The “undue burden” of a regulated abortion clinic
~ RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes, itemizing the “undue burden” placed on pregnant mothers who have to travel further to get an abortion at a regulated abortion clinic in Texas, as opposed to a closer unregulated clinic.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of these regulations on October 2, effectively shuttering 13 unstandardized abortion clinics around the state.
Oct.04, 2014 6:15 am |
Legislation inspirations, The Courts |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
The child care expenses are no where close to reality. $350 a day? $700 for two days? This is supposed to be a “reality check”? That’s absurd.
And between 1/2 – 1/3 of the cost is the abortion procedure itself.
I see charities (Christian and non-) helping women, men, families, singles… with medical care, child care, food, housing… all the time. I see pro-life people putting their money and time where their mouth is.
RH Reality Check? If there is an undue burden and RH thinks abortion is the answer, then THEY need to help bear that burden. Watch the child. Go with Maria and drive her to San Antonio. Pay for the abortion yourself.
But, no. RH and abortion advocates won’t.
Instead they want to keep legal abortion UNSAFE and unregulated. They want to give abortion facilities a pass at meeting the standards that other ambulatory surgical centers must meet. They don’t care that the fly-in-fly-out abortion doctor doesn’t have admitting privileges at a local hospital when Maria has complications. They don’t care that she’ll be left alone and stranded, with more medical bills and a risk to her life when she develops a post-operative infection.
They don’t care about Maria or her undue burden.
The absurdity of the pro abortion position is that the Abortion Hustlers try to make abortion sound like it’s the Unified Theory of Everything. If abortion is so great, women should be getting congratulated for Saving the Environment, the Economy and Marriage. They should be getting a Gold Medal and put on a Special Pension as Heroines of the Progressive Great Leap Forward and the War on Women.
We used to honor motherhood in this country. Now we have women who want free condoms and free abortions. And the Progressive Media paint the most outspoken of these women as Heroines for Women’s Rights. They are given the first seat at the banquet and are asked to give speeches reciting tales of their heroism. And if you think that’s dishonorable, you will be called out as a woman-hating, misogynist, patriarchal pig.
Can’t afford an abortion? Don’t have one!
Those childcare expenses sound like they are more for a week, not a day.
Why is the mother only making $7.25 an hour? The solution isn’t raising the minimum wage (that just increases everyone’s cost of living) but to make sure she has job skills. If the schools focused on teaching job skills rather than liberal paradigms of sexuality, she might be able to use her skills to contribute to an employer and earn a better wage.
Even though many women who have these procedures done do in fact have children, many do not, and, since this financial model is presuming the women has to stay overnight, few, if any, child care providers offer overnight services. More realistically, the woman would leave her child with a family member or close friend or bring them into the city with them. It’s also ignoring the possibility that their child may already be in daycare/pre-school where the cost has already been paid.
As for meals, it’s not much more than what the woman would have to pay regardless of the surgery. Even so, there are cheaper options to get food, and of the women was in desperate poverty they would even be able to seek out aid from food stamps, soup kitchens and food banks.
Also, you are presuming the woman will stay in a hotel. Motels, hostels and cheaper hotels are available options, and if the woman was truly concerned over that she would find the best available place for her budget. She may even have family or friends in that city.
Either way, this is as per usual for healthcare. People will do the same to get brain tumors removed, which would kill them without a doubt if they didn’t. They go this far to seek rehab services for addictions. This happens for special surgeries, cosmetic surgeries, even other services like legal services. Nobody complains every rural county doesn’t have a jail or a community college and people have to travel great, costly lengths to visit prisoners or seek education. Rural areas can’t and don’t provide every possible service imaginable to tend to their small demographics. This isn’t because we hate people with cancer or addicts or family members of prisoners or college students or people who get plastic surgery or women seeking abortion. It just makes sense.
Item is misnamed. This is not the price of an abortion. It is the price of a piece of action. Should also include the doctor/hospital/etc. If you cannot bankroll the total cost, do not buy into that action.
Every action has a reaction and/or consequence. Not in favor of choices that make one POOR! Am in favor of life and Eternal Life!
RH Reality Check is trying to make the case seem more extreme than necessary.
