from Talk to Action

Talk to Action's dogemperor has documented extensively, and Ethics Daily concurs, that the Religious Right has an increasingly dangerous tendency to confuse medical mortality and morbidity with divine punishment for what they believe to be sexual impurity -- a moral blindness evident in their response to the cervical cancer vaccine that, when administered to girls under age 16, promises to confer near total immunity in later life. But the cancer in question is cervical cancer, its precursor is Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and HPV is contracted through having ... uh ... sex.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reported this summer that a spokeswoman for the Family Research Council said young women should have to deal with the consequences of the rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.

"Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," the FRC's Bridget Maher reportedly told New Scientist. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."

Nick at morons.org summed up the "protection is permission" mindset: "This is probably a legitimate concern -- I know that when I got a tetanus vaccine, the first thing I wanted to do was to run out and play on rusty manure-spreading farm equipment in an effort to get as many puncture wounds as possible."

"I personally object to vaccinating children when they don't need vaccinations, particularly against a disease that is one hundred per cent preventable with proper sexual behavior," Leslee J. Unruh, the founder and president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, said. "Premarital sex is dangerous, even deadly. Let's not encourage it by vaccinating ten-year-olds so they think they're safe."

Unruh, the "pro-life" mouthpiece of record in South Dakota, might be getting her comprehensive knowledge of both child psychology and gynecological epidemiology from her husband Alan, the chiropractor who served as an "expert" consultant to the South Dakota Task Force on Abortion, because her opinion on the sexual morality of cervical cancer sufferers agrees with that of another medical expert, family practitioner and Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. In addition to believing that abortion should be illegal and that abortion-providing doctors deserve the death penalty, in 2004 Senator Coburn testified, "Studies have indicated for years that promiscuity was associated with cervical cancer."

There's an expert medical opinion for you: sluts get cancer. I wonder whether Dr. Coburn diagnosed his patients by watching prerecorded videos, as Dr. Bill Frist so notoriously did with Terri Schiavo, or whether he actually required them to come in for colposcopy and a biopsy. As Coburn himself said about Congress (even before he developed his strange obsession with teenage lesbianism), "There are not many normal people up here" – and that's one diagnosis of his with which I heartily concur.

God's little helpers seem to have just as big a mote in their eyes when it comes to the inevitable consequences of banning safe and legal abortion. Now, along with the rest of the hallelujah chorus, the Concerned Women of America are chirping predictably and on cue.

"Pro-abortion advocates and some politicians claim that the measure is ‘extreme’ since there is no exemption for rape and incest. CWA believes that the killing of an unborn child is extreme no matter how the child was conceived. Every life is precious.�
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More and more women are beginning to share their tragic experience of abortion. While in a vulnerable condition, many were coerced, not fully informed, and lied to in order to submit to terminating the life of their child. Now they relate how they are suffering physically and emotionally as they mourn the death of their child.

It sounds as though the numbers of repentant women are legion. But the same small group of women, mostly recruited and organized by various chapters of Operation Outcry, is shuttled back and forth across the country to "testify" before legislative committees such as the South Dakota Task Force.

OPERATION OUTCRY is the project of THE JUSTICE FOUNDATION to end legal abortion by exposing the truth about its devastating impact on women and families. We believe that this will be accomplished through prayer and with the testimonies of mothers who have taken the life of their own unborn babies and of others who have suffered harm from abortion. We are working to restore justice and to protect women, men, and children from the destruction that abortion causes.

It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and God forbid that we should get the justice that these true believers in the "sanctity of life" are praying for.

Because he lives and works under constant threat from groups such as Operation Rescue, Warren Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., of Boulder, Colorado is best known as a physician who provides abortion care. But Dr. Hern is also an eminently qualified and profoundly knowledgeable public health physician and epidemiologist. So unlike the religious propaganda groups who are polluting the public consciousness with dubious "facts" about the putative "tragedies" of abortion, he actually knows what he's talking about.

In The Epidemiologic Foundations of Abortion Practice [pdf link], Dr. Hern backs up the facts with some sobering figures.

