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hisannabelle -> RE: Obama: Mental distress cannot justify abortion (7/4/2008 9:16:30 PM)
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if you are going to attack these sources as biased, then this won't matter, but hopefully this will shed some light on the subject...
quote:
from the national abortion federation:
Legal abortion is not widely accessible to women in the U.S. The Supreme Court confirmed women's right to choose abortion in 1973, and the courts have upheld that finding in subsequent cases. But access to abortion has been severely eroded. The most recent survey found that 88% of all U.S. counties have no identifiable abortion provider. In non-metropolitan areas, the figure rises to 97%. As a result, many women must travel long distances to reach the nearest abortion provider. But distance is not the only barrier women face. Many other factors have contributed to the current crisis in abortion access, including a shortage of trained abortion providers; state laws that make getting an abortion more complicated than is medically necessary; continued threats of violence and harassment at abortion clinics; state and federal Medicaid restrictions; and fewer hospitals providing abortion services. Shortage of Abortion Providers In 1973 the Supreme Court struck down state laws that had criminalized abortion. Doctors working in hospital emergency rooms and ob-gyn units before that time knew first-hand about the medical devastation that women suffered as a result of self-induced abortions or black market abortions performed by unlicensed practitioners. Today, many of those doctors are retiring. The younger physicians replacing them have little direct experience with the consequences of illegal abortions and the public health benefits of ensuring that safe abortions remain available. Even those young doctors who are committed to providing safe abortions to their patients may have trouble getting the training they need. A survey in 1998 revealed that first trimester abortion techniques are a routine part of training in only 46% of America's ob-gyn residency programs. About 34% offer this training only as an elective, and 7% provide no opportunity at all for young doctors to learn to provide safe abortions.1 In 1996, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the agency responsible for accrediting medical residency programs, took steps to correct this problem. It now requires ob-gyn residency programs to include family planning and abortion training for their students. It is too soon to tell whether this will result in better preparation of ob-gyns in the future to provide safe abortion services, but it is clear that doctors who do not get this training are not in a position to provide the full range of care that their patients will need. Restrictive Legislation National polling consistently shows that the majority of Americans support a woman's right to choose, but many legislators are committed to bringing an end to legal abortion and have passed laws that have drastically diminished access to abortion. These include: Parental Consent or Notification Laws which are now enforced in over half the states can violate the privacy of young women by forcing them to involve their parents in their decisions, even when they have strong objections to doing so. As a result, some women to travel to other states that do not require parental involvement; others have resorted to illegal abortions rather than comply with a legal requirement that puts them in jeopardy. Mandatory Waiting Periods require women to wait some period of time (up to 24 hours) between a state mandated counseling appointment and their abortion. Many of these laws require the counseling be done in person rather than on the phone. These laws imply that women come to abortion clinics without having seriously considered their options. As a result of these waiting periods, a woman's abortion is often delayed much longer than 24 hours, particularly if she has to take time off from work, arrange for child care, travel a long way, and perhaps stay overnight in a distant city. These factors can significantly increase the cost as well. Biased Counseling Laws require that clinic personnel lead their patients through detailed, state prescribed "scripts" that promote childbearing. Abortion providers have long been at the forefront of developing and delivering sound and effective options counseling to their patients. They consider these scripts "biased" because they contain information that is designed to frighten and dissuade women from having abortions. These coercive scripts are completely incompatible with the goal of true informed consent. Clinic Violence and Disruption Medical professionals who provide abortion services do so at a tremendous risk to their safety. Since 1993, three doctors who provided abortions have been murdered, and five others have been shot at by anti-abortion zealots in the U.S. and Canada. A clinic escort and three clinic employees have been murdered, and several other clinic staff have been shot. Violence against providers also includes bombings, arson, vandalism, burglary, illegal blockades, threats, and harassment. Frivolous malpractice lawsuits against abortion providers are also generated by anti-abortion extremists who want to keep providers from offering abortion services. These lawsuits are rarely justified, but they are used unfairly to discredit the reputations of providers and frighten patients. Funding for Abortion The cost of a first trimester abortion has increased only slightly since 1973 (see Abortion Facts: Economics of Abortion), but many women still cannot afford the fee. The Hyde Amendment denies federal Medicaid funding for abortions except in specific, rare circumstances, and most states have similar laws restricting financial help to women who need abortions. More than 2/3 of women must initially pay for their abortions themselves - only 13% of abortions are paid for with a state's public funds,2 and only 13% are covered by a woman's private insurance at the time of her abortion.3 A small number of women may be reimbursed by insurance after their abortion. The result is that too many women who need abortions must wait while they raise funds, postponing their abortions until later in their pregnancies, when the costs of these more complicated abortion procedures are higher. For the women who are struggling to make ends meet and who do not have insurance that covers abortion, the legal right to have an abortion does not guarantee that they will have access to it. Declining Number of Hospitals Providing Abortion Services Today, about 95% of women who need abortions have them in clinics or in private doctors' offices where costs can be kept low without increasing health risks. This pattern of abortion service delivery represents a significant shift away from hospital provided abortion care, which was