The rich kids at RH-RC imagine that a poor woman desiring an abortion would make the Cadillac-choices that the RH-RC writers would desire.
Abortion will always have a cost. If we really mean to have abortion that is safe and legal, it is going to cost as much as American healthcare costs. But abortion-choice isn’t healthcare, so it shouldn’t be covered by most insurance plans. If a woman can’t afford it (or just doesn’t want to pay so much), she should choose abortion.
It is more affordable to keep the child, with all the assistance that is available. And adoption is always a choice, one which saves lives and comes with fully paid healthcare benefits.
In the mind of RH-RC, abortion will always cost too much. RH-RC will not rest until we are all forced to pay for any woman’s abortion.
Only the most skilled propagandist could make the case that forcing a woman to travel hundreds of miles for a basic surgical procedure is in her best interest. Fortunately, you guys are terrible liars. It isn’t hard at all to see through the mendacious pro-life BS.
“If a woman can’t afford it (or just doesn’t want to pay so much), she should choose abortion.”
What? She should choose abortion if she can’t afford one? I think that may be a typo.
Megs. I live on a mountain. I have to travel far distances to do most everything except work and get my kids to school. If I cannot afford to go, then I cannot go. This is what being an adult means.
(Not to mention recognizing that abortion is NOT merely a simple surgical procedure but more like a decision that will leave one heart stopped and the other broken.)
“This is what being an adult means.”
Being an adult also means not interfering with the decisions that other adult women make regarding their bodies and their future.
“I have to travel far distances to do most everything except work and get my kids to school.”
And if state lawmakers suddenly closed that school without offering a viable alternative to your children, I think you’d be pretty freaking mad. And justifiably so.
Nobody’s interfering. But depending on the choices you make (who you have sex with, where you decide to live, etc.), you have to deal with the outcomes of those choices. Equal outcomes are not insured by merely showing up in America. I chose to live on a mountain, and so my Walmart, church, ob/gyn, hospital, movie theater, orthodontist and tax preparer are all in the valley. We deal.
Now if my kids went to a public school, they would also have to go down the mountain for it. Windy mountain roads. Many families do this. That is what they chose. We chose to send ours to a private school up here, and so they walk down a wooded path. This, too, is made possible by a series of choices.
Single mothers? Over and over I read about the poor, single moms.
For every single mom, there is a single dad. Why is there no mention of the single fathers who are obligated and should be held accountable to help support and raise their children?
Oh wait, I’ve spent fourteen years trying to get “the system” to hold the “father” of my children responsible.
From what I’ve seen, it’s not about the children at all. The system enables the deadbeats to remain deadbeats and a lot of money is being made off of the people who try to fight for what is right.
“Fortunately, you guys are terrible liars.”
Unfortunately, you darn proaborts put the burden on women and don’t hold men accountable.
So we’re through with the “abortion is just like a pap smear, it doesn’t count as a real surgical procedure” meme?
Cutting through the deliberate obtuseness and rank condescension, let’s lay out your argument in franker terms: women who dare to have non-procreative sex deserve to be punished. That 200-mile drive? It’s part of the gauntlet.
No civilized place (village , town, county, state or nation) would offer elective abortion ‘services’. They should have to drive to hell get their unborn children killed.
Megs, that all depends. If you saw the child that you created as a result of your non-procreative sex (that was actually procreative) as a PUNISHMENT (like our dear Pres), then I guess so. I would never view any baby (much less my OWN) as a punishment. But clearly some women do. Ok. So, yes, if you have chosen to live somewhere where you have to drive 200 miles in order to end the life of your child that you made, so be it. You used the word gauntlet, not I.
Last year, my son made the decision to play pick up football with his friends. He and another boy headbutted each other, and my son crushed his eye socket and to have reconstructive surgery at an out of town hospital. It cost us, big time, especially the rural ambulance ride to Nashville. I had consultations before and after his operation. I had to stay overnight. And I also had to watch him deal with the consequence of his choice. This is life. He will never play football again without the proper equipment. He took a stupid risk he was not prepared to pay for, and we ran through a bunch of gauntlets to get him back to a normal life.
But this is life.
And here’s a question: how come any time I question your (deadly) reasoning, you call it condescension?
