control pills. The abuse continued for another year and a half, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, at which point the girl told her future college sports coach, who reported the coerced sex to authorities, launching the criminal investigation that led to Blanks's arrest, trial, and five-year prison term.How 'bout one more, just to prove the incidents aren't isolated? (Allen has loads of cases.)
Hurley also represents "Jane Roe," a Cincinnati-area girl molested by her 21-year-old soccer coach, who in November 2004 accompanied her to a Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio clinic where she had an abortion without her parents' knowledge at age 14 and used his credit card to pay for the procedure. A Planned Parenthood "Documentation Form for Suspected Sexual or Child Abuse Report" retrieved by Hurley as part of discovery in the lawsuit the girl filed in 2004 noted that the girl claimed to have been raped by a stranger but the clinic did not notify police of this serious felony charge because "due to physician-patient privilege, we are prohibited from reporting as no severe bodily injury was reported." Ohio prosecutors say there is no such exception to the state's sexual-abuse reporting law (if there were, there would be very few reports of abuse).
Allen's point (after noting loads of other abuses) is that Planned Parenthood ought to be a pariah organization, in the same category as NAMBLA --not the place Democratic candidates for president go to establish their bona fides, nor the group receiving free publicity every week from Dear Abby. Neither Allen nor Knight makes the connection between "do it yourself" --hidden-- abortion and the enabling of sexual abusers, so I will. That's the main problem with making the "morning after" pill an OTC medication, too. Great news for abusers --if Adam Gault had had OTC access to the morning-after pill, his poor victim would probably still be locked under the stairs.
But who the hell cares? They're just girls.
