The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) released the following statement today about Texas Senate Bill 1 and House BIll 2:
Washington, DC — The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) strongly opposes Senate Bill 1 (formerly Senate Bill 5 in the previous session) and House Bill 2 under consideration in the Texas legislature. Both bills are plainly intended to restrict the reproductive rights of women in Texas through a series of requirements that improperly regulate medical practice and interfere with the patient-physician relationship.
“The Texas bills set a dangerous precedent of a legislature telling doctors how to practice medicine and how to care for individual patients. ACOG opposes legislative interference, and strongly believes that decisions about medical care must be based on scientific evidence and made by licensed medical professionals, not the state or federal government,” said ACOG Executive Vice President Hal C. Lawrence, III, MD.
“The Texas bills are a compilation of over-reaching measures to control when, where, and how a woman has an abortion,” said ACOG Texas District Chair Lisa M. Hollier, MD, MPH. “The bills are not based on sound science, despite our efforts to provide the legislature with the best available medical knowledge. The bills would erode women’s health by denying the women of Texas the benefits of well-researched, safe, and proven protocols.”
The bills would ban abortion after 20 weeks and impose other widespread restrictions that would close many of the state’s abortion clinics, decrease the number of doctors who meet the additional requirements for providing outpatient abortions, and decrease access to essential women’s health care. For example, the bills would require physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, allowing abortions only in surgical clinics and setting a higher standard than for other procedures with similar low risk such as colonoscopy. The fact is that abortion is one of the safest medical procedures. The risk of complications from abortion is minimal, with less than 0.5% of abortions involving major complications.
All women, including the women of Texas, must have the legal right to abortion, unconstrained by harassment, unavailability of care, procedure bans, or other legislative or regulatory barriers, including those posed by these Texas bills.
Women should have access to all needed health care—ranging from mammograms to prenatal visits to reproductive care—that is based on scientific facts, not political ideology. ACOG therefore opposes Texas Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 2, which jeopardize women’s health care as well as interfere with medical practice and the patient-physician relationship.
Dr. Jen Gunter 
Some FACTS about abortion in Texas:
http://watchdogblog.dallasnews.com/2013/07/abortion-in-texas-facts-figures-questions-and-answers.html/
Women do not hate babies , but are inclined to bring babies made in love to term. Babies made against their will, by rape, incest or domination may not be wanted by the women forces into these predicaments. Women are predisposed to bring up children and caring for them until they reach maturity. There is no woman who wants to abort any fetus, and there have been examples of nuns who brought pregnancies to term because of their religious training and upbringing. But there are women who, through no fault of their own are inseminated by rapists, fathers or dominants such as the guy who held three women as slave slave-hostages for over ten years. Now, supposed that happened to your daughter, wife, sister, girlfriend or mother.
No politician, Democrat or Republican, no man or woman, no religious cleric or other person, has any rights to force a woman to have or not have an abortion. That right belongs to the woman and the woman alone. Abortion options are available to all women after Roe v. Wade was passed and sanctioned by the Supreme Court!
“There is no woman who wants to abort any fetus”
The facts don’t match your assertion. Only 1% of abortions are performed due to rape or incest or domination (whatever that convoluted term is). The vast majority of abortions are elective.They are done because the women has decided that the pregnancy is too inconvenient for her way of life.
And because you have already demonstrated that you are not really informed about abortion, I though I should point out that there are, in fact, exemptions to the abortions laws when a pregnancy is due to rape and/or incest – including this Texas law. I’m sure you knew that.
And, Roe v. Wade does not allow ALL abortions. It explicitly denies abortions of fetus that are considered viable. Nowadays, that means anywhere after 23-24 weeks, which is why you don’t see 24-week abortion restrictions being shot down in court and why the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 still stands after 10 years.
Who are you to say she decided to abort because of inconvenience? Women who have what you term “elective” abortions are generally unprepared to care for and/or raise a child. But even if it were about convenience, by what right does the fetus use her body without her consent?
Texas isn’t the first. Here’s a great resource for following these “personhood initiatives” by state:
http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/
Increasing the standard of care at these clinics is not a bad thing. I’m thinking ACOG opposes it because they know it will cut into the profits for OBGYNS who are making some pretty nice money in the abortion business. Also, I know how much docs hate being told what to do by the gov’t, so that probably has something to do with it as well. But, spare me the “women’s right to healthcare” BS. These standards aren’t even that restrictive. What kind of legit OBGYN doesn’t have hospital privileges within 30 miles?
I don’t really care if the bill bans post 20-week elective abortions anyway. In med school I saw a 22-week old being aborted. As a dumb 3rd-year, I went into a “termination” not knowing what was going on. Let’s just say that after that I knew I couldn’t be an OBGYN if I had to perform elective abortions on nearly viable fetuses.
20 weeks is not “viable”. 20 weeks is “Will spend weeks in NICU suffering dreadfully, and then dying, leaving $2m off bills in their wake”.
Women are more important than foetuses. Living, breathing, sentient women are, to MEN like you, nothing more than mobile incubators, and that is morally repugnant.
