Well, according to Rep. Trent Franks, the incidence of pregnancy resulting from rape is negligible, so probably we don’t need to consider allowing abortion when rape or incest is involved. Franks is not big on considering women at all, or the issues women face.
Franks would have us consider only the fetus. His Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, currently being discussed by himself and a lot of mostly men in Washington, would ban abortion after 22 weeks.
Franks was himself unborn when I became pregnant after an incidence of workplace rape. Such occurrences are probably less common today, progress having been made in workplace protection since 1958. But I would be willing to bet they still happen. I wonder if Franks cares. I wonder if he has heard about sexual abuses in the military? Or unreported date rape? They happen; unintended pregnancies happen. I wonder if Franks is able to get his mind around the fact that there is a woman before there is a zygote?
I appreciate Franks’ concern with the unborn; I just want him to consider the already-born. They are real, live women facing difficult, complex issues that no one — NO ONE — could possibly understand but they themselves.
Abortion is a difficult and complex issue. I personally wish it would never be necessary. But for Franks and his fellow ideologues to inch it back toward criminalization, as they would like, is a violation of the basic rights of the women whose existence they prefer to ignore.
Women’s control over their own reproduction is strangely limited. I am concerned about the safety of prenatal ultrasound in the first place, and now they are mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for abortion counseling?
I’ve ready studies that claim ultrasound can induce spontaneous abortion in itself..