Where are the women?

Is it “informed consent” when you’re not given the chance to consent?

The politicians who proposed the bill that passed in the Virginia legislature last week requiring women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before having an abortion certainly seem to think so.

The bill, which doesn’t require women to review the results of the ultrasound — it only requires that the procedure be performed, has nothing to do with informed consent, the idea that patients should have as much knowledge as possible about a procedure (in this case, an abortion) before having it done.

What it does concern, however, is blatant abuse of women’s reproductive rights and terrifying conservative hypocrisy regarding governmental intrusion in health care.

This bill will force Virginia women to undergo a unnecessary medical procedure in order to practice a right that was established almost 40 years ago in Roe v. Wade. As mentioned before, the bill is being legitimized by saying it is expanding Virginia’s “informed consent” laws, but this isn’t the case.

This argument is degrading and presumes that women who decide to have an abortion are incapable of realizing the magnitude of that decision without first seeing an ultrasound confirming the fact that they will be terminating a potential life.

Moreover, the bill has unabashedly harmful provisions to women’s rights (not to mention simply disturbing), such as the stipulation that the doctor performing the procedure is required to ask the woman if she wants to watch the ultrasound and then note whether she does or not. Whether a woman chooses to look or not will then go on her permanent medical record.

No matter what the bill’s proponents say about “informed consent,” it certainly seems the true motivations are to shame and punish women for deciding to have an abortion.
Furthermore, something integral is missing from this equation: women’s consent to have the literally invasive procedure in the first place.

Virginia Delegate David Englin proposed an amendment to the bill that would require women to give written consent in order to have the procedure done, but it failed by a
64-34 vote.

There is something seriously wrong here.

Not only is this bill regressive and harmful to women, it’s also glaringly hypocritical. 

Last week, conservative politicians raised pandemonium about Obama’s universal birth control coverage policy, crying government interference in the institutional and individual rights to freedom of conscience.

Why is it, then, that none of the same politicians have said a word about unabashed government interference into individual liberties in Virginia?

Unlike Obama’s policy, this is about more than coercive payment. It forces doctors to provide and women to endure an unnecessary medical procedure and a subsequent arbitrary “waiting period” before gaining permission to have an abortion.    

If the Virginia legislature were really so concerned with informed consent, it would pass laws requiring all doctors to tell women about their lawful rights to have an abortion and obtain contraception.

­— ccleahy@indiana.edu