far more common in the early years after the laws criminalizing abortion were struck down. "According to the American Hospital Association, there were 5,801 hospitals in the United States in 2001. However, a 2001-2002 study by the Guttmacher Institute identified only 603 hospitals that provided abortions in 2001."2 This has serious implications for abortion access. Women in rural areas where there are no abortion clinics, and low-income women who depend on hospital emergency services for medical care, are left unserved when hospitals do not provide abortions. When hospitals do not offer abortions, young physicians they train have no opportunity to learn to provide safe abortions. What is Being Done to Improve Abortion Access? The National Abortion Federation's Access Initiative Project was created specifically to address the escalating problem of limited access to abortion in the U.S.. The Access Initiative Project works with medical residency programs, educational institutions, health care associations, legal experts, public policy organizations, and interested individuals to ensure that qualified clinicians are able to get the training they need to provide safe abortions and that women can continue to have access to the quality health care they deserve. [image]http://www.prochoice.org/images/global/dots545.gif[/image] References Almeling R, Tews L, and Dudley S. Abortion Training in U.S. Obstetrics and Gynecology Residency Programs, 1998. Family Planning Perspectives, 2000, 32(6):268-271 & 320. Guttmacher Institute. Facts in Brief: Induced Abortion. January, 2003. Henshaw SK, and Finer LB. The Accessibility of Abortion Services in the United States, 2001. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2003, 35(1):16-24. here is another website that may help: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/issue-briefs/access-to-abortion
in terms of birth control, it works like this - birth control for most women is expensive even with health insurance - moreso now that that law was passed which doesn't allow universities and some other places to obtain it at a lower cost and sell it at a lower cost. in my case, i've stopped and started birth control several times in the last year because despite the fact the cost may not seem THAT much to many people, on top of the other medicine i take and the amount of bills i have to pay, it's extremely difficult for me. and i take one of the cheapest brands of the pill - for women who can't take the pill, or have to take a more expensive brand of the pill, it's a hell of a lot more prohibitive. and i'm not even going to go into my experiences at the gynecologist's office - and you have to have a yearly prescription from the gynecologist (which means paying an additional $70+ per year for the appointment) in most cases to obtain the pill. again, if you don't struggle with money or you don't need birth control, that may not seem like a lot - until you are in a situation where you are poor and you need it.
in terms of restricting access to abortion, IF you are lucky enough to have an abortion provider who is less than, say, 50 miles away from you, then they probably won't offer abortions past a certain point; here it's nearly impossible to get an abortion past the 12th week, even though federal and state law technically allows it, because the provider local to me won't do it. VERY few abortion providers will even do third trimester abortions, regardless of whether you've gone through the legal hoopla to obtain an exception based on physical or mental distress. most planned parenthood facilities do not perform abortions, contrary to popular belief, so you have to seek out other providers. if you already have children, having to travel to an abortion provider who may be hundreds of miles away, or having to travel over state lines because of your state's laws about abortion, can make it really difficult - especially if you have to work as well and you don't have family or anyone to keep your children. then you get there and they tell you you have a mandatory waiting period, or mandatory counseling, or both, at which point you have to take more time off work to spend more gas money to drive more hours to come back multiple times before you're allowed to obtain the procedure - PLUS coming up with the money for the procedure itself - and if you're very lucky, the waiting period won't have passed by then. considering that most women don't even find out they are pregnant until at least a few weeks into the pregnancy, and some of us DO actually think about it, plus the weeks of planning and going back and forth for the waiting periods and the counseling periods, often at that point the clinic will refuse to do the procedure because of how much time has passed, even though technically speaking most states allow abortion up until 20 or so weeks. if you ARE lucky enough to have a local provider, hopefully they don't have protest lines, and if they do, hopefully they employ escorts - a friend of mine was an escort for an abortion clinic for several months, and the kind of treatment and even physical threat that women and escorts face is another barrier - it might seem insignificant to some, but it is nonetheless a barrier.
don't get me started on the number of emergency pregnancy clinics posing as clinics that offer information about all options but often waste women's time claiming that they will help them with pregnancy tests and help them to obtain safe medical abortions but really spending weeks trying to talk them out of it - weeks that can quickly put them past the time limit in many states. i live in the capital city of florida. we have two universities and one community college, so it's not like we have a dearth of people having unsafe sex, usually under the influence of alcohol. however, access to birth control is fairly difficult here. we have one planned parenthood office that offers extremely limited resources, one abortion provider that will only provide for up to 12 weeks (the next closest provider is at least three hours away to my knowledge), and at least six or eight "pregnancy centers" that often pretend to help women obtain abortion but in reality harrass them into choosing other options or waste their time until they can no longer obtain a legal abortion.
one of the best things is that if you are over the age of 18 often the morning after pill is easily obtainable now. when i had to use it, you still had to have a prescription - and then i would go to the pharmacy and rather than telling me that he didn't want to dispense it for moral reasons, the pharmacist would lie to me and tell me they were out of it and i would have to come back during the next shift. not really that helpful when we're talking about a situation that's extremely time-sensitive - and i know i'm not exactly alone in having experiences like that trying to obtain emergency birth control.
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