Pro-Life Nation

[zakur]

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.

[...]

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. They were rejected in the late 1990's, in a period after the country's long civil war ended. The country's penal system was revamped and its constitution was amended. Abortion is now absolutely forbidden in every possible circumstance. No exceptions.

There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, 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.

[...]

A policy that criminalizes all abortions has a flip side. It appears to mandate that the full force of the medical team must tend toward saving the fetus under any circumstances. This notion can lead to some dangerous practices. Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.

According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. "That is our policy," Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. "That is the law," she said. "The D.A.'s office told us that this was the law." Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital's practice. "Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital," she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. "If it's dead, we can operate," she said. "Before that, we can't." If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture.

Disturbing.

 

[Pauliesonne]

F**king Animals!!!

 

[Dcdrac]

US is well on the raod to this too

I have begun to genunley feel sorry for the USA and what it is mutating into to.

Farewell the grand experiment, brave effort but it seems lost.


Bon Chance Mon Ami

Best of luck and remember all refugees welcome.

 

[Zep]

Perhaps if the new Pope intervened??

 

[joe1347]

Interesting (actually disturbing) article making us appreciate what a total ban on abortion entails. Hopefully, the loons in South Dakota don't get any help from El Salvador in formalizing anti-abortion policy.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Do even the most hardcore pro-lifers in the US insist on women continuing ectopic pregnancies?

 

[Zep]

I suspect they have no friggin' idea what an "ectopic" pregnancy actually is...

 

[hgc]

I suspect they have no friggin' idea what an "ectopic" pregnancy actually is...

They know. Don't think that El Salvador is so different from the U.S. that this couldn't happen here.

 

[Zep]

They know. Don't think that El Salvador is so different from the U.S. that this couldn't happen here.

Oh some of the "moderate" pro-life proponents do know, but they usually aren't the real hardcore proponents like in El Salvador.

My experience so far listening and reading what some of the REAL hardcore pro-lifers say is that they actually get utterly lost when asked to explain these things, and that they are a long way from the realities of the situation. And once they realise they are stranded, they simply rant to escape. As the saying goes, the reason these people get lost in thought is that they have never been there before.

 

[zakur]

My experience so far listening and reading what some of the REAL hardcore pro-lifers say is that they actually get utterly lost when asked to explain these things, and that they are a long way from the realities of the situation. And once they realise they are stranded, they simply rant to escape.

Meet The Press, 10/17/04

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. DeMint, you said you would ban all abortions. Would you ban all abortions without any exceptions, for rape or incest, just ban all abortion, period?

REP. DeMINT: Tim, I've had four kids, as I mentioned before, and I think it's wrong for a country to call an unborn child a baby when we want it and a fetus when we don't. Where the debate needs to be right now, a lot of these exceptions and what-ifs are just distractions. We need to decide, are we going to protect human life? And the first vote, the first debate we need to have is are we going to protect human life? Is that a person or is it property? And so, you know, we can get into all the distractions we want. I'm against abortion. I believe it takes a human life, and I think our laws need to protect human...

MR. RUSSERT: You would ban all abortion, period. If that was the law, who would you prosecute, the woman, the doctor, the father, who?

REP. DeMINT: We've got to make laws first that protect life. How those laws are shaped are going to be a long debate.

MR. RUSSERT: But any law that banned abortion would have to have in it...

REP. DeMINT: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...the criminal sanctions that would apply.

REP. DeMINT: It would have, and we have to decide that, Tim. What we have to--Tim...

MR. RUSSERT: What is your view as a legislator?

REP. DeMINT: My view...

MR. RUSSERT: Who would you prosecute?

REP. DeMINT: My view is that unborn children are human life. They deserve the protection of law. And just like the president said, there's no longer a question of when life begins, it's just a question of when love begins. We can have all the debate that you're talking about once we decide it's human life, but the debate is do we have property or do we have a person?

MR. RUSSERT: I accept that, and respect your views, but if you have a law which says all abortions should be banned, period, who should be prosecuted if they perform an abortion, the woman, the doctor, who?

REP. DeMINT: I think the lawmakers at the state level...

MR. RUSSERT: You want to be a lawmaker.

REP. DeMINT: I do want to be. But we need to...

MR. RUSSERT: You want to be a United States senator. What is your view?

REP. DeMINT: My view is we should protect all human life and that our laws should be set up to protect that life.

MR. RUSSERT: But who would be prosecuted?

REP. DeMINT: We'll just have to decide that. I mean...

MR. RUSSERT: What is your view?

REP. DeMINT: 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?

Translation: We should just make laws, but figure out all the "unimportant" details later.

Just like here in Ohio, where we passed the "Defense of Marriage" ammendment to ban gay marriages, but now authorities can't prosecute some unmarried people under Ohio's domestic violence law because it conflicts with said amendment.

So now we can't put a guy in jail for beating up his live-in girlfriend, but at least the queers can't get hitched!

 

[Zep]

Good example, Zakur!

I also recall a TV in-the-street interview with some placard-carrying idjit protesting against an abortion clinic (it turned out to be a dentist's office or something, later, but that's not important here ).

He was asked under what condtions an abortion MIGHT be performed legally - he said "None! It's all against God's laws! We must burn their baby-killing operations down!" Etcetera.

To the next question about pregnancy from rape, he said to the effect that it was at least partly the woman's fault - women invite sexual assault by dressing too revealing anyway (I'm not kidding - he said that!). The reporter qualified the rape to incestual rape, which drew a response along the lines that that sort of thing never happens in a God-fearing society, but pitched at a higher volume than previously.

Finally, the reporter asked about dangerous conditions like ectopic pregnancy. The shouted response, that gobsmacked me, was "We don't want none of them ectopics in this country anyways!"

The reporter tried to explain the question, but at that point the idjit exploded and attacked him and the TV camera with the placard. And...back to Jim in the studio!

 

[Anti_Hypeman]

Reminds me of a show on PBS last night http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/

They were trying to give polio vaccines in some muslim crap hole, they all look the same to me. The religious leaders told people not to take it as it would cause impotence. They tried to convince one guy to let his kids have it but he just kept screming how allah would protect them.

DeMint couldnt answer the question simply because he had not been told what to think on the subject yet. As soon as Rod Parsley does a show on it he will get back with us.