Roundup: The Harm Caused By Anti-Choicers

Jan 15, 2010, 9:32am

Rachel Larris

Today's roundup is all about the harm caused by those who oppose abortion so strongly, they ignore all the other harm they are creating for women and doctors.

Today’s roundup is all about the harm caused by those who oppose abortion so strongly, they ignore all the other harm they are creating for women and doctors.

First up, as the trial of Scott Roeder continues the jury
selection process today Judge Warren Wilbert has decided to question potential jurors
in private. However he did agree to release
a blank jury questionnaire.

After the closed hearing, Vix said
Wilbert had agreed to open parts of jury selection to the public but that
individual jurors will first be questioned in private about "sensitive
personal issues."

The focus of the individual
questioning will involve personal beliefs about abortion, the judge and the
lawyers have said, and whether they can set those aside to listen to evidence
in the murder trial from both sides.

The shooting of Dr. George Tiller has upped the ante again
for anti-choice crusaders. Operation Rescue is now offering a
reward for "whistle-blowers" who report on abortion doctors.

A Kansas-based
anti-abortion group is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to
the arrest and conviction of abortion doctors who break the law.

Operation Rescue announced its Abortion Whistleblower campaign Thursday.

The campaign will include a series of radio and Internet ads, as well as direct
mailings to abortion clinics across the country asking clinic workers to report
clinic abuses.

The group’s campaign follows Nebraska abortion doctor LeRoy Carhart’s
announcement last month that he will likely perform more late-term procedures
at his Bellevue, Neb.-based clinic.

Meanwhile remember Massachusetts Republican Senate
candidate Scott Brown’s attack of conscious for all the poor hospital staff who
would have been required to give emergency contraception to rape victims? Well
the Boston
Phoenix says it probably was because Brown owed the Catholic Church a favor
for getting him elected.

The state legislature wanted to make the hospital
provide the pill. The Catholic Church opposed that mandate. (Abraham, in
her otherwise excellent column, suggests that the law was largely about
allowing individual practitioners to opt out. While that would have been an
effect, the legislative battle was entirely about the state’s Catholic
hospitals’ refusal, as policy, to offer emergency contraception.)

There’s a legitimate debate to be had on that issue
(not to mention, on whether the refusal to provide the pill is an act of good
"conscience"), and that debate was waged among the Democrats
controlling the legislature, and the Church lost. So, they needed a Republican
to try a Stupak-like attempt to introduce a "conscience clause"
amendment to the mandate bill, in hopes that they could pressure enough
legislators to win an open up-or-down vote. They got Brown to introduce it.

And frankly, his daughters may very well be correct
when they insist that this was not because Brown is a cold-hearted,
misogynistic bastard. Instead, it was more likely because he owed a big favor
to the cold-hearted, misogynistic Church, which had just played a major role in
getting him elected.

Lastly a bill in Kentucky requiring all women seeking an
abortion to have an ultrasound has been passed
by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

Similar bills have passed the
Republican-controlled Senate in recent legislative sessions but died in the
House, which is controlled by Democrats.

[Bill sponsor Sen. Elizabeth Tori,
R-Radcliff] said that this year’s bill goes further than the one she sponsored
last year in that it requires the physicians to explain what the ultrasound
shows, including the "number of unborn children depicted" and the presence of
organs and "external members," such as arms and legs.

Considering all the effort anti-choice groups put into
trying to tie abortion to medical problems, it’s worth noting that Henry
P. David, a clinical psychologist who "helped alter the prevailing
assumption among clinicians that abortion was a source of mental health
problems in women" recently died.

In the
late 1960s, Dr. David became one of the first to study the psychological
aftermath of abortion. He guided younger psychologists to do similar research,
and their combined efforts helped alter the prevailing assumption among
clinicians that abortion was a source of mental health problems in women.

Their work
influenced the public debate. As opposition to abortion mounted in the 1980s,
President Ronald Reagan asked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a
report on the psychological effects of abortion. Koop, a vocal antiabortionist,
was widely expected to denounce abortion as a risk to women’s mental health.

After
surveying 250 studies, including those by Dr. David and scientists he had
mentored, Koop refused to issue the report, citing inconclusive evidence. Koop
later called the psychological harm caused by abortion "minuscule from a
public health perspective.”