"As a physician who has been providing abortions for decades, I can tell you that the issue of abortion doesn't exist in black and white; it's all shades of gray. When it comes to the issue of later abortion, arbitrary lines are just that, arbitrary. But not only are these limits irresponsible, they are dangerous. Restricting a woman's right to obtain an abortion at any stage in her pregnancy is an outright siege of her body by the state."Dr. Carhart is one of my favorite people. He risks his life daily to provide a controversial yet vital service to women and their families. He endures threats on his life, his clinic, and his practice. And through it all, he still has the energy to be an outspoken supporter of reproductive freedom.
Read through the piece, if you will. In it, you will find account after account of women who desperately needed Dr. Carhart's help. These women and their families have sold family heirlooms, pawned their cars, and gone into tremendous debt just to be able to have an abortion; ironically enough, the delay caused by them "chasing the fee" meant that they had to travel even further distances and pay hundreds of dollars extra for a more invasive later-term abortion. In some cases, Dr. Carhart recounts, many women who finally arrived at his Nebraska clinic weren't able to legally have the abortion because the pregnancy was not life-threatening and the fetus was viable. He wrestles with the complex moments where a woman is overjoyed to find her fetus carried significant defects, because it means she could legally terminate the pregnancy. You can see why he has such a firm grasp on the complexity of the issue.
If the anti-choicers truly cared about not terminating a pregnancy after the arbitrary points where they push restrictive legislation, they would be 100% against the Hyde Amendment. But they don't. They don't care if a fetus is 2mm or 5 inches. They don't care if it's still in its embryonic stage or if it's around 20 weeks gestation. They use the graphic images of later-term abortions because it makes a better point than the microscopic product of pregnancies terminated earlier on. The legislation to restrict the later-term procedures are just an entry point, an excuse to dig their fingers underneath the rock of legal abortion so they can overturn it altogether. The same goes for mandatory delays, biased counseling, and TRAP laws.
The antis have little (if any) interest in the human aspects of abortion. And I'm not talking about "when does a fetus become a human," and I'm certainly not talking about their belief that embryos deserve personhood status. The antis like to play pretend that they're "compassionate," that they don't want women to undergo abortions because they think it will "hurt" them. They have precious little compassion for these women, which is why their version of "supporting the woman" involves shouting desperate pleas while following them between the parking lot and the clinic entrance. Or why they have to misconstrue research and make up mental disorders to disuade women from making an informed choice.
It's not the woman they're concerned about, it's her role as an autonomous human being. They don't want her to have that. If they did, they wouldn't have the knee-jerk reaction to engage in manipulative "counseling" when they hear the stories like the ones shared by Dr. Carhart. They would realize that, often, dealing with an unplanned pregnancy has no winning solution. They would allow themselves to separate the value of the fetus from the value of its carrier. But they don't. Because they don't trust women.
The campaign against Dr. Carhart has been nothing short of genius. Like his late colleague Dr. George Tiller, Carhart's name has been smeared, his practice slandered, and his livelihood dismantled. The antis have painted a highly pervasive picture of LeRoy Carhart, one that is not at all representative if you speak to the women and families who have been helped under his care. Unfortunately for them, Dr. Carhart is not one to sit back and take it.
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