keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus:

Anonymous asked you: 

5 years ago I had an abortion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Prior to the abortion, the doctor administered a transvaginal ultrasound. She told me that it was to confirm that I was indeed pregnant and that to confirm that an abortion was necessary (eg the fetus had not naturally dislodged). She also said that so early into a pregnancy (7weeks) it would be impossible to do an ultrasound externally (via my abdomen). Because I believed it was medically necessary, I had no problem with this. Was it?

I’m not a doctor or a nurse or in any way qualified to advise on medical decisions.

Here is what I will say.

Plenty of doctors have testified in response to the VA bill that the procedure - IN MOST CASES - is not medically necessary. Perhaps, for whatever reason, your doctor felt that the best course of action before performing the procedure. That could have had to do with your own personal history, the type of abortion, or it is just something that that particular doctor asked of all their patients.

I’m not against the procedure. I’m against the fact that it will be demanded by the government even if it isn’t for medical reasons. I’m all for making decisions with your doctor about your health care.

I just bolded that paragraph because it’s the absolute only thing about this nonsense that need be stressed. This is about the state forcing doctors to perform unnecessary medical procedures, and removing from those doctors the ability to use their own critical knowledge and expertise. It turns the doctor/patient relationship from one in which the patient’s health and safety is of paramount importance at all times into one in which non-experts who know nothing about the patient’s case can demand invasive procedures be performed for no valid medical reason whatsoever.

That’s not health, and that’s not medicine. When the state decides to interfere with health and medicine — whether it’s to act punitively, as Virginia legislators responsible for the now-defeated bill smirkingly framed it, or to “help women make a more informed decision” — it is every bit the Big Government Intrusion into health care that the braying jackasses going on about Obamacare and socialized medicine described. The state forcing doctors against their will to perform unnecessary procedures on anyone who seeks a particular operation that is completely legal is an absolute violation of American ideals.

The idea that so many of the same people who crow about “liberty” and “freedom” are okay with this exposes them as the absolutely wretched hypocrites that they are. There is no other way to view this without the sort of mental gymnastics and rationalizing that any halfway honest human being commit seppuku before attempting.

And remember, y’all — this shit is the law of the land here in Texas. Good on Virginia, I guess, for shutting it down, but that isn’t and wasn’t the frontline of this battle.