Get it through your thick skull, proabort: Prolifers don’t give a rat’s behind if you have non-procreative sex until your body parts start falling off.
Since you seem unclear, ask Bill and Monica to explain what non-procreative sex entails. Ask them to bring along the blue dress if you need a visual.
Leave the procreative married love-making to prolife professionals. It’s above your paygrade to understand it.
Courtnay, I’m so glad your son recovered.
Boys and football.
If you have any pictures of your son’s recovery, you should send them to schools for the teachers to show to the students before recess!
When pro-aborts claim that prolifers want to eliminate abortion as a punishment for sex, it’s just another attempt to divert attention away from the unborn life that abortion kills. Make it about patriarchy, power, punishment…anything but about saving a life. We can’t have people realizing that this basic surgical procedure kills a human life, can we?
Courtnay, if politicians in your state tried to relocate that hospital halfway across the state, would you be upset?
Would I feel inconvenienced? Probably. Most likely I’d be spending my upset on my son, who chose such reckless behavior and required us to drive halfway across the state to remake his face. And maybe a little for his dad, too, who was the parent in charge there, and did not take him immediately to the emergency room even though our son had lost consciousness and felt nauseous.
But that’s another rant for another day.
Well, for what it’s worth, I think everybody deserves access to quality healthcare, regardless of where they choose to live or the risks they choose to take.
I hope your son is doing better now – that sounds really rough. This girl sustained many a sports injury as a kid. Risk-seeking isn’t necessarily a boy thing :)
Thanks, megs. I really appreciate that. The story has a happy ending: he went on to be MVP of his basketball league and win his tournament. We swear 2014 will be incident free.
Where we will differ here is what constitutes healthcare. Abortion is NOT healthcare. It’s paying someone to end your own child’s life.
BlueVelvet says:
Only the most skilled propagandist could make the case that forcing a woman to travel hundreds of miles for a basic surgical procedure is in her best interest.
Abortion is not a “basic medical procedure.” It is a lifestyle choice, like getting a tattoo (or having one removed).
Cutting through the deliberate obtuseness and rank condescension, let’s lay out your argument in franker terms: women who dare to have non-procreative sex deserve to be punished.
You have totally missed the point again. The woman had procreative sex with a man. (Biology fact: Sex is naturally procreative.) When sex does what sex does, you should not be so amazed.
What your hypothetical woman wants to do is murder her child. For some insane reason, this is legal. For the safety of women, society insists decided that if it must be legal then it must also be safe.
It was the abortionists who decided that if they can’t cut corners and do it dirty and cheap, then they won’t do it at all. They chose to close their clinics, instead of complying with medical standards. Direct your pointy finger to the source of your problem.
I don’t have access to any healthcare for me or for my children thanks to a precarious economy and outrageous healthcare costs (lost my catastrophic coverage after ACA passed, cant afford new catastrophic coverage, don’t qualify for assistance). We have the emergency room. That’s it. Don’t come complaining to me about the cost of abortions. If I get so much as a staph infection, we are up a creek.
As for sex, the entire reason sex exists is procreation. That’s just a biological fact. If My husband and I don’t want me to get pregnant, we don’t do the deed. There is no such thing as non-procreation sex.
AND why would anyone complain about $7.25/hr? My husband has an MBA, and he has not made that much in the last six years. If you break down his salary by the hour, he has been lucky to average $5. Right now, he makes a little less than $4/hr and works a minimum of 60 hours per week.
Everything has a context. If what you want to do doesn’t fit into your context, you just don’t get to do it. If I cant afford food, I cant buy it. Even if I want to. If I cant afford rent, I cant pay it. No matter how much I want a roof over my head. That is the real world. It’s not fun or pleasant. But pretending that reality doesn’t exist makes it all even more unpleasant.
If you’re in a financial bind and can’t afford another child, here’s the reality for you to check: abstinence is free.
If you are pregnant, and don’t want to raise your child, there are families ready and willing to help with costs and adoption. People wait years to welcome a new baby into their home by adoption.
Oh, I remember when I was afraid to mention adoption on this board for fear that our adoption-hating commentor would pounce all over it.
