Who do you want to decide?
My former friend and colleague Dr. George Tiller used to say, "Abortion is not a cerebral or a reproductive issue. Abortion is a matter of the heart. For until one understands the heart of a woman, nothing else about abortion makes any sense at all." This statement rings true, so loud and clear that I want to shout it from the roof top. The legislative bodies in this country are out of control when it comes to decrying the need to create laws governing a woman's body.
Here are some of the restrictions, which are you okay with? Near total bans on abortion, banning abortion at arbitrary gestations, mandating biased counseling, forcing women to wait 24-48 hours between their mandated counseling/ultrasound and their procedure, giving doctors the right to refuse to provide medical services (including refusing to provide emergency contraception in the emergency room for rape victims), restricting poor women from accessing abortion care through Medicaid, requiring young women to have their parents consent or forcing them to notify their parents, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws, fetal personhood, mandated ultrasound explanation and viewing, and on and on.
As a physician who has been providing abortions for decades, I can tell you that the issue of abortion doesn't exist in black and white; it's all shades of gray. When it comes to the issue of later abortion, arbitrary lines are just that, arbitrary. But not only are these limits irresponsible, they are dangerous. Restricting a woman's right to obtain an abortion at any stage in her pregnancy is an outright siege of her body by the state.
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