It never ends:

The Oklahoma Senate approved several bills Monday that opponents say would make it more difficult or uncomfortable for women to get abortions, including one that would require women seeking the procedures early in their pregnancies to undergo an invasive form of ultrasound…. One of the laws headed to the governor would require doctors to use a vaginal probe in cases where it would provide a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound. Doctors have said this is usually the case early in pregnancies, when most abortions are done.

“You’re going to force someone to undergo an invasive medical procedure,” objected state Sen. Andrew Rice, D-Oklahoma City, who voted against the bill. “You have to invasively put an instrument inside the woman. This could be your 15-year-old daughter who was raped.”

Anti-choice activists spent most of the last decade railing against late-term abortions. No one could’ve predicted that they would have a problem with early-term abortions too.

What most anti-choice activists have a problem with—almost all of them motivated by our sex-hating, woman-hating religious “traditions”—is sexually active women, period, whether they’re using birth control or not, whether some seek to terminate their pregnancies early or late. They want to punish sexually active women. They want to deny women access to the life-saving HPV vaccine, they want to deny women access to birth control, they want to deny women access to abortion services. And when they can’t outright deny women access to abortion—and for now they can’t—they will do all they can to make sure obtaining an abortion is a humiliating and traumatizing ordeal.

Because they hate women.

55 replies on “Meanwhile in Oklahoma”

  1. I want to know who’s going to pay for this. If it’s the patient, that’s another burden intentionally placed on the pregnant woman.

    I’d argue that this procedure is invasive in that it has no medical purpose (or else the docs there would already be using it). Its purpose is to place roadblocks in the place of any woman seeking to exercise her rights.

    It shouldn’t matter why a woman seeks an abortion. It’s our legal right to have one, and there aren’t “good” and “bad” reasons.

  3. @5 (and @7). Few people realize that Mr. Justice Blackmun actually cited that passage from Exodus in the Bible in delivering the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade:

    Early philosophers believed that the embryo or fetus did not become formed and begin to live until at least 40 days after conception for a male, and 80 to 90 days for a female. See, for example, Aristotle, Hist. Anim. 7.3.583b; Gen. Anim. 2.3.736, 2.5.741; Hippocrates, Lib. de Nat. Puer., No. 10. Aristotle’s thinking derived from his three-stage theory of life: vegetable, animal, rational. The vegetable stage was reached at conception, the animal at ‘animation,’ and the rational soon after live birth. This theory, together with the 40/80 day view, came to be accepted by early Christian thinkers. The theological debate was reflected in the writings of St. Augustine, who made a distinction between embryo inanimatus, not yet endowed with a soul, and embryo animatus. He may have drawn upon Exodus 21:22. At one point, however, he expressed the view that human powers cannot determine the point during fetal development at which the critical change occurs. See Augustine, De Origine Animae 4.4 (Pub. Law 44.527). See also W. Reany, The Creation of the Human Soul, c. 2 and 83-86 (1932); Huser, The Crime of Abortion in Canon Law 15 (Catholic Univ. of America, Canon Law Studies No. 162, Washington, D.C., 1942). Galen, in three treatises related to embryology, accepted the thinking of Aristotle and his followers. Quay 426-427. Later, Augustine on abortion was incorporated by Gratian into the Decretum, published about 1140. Decretum Magistri Gratiani 2.32.2.7 to 2.32.2.10, in 1 Corpus Juris Canonici 1122, 1123 (A. Friedberg, 2d ed. 1879). This Decretal and the Decretals that followed were recognized as the definitive body of canon law until the new Code of 1917. For discussions of the canon-law treatment, see Means I, pp. 411-412; Noonan 20-26; Quay 426-430; see also J. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists 18-29 (1965).

  4. @25: They DO spend money, time, and effort “educating” children about their values related to these issues. They call it “Sunday School” and “Youth Group.”

  5. Hi DavidBowieFan,

    I was being sassy. Your suggestion is interesting, but I must confess I love having men around. So, I’d miss them if we sent them all packing to some space station.

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