Abortion mortality ratios have ... declined precipitously since 1967 to 1970, the years in which state abortion laws, beginning in Colorado, were liberalized. Prior to that time, deaths due to septic abortion, especially, were a serious health problem, especially for the poor and minorities. In 1967, the mortality rate (per 100,000 live births) due to septic abortion was 1.5 for whites and 10.2 for non-whites. In 1965, Gold and co-workers reported that nearly 50% of all maternal mortality in New York City was due to complications arising from abortion during some periods, and this figure exceeded 60% for Puerto Ricans.
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In 1978, the overall death-to-case rate for legally induced abortions fell to 0.5 per 100,000 abortions, whereas the death-to-case rate for term delivery resulting in live births, excluding abortion and not including deaths due to ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, and fetal deaths, was 8 per 100,000 live births, making the risk of death from pregnancy untreated by abortion 16 times greater than the risk of death due to abortion. An overall comparison of death-to-case rates for abortion and pregnancy for the years 1972 to 1978 shows the risk of death per 100,000 events to be 1.9 for abortion versus 11 for live birth.

The South Dakota Legislature didn't ask Dr. Hern to provide testimony to the Task Force on Abortion in Pierre, and small wonder – because unlike Leslee Unruh, Concerned Women for America, or Dr. Tom Coburn, Dr. Warren Hern deals in the truth.

Another truth is that, in every place in the world where abortion care is illegal, the same things happen: women go to prison, women are maimed for life, women die, and children are orphaned. In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Jack Hitt recounted his recent journey to El Salvador, which is the epitome of what the religious right wants the United States to become – a Pro-Life Nation.

I had been warned that interviewing anyone who had had an abortion in El Salvador would be difficult. The problem was not simply that in this very Catholic country a shy 24-year-old unmarried woman might feel shame telling her story to an older man. There was also the criminal stigma. And this was why I had come to El Salvador: Abortion is a serious felony here for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years.
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The South Dakota law, which its backers acknowledge is designed to test Roe v. Wade in the courts, forbids abortion, including those cases in which the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. Only if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother is the procedure permitted. A similar though less restrictive bill is now making its way through the Mississippi Legislature.

In this new movement toward criminalization, El Salvador is in the vanguard. The array of exceptions that tend to exist even in countries where abortion is circumscribed — rape, incest, fetal malformation, life of the mother — don't apply in El Salvador.

El Salvador ... has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet.
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[W]hen a woman might face jail time for an abortion, she's less likely to discuss her pregnancy at all. According to a study on attempted suicide and teen pregnancy published last year by academics at the University of El Salvador, some girls who poison their wombs with agricultural pesticide (its efficacy being a Salvadoran urban legend) would rather report the cause of their resulting hospital visit as "attempted suicide," which is not as felonious a crime nor as socially unbearable as abortion. "They don't want to be interviewed about abortion," Irma Elizabeth Asencio, one of the study's authors, explained to me. "They know they have committed a crime."
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As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

"Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam," [Prosecutor Flor Evelyn] Tópez said, ... "and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus." In other words, if the suspicions of the patient's doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene. Tópez said, however, that vaginal searches can take place only with "a judge's permission." Tópez frequently turned the pages of a thick law book she kept at hand. "The prosecutor can order a medical exam on a woman, because that's within the prosecutor's authority."

Are you telling yourself that it can't happen here? The South Dakota ban, like the paradoxical fundamentalist mindset that inspired it, casts the woman who has an abortion as an ignorant and innocent victim. But other bills already introduced in the U.S. would send a woman who had an abortion, and anyone who helped her, to prison just as surely as does the law in El Salvador. And even though the South Dakota ban exempts a woman from being charged under that law, Lynn Paltrow and Charon Asetoyer have detailed how other state statutes already in effect clearly expose her to prosecution.

In October 2004, when Republican Jim DeMint was a candidate for the U.S. Senate, he appeared on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert, who repeatedly asked DeMint to explain his position in favor of a total ban on all abortion procedures. DeMint repeatedly refused to give Russert a straight answer.

Would you prosecute a woman who had an abortion? DeMint said he thought Congress should outlaw all abortions first and worry about the fallout later. "We've got to make laws first that protect life," he said. "How those laws are shaped are going to be a long debate."

Russert refused to leave the congressman alone. "Who would you prosecute?" he persisted.

Finally DeMint blurted, "You know, I can't come up with all the laws as we're sitting right here, but the question is, Are we going to protect human life with our laws?"

A better question is whether we are going to let fundamentalist religionists like Jim DeMint, Leslee Unruh, Bill Napoli and Sam Brownback do our thinking for us.