If abortions were easier to obtain in your logic-forsaken country then women wouldn’t have to wait until twenty weeks to have one. As it is, even in the Land of the “Free”* most procedures carried out at 20wks after LMP are for abnormalities detected at the 20 week ultrasound. What should those women do, be forced to incubate dying, grossly malformed foetuses, or those who’ll never know a life without agonising pain, or who are likely to kill the woman – sorry, the ambulatory uterus – that is carrying them?
Forced birth is slavery, it is abuse, it is barbaric and amoral. To hear someone who’ll never have one, prating from his high horse and rendering women as nothing more than disposable vessels for producing more men, is repugnant.
Abortion is not a crime, nor should it ever be. Pregnancy is not a punishment for sex, although you apparently view it as such. Countries that make abortion illegal have far higher rates than countries where it’s legal. Trust me, if you think it’s about money, hospitals full of sepsis-riddled women and girls requiring surgery (amputationq, repair of ‘ve reproductive and digestive tracts) and medical treatment (antibiotics, ICU, life-support etc) after botched illegal abortions will bring in far more money than safe, legal, sterile abortions.
So, why not make a real difference? Campaign for mandatory, comprehensive sex education in schools, and free (of charges and constraints) access to all forms of contraceptio, from condoms and POPs to IUDs and EC. That will guarantee a huge reduction in abortion rates, so if you really care about preventing abortion, as opposed to just punishing women, I’m sure you’ll start your campaign for sex ed and freely available contraception immediately.
“Offer of “freedom” limited to selected customers only. Promotion to “free” status is limited to white, straight, christian men only. Women, racial and religious minority group members, and LGBT citizens are not eligible.
My wife is not an “incubator.” She’s my wife. My partner. My love. My life.
Having been though this, I know that 20 weeks is a long time. A woman who cannot make the decision to get an abortion before 5 months is seriously lacking.
And, yes, sometimes abortion is a crime. Look at the Kermit Gosnell case if you’re still confused about that.
Oh Jim, Jim, Jim, you morally deficient halfwit.
Five weeks? As in, one week after the first missed period, A F*CKING WEEK?
So during that week she’s supposed to find $600, get an appointment at a clinic that can fit into her work schedule, travel however many miles (or States) to and from said clinic for a consultation, while ensuring that her home, children and other responsibilities are taken care of? How generous of you to even give them a whole week, well… five days really, as most non-urgent facilities aren’t open at the weekend.
What if Jim, like the majority of women, our hypothetical women does not have a perfect 28 day cycle? What then? That cuts her five days down or eliminates it completely, doesn’t it?
You’re a man Jim. You’ll never be maimed or killed by a pregnancy. Murder by spouse or partner is the leading cause of death during pregnancy, Jim, did you know that?
Yeah, but pregnancy’s always beautiful and safe, isn’t it Jim? Pregnancy isn’t a dangerous, draining, difficult task that involves forming a baby from your own blood and bones is it?
You won’t ever be raped and have to carry some evil pig’s baby to term, enduring almost a year of torture, and undergoing a second rape as your vagina is torn apart by your rapist’s baby, the baby that you could not abort because you’re too poor, too young, or live too far away from a clinic.
So remember women and girls, if you’re found guilty of having a vagina and a pulse, by a jury of men like Jim, then you deserve anything and everything that men do to you. You have no right to choose your own path, no agency or worth any more than that of a plant pot full of compost.
Dear Miss Neverdefiled,
You are obviously a moron. It’s five MONTHS. Not weeks. Not days. Learn to read. It’ll save your life one day.
So it was misheard as weeks, so what? I can’t read, no, but that doesn’t make me a “moron”*, it makes me blind.
So five months, twenty weeks eh? When my wife was 21 weeks pregnant the baby was diagnosed as having anencephaly. This was due to a folate deficiency so severe that, along with the cobalamin deficiency that was also found, she herself had developed peripheral neuropathy.
The foetus was never going to become a baby. lt had no head. Was she supposed to carry it for another twenty weeks?
Everything else I said still stands, and the fact that you never answered my question about promoting mandatory sex education and free contraception speaks volumes about you and the rest of your type.
If you wanted to cut the rate of abortions you would make sure that every woman had free access to LARC, that all men had condoms and knew how and why to use them, and that everyone over the age of twelve had a complete understanding of human reproduction.
That would drastically reduce the number of abortions. But as you seem to be avoiding that line of questioning, it seems like maybe you do just want to punish women.
*Using “moron” as an insult just proves that you’re as disableist as you are sexist. No big surprise. and no doubt you’ll resort to some homophobic slurs in your next comment.
Abortions make far less profit for an ob/gyn than a full-term pregnancy and L&D. If it were about money, the ob/gyns would be on YOUR side.
“Also, I know how much docs hate being told what to do by the gov’t, so that probably has something to do with it as well.” ‘Docs’ shouldn’t be told by the government how to practice medicine. The government isn’t qualified to do that. Would you allow the government to say what cancer treatment you get, overriding what your oncologist recommended? How about diabetes or heart disease? Would you want the government overriding your doctor on those too?
The American Taliban, indeed.
Have you looked into what Ohio just passed? It is similar to Texas and it is Law!
And what will happen is someone will become seriously harmed by the law in Ohio, sue the state, and take it back up to the Supreme Court where it will be overturned, and cost the taxpayers millions. It’s depressing.