The real undue burden is on the innocent child. Why should a tiny human being pay with his life for the lack of care from his parents? Isn’t it bad enough to be unwanted, but you abortion fans think adding dead to it somehow makes the world a better place? Nutsolaville. Choose life, it’s not too late.
I clicked over to RH-Reality Check to see the original article. I made the mistake of reading the comments.
Wow… that is a scary blog. Such angry, threatening, violent people. My respect and sympathy to Jill and the collaborators who have to check that stuff daily.
abstinence: $0
Learning Natural Family Planning costs about $160 and after that, it’s basically free.
If your boyfriend doesn’t want to wait until marriage to have sex, you’ll probably be faced with two options eventually 1) Dump the baby or 2) Dump the boyfriend. If you dump the baby, you’ll probably end up without the boyfriend, too.
If you have a boyfriend who will wait until marriage, you’ll very likely end up with a husband who will practice Natural Family Planning with you. Young couples just starting out can afford NFP classes; they only cost $160.
If you don’t have a boyfriend who wants to wait until marriage, and you get pregnant, he will say to you, “It’s your choice, baby.” Funny how that word “baby” pops up in reference to you, not his baby. Your baby. It’s not “our baby.”
If you go ahead and get an abortion, depending on how far along you are in giving that bay life (before you end the life), it will cost anywhere from $400 to upwards of $2,5000 or even more.
But your expenses for the abortion don’t end there. You’ll probably need a few concert tickets and binge drinking episodes. Lots of them. Car wrecks. Loss of income from staying home with depression. Or medical complications from the abortion. More concerts and maybe sleeping around and all the costs associated with that (“This guy will treat me better….His wife will never find out, etc.,that sort of thing). You might even “turn gay,” being “turned off by guys.”
NFP only costs $160. For real.
http://ccli.org/nfp/nfp-advantages/easytolearn.php
“As for sex, the entire reason sex exists is procreation. That’s just a biological fact. If My husband and I don’t want me to get pregnant, we don’t do the deed. There is no such thing as non-procreation sex.”
Hooboy. Do you consider every sexual encounter from which you don’t conceive a failure?
“The real undue burden is on the innocent child.”
An adult human being must use her body to bring that “innocent child” into existence. This is labor in its most elemental form. I, for one, would like to live in a world where that labor is ENTIRELY elective.
Anyway — thank you, everybody, for reaffirming that these abortion restrictions in Texas have NOTHING, 0%, do with a woman’s health, and everything to do with making it as logistically difficult and humiliating as possible to legally end a pregnancy. Go you guys.
BlueVelvet:
What do you think are the chances that if it weren’t for the pro life movement in the US that by now we’d be living in a country where birth labor IS entirely elective?
Of course, the ones doing the electing to create life would also be those who wield the power to say some human beings’ lives may be destroyed at will.
You may not want to accept this, but the only reason abortions happen at 3,000+ a day in the US is because it’s legal to do so. If it’s legal to destroy at will, the power to force the creation of life at the will of the LAWMAKERS exists within that first, preceding law.
Abortion on demand is the dream of utopianist, eugenicist thinkers from Charles Darwin to his cousin Sir Francis Galton to Margaret Sanger to Hitler to those who influenced the Supreme Court in ’73. It’s never been about JUST choosing to kill, but also about who has the legal RIGHT to kill, and by the extension of that right, who has the RIGHT to live. As Darwin subtitledtitled his masterwork, “Survival of the MOST FIT Races.”
“An adult human being must use her body to bring that “innocent child” into existence.”
Please add that an adult human being (in almost all cases) has complete control and choice to use her body in such a way that ensures that no innocent child will be brought into existence. Human beings comes into existence at conception.
And btw, an adult male human being must also use his body to bring an innocent child into existence. No female in history has ever conceived a child without a man being involved. In almost all cases, he has complete control and choice to use his body in such a way that ensures that no innocent child will be brought into existence as well.
Humiliating as possible? Why wouldn’t killing humans be humiliating proabort? Practice some self-control because it’s never really been all about you. After all, you are reminded of that little one that you paid to have killed every time you come here, aren’t you? How old would she be now? Old enough to tell her mom how much she loves her?
Stop trying to get others to join you in your misery and find freedom in the Truth.
