Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that women have a constitutional right to end their pregnancies, zealous abortion opponents have gone to endless lengths to prevent them from exercising it. They’ve whittled away at abortion rights by imposing conditions on their timing and enacting waiting periods for getting them.
Some of the more militant have chained themselves inside clinics, and bullied and intimidated providers until facilities closed down. They’ve sent pictures of mutilated fetuses to journalists, tried to stop women from going into Planned Parenthoods or followed them out, screaming at them for “killing” their “babies.” Legislative efforts have attempted to change women's minds into backing off abortions by forcing them to view sonograms of their pregnancies.
Now here comes Iowa's House File 53, an unscientific and potentially dangerous attempt to get a pregnant woman to change her mind midway through a medication abortion. Six other states — Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota and Utah — already have laws to that effect, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Three others — North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee — have been temporarily enjoined from enforcing theirs while courts consider them.
Iowa’s proposed law would require doctors to give patients information on the risks associated with a medication-induced abortion and notify them "that it may be possible to reverse the intended effects" if the woman changes her mind," but "that time is of the essence." Notably absent is information on the risks of replacing the second dose of medication with progesterone.
"The abortion pill reversal process involves a large influx of progesterone into the pregnant woman’s system," says the website of the American Pregnancy Association, which opposes abortions. It notes that organizations including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists don't support the reversal procedure. The site says that the first pill, mifepristone, blocks progesterone from being absorbed by the womb and that — when an influx of progesterone replaces the second pill, misoprostol — "progesterone can outcompete for the available binding spaces."
An attempted University of California, Davis, study to test the success of the approach ended early after three of 12 women had such severe vaginal bleeding they had to be taken by ambulance to a hospital. The researchers had planned to enroll 40 women scheduled for surgical abortions and first give them mifepristone, after which they would be randomly assigned either a placebo or progesterone instead of misoprostol.
"As with any hormone, there are some risks," acknowledges the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists website. It also says, "It is important to note that when any medical procedure is performed, the physician informs the patient of whether the process is permanent or may be reversed.” It goes on to say any abortion education should include the option for a possible reversal.
Why single out this one medical procedure for such a mandate?
The House bill requires that signs be posted "conspicuously" in waiting and patient consultation rooms in clinics and hospitals that do medication abortions, saying: "Recent developing research has indicated that a medication abortion utilizing an abortion-inducing drug is not always effective in ending a pregnancy. It may be possible to avoid, cease, or even to reverse the intended effects of a medication abortion that utilizes an abortion-inducing drug. Please consult with a health care professional immediately. "
The bill even mandates the type size and styling: at least three-quarters of an inch and boldface type. So Iowa lawmakers presume to know better than medical professionals not only what to post on medical facility walls, but also in what font! The bill would mandate documentation in the woman’s medical record verifying that she had received this information in writing. A failure to comply would be grounds for doctor discipline.
Is it any wonder the Iowa Medical Society has registered opposition to the bill? Here's a group of Iowa politicians without medical training forcing doctors to dispense information and advice for something that hasn't been proven safe, isn't approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration and is based purely on ideological opposition to abortions. The bill also mandates that the Iowa Department of Public Health publish materials about possible abortion reversibility and put them on its website.
Then we get this tepid reassurance from the American Pregnancy Association: "As with any hormone, there are some risks; however, since progesterone has been so well tolerated" — but not verified under these circumstances — "there is no reason to label the procedure 'dangerous.'”
"By scripting physicians and compelling them to provide medically inaccurate information and steer patients toward untested procedures, this bill is in direct violation of a physician’s oath to care," Dr. Lindsey Jenkins, legislative chair for the Iowa chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.
Over the years, linguistic changes have characterized an evolving strategy of those seeking to end legal abortions. The standard cutoff time for getting an abortion was long defined by fetal viability outside a woman's womb. But activists' current rhetoric claims there is a new person or baby from the moment of intercourse when sperm fertilizes egg. Measures like this one, or requiring pregnant women to view ultrasounds of the pregnancy, seek to shame and confuse those who've made up their minds to end their pregnancies.
There's plenty of heartfelt emotion on both sides. But it would be so much more valuable for committed abortion opponents to focus on making abortions less necessary by promoting pregnancy prevention, and helping to care for the children already on this earth living in poverty or abusive situations instead of interfering with other women's rights not to be forced into parenthood.