“Do you consider every sexual encounter from which you don’t conceive a failure?”
Conceive? Conceive what? Oh that’s right. A child. Your child.
A failure is being given the wonderful gift of a child (being given this gift in spite of your selfishness and lack of control even!) and then choosing to annihilate her.
That is the definition of a complete and utter failure. And then having the gall to come here expecting what? High fives and applause?
Go you.
“Practice some self-control because it’s never really been all about you.”
But apparently it’s all about the delusions of a post-menopausal religious fanatic. Did you name my child, too, Praxedes? Is that a fun game they play in the la-la land where people champion the rights of an embryo over the rights of the woman in whose body that developing life is housed?
“But apparently it’s all about the delusions of a post-menopausal religious fanatic.”
Silly attempts at diversion won’t change the fact that your child is dead because of your actions and choices.
“Did you name my child, too, Praxedes?”
No, but thanks for admitting you had a child. Since you can’t seem to bring yourself to give her a name, I will.
Dorothy Gianna would have loved you very much and made you very proud, BlueVelvet.
Menopause is a beautiful time of life. A woman who has borne fruit in her youth and is experiencing her life changing in her maturing years is like a noble tree experiencing the falling away of the leaves in autumn. This maturing time is then spent sinking roots deep into the fertile soil of her patriot land, having given that land the best of her natural, fruitful, youthful growth. The golden and dappled leaves that are falling at her feet reveal the inner beauty that was hidden by the bright greenery of younger days. There is a time for every thing and every purpose under heaven.
That’s pretty creepy, Prax. Prettttttty creepy.
BlueVelvet sez: “Is that a fun game they play in the la-la land where people champion the rights of an embryo over the rights of the woman in whose body that developing life is housed?”
I don’t have a problem with this question, since my values a democrat, liberal values. Although not Marxist. Democrats ought to be the party sticking up for the little guy, the guy who alone does not have the political power to get his or her rights respected.
The human being who is in the embryo apparently needs advocacy. The adult woman not so much. The power structure is set up to suit her interests, to the detriment of the eight-week-old human. Who is advocating for human beings that have only been in existence for six or eight weeks?
Megs, I have a question: how come any time any one of us expresses the conviction that your child had a right to live, you see it as a confirmation that we don’t care about you, your story, or your health? You bought into the proabortion polemic, which is to say, it’s either me or the fetus. We cannot possibly coexist. One has to go, and it will always be this competition between us.
I am not going to name your child, but I am going to affirm that she had a right to be protected by her mama, and she had the right to coexist alongside you. This affirmation in no way communicates my belief that you didn’t have a tough situation or that you might have thought at that moment there was no way out. All I’m saying is both of you should have lived, and prospered and gone on to do good things in this world.
Thanks for the wonderful comments DocKimble. I often find that those who don’t value the youngest among us have snide comments to make about those older than themselves as well. Maybe it’s just humans who are different than themselves that they are really afraid of. I’ve earned every grey hair and wrinkle! Most days I’m amazed I have any hair left!
I have pity on you, BlueVelvet, that my naming an unwanted child creeps you out so. You didn’t want her and didn’t want anyone else to love and raise her, so why do you care if someone else names her?
Killing children that are unwanted by their mothers is what creeps me out and makes me fear for myself and others who may now or someday become unwanted by you. Hopefully someone wants you.
If the dude will not pick up the tab for you, maybe, just maybe, “he’s just not that into you.”
(To quote Greg Behrendt + Liz Tuccillo.)
News flash!!! You will not die without sex! Cant afford an abortion? Dont put yourself in the position where you would even have to consider one. Name one case where a woman has died from not having sex!
Hi heather, I caught the tail end of a report on the radio today that talked about how Ebola can be spread through sex for seventy days after recovery — did not know this. Survivors are told to use condoms for those seventy days!
Common sense tells me that survivors should be told under no uncertain terms that they CANNOT HAVE SEX FOR SEVENTY DAYS to make certain they don’t spread an illness with a mortality rate of around 90%.
If he risks giving you Ebola, “he’s just not that into you.” But I’m the creepy one for naming a murdered child. Jeepers Creepers.
The problem with common sense is that it is just not very common anymore.