Monday, June 4, 2007

James Dobson Hates Women

As Kevin Drum points out over at The Washington Monthly, this nugget from James Dobson spokesman Tom Minnery is exposing and disgusting:
Doctors adopted the late-term procedure "out of convenience," Minnery added. "The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling."
So, basically, Dobson supports forcing doctors who feel that a late-term abortion is medically appropriate into using a procedure which is more dangerous for the woman involved. If some more of them are injured or killed in the process, well, they were probably Democrats anyway, so no big loss.

Look, I am pretty middle-of-the-road on abortion. I don't like the idea of killing fetuses, and make no mistake about it, that is what an abortion does. But life is full of decisions, and we do things we'd rather not do all the time. I believe the rights of a fully-grown person have to override those of an unformed fetus contained inside her body. I think we can all agree that we'd like to have less abortions, if only because they are surgical procedures, which means they have risks, and we'd like to reduce those for everyone.

But this just makes me ill. Dobson is admitting to being a proponent of exposing women to higher risk of injury; that is, physically hurting women, in order to reduce the already miniscule numbers of people undergoing a grotesque, but sometimes necessary, medical procedure? It's bad enough (well past bad enough) for Anthony Kennedy to claim that this ban is necessary to prevent women from suffering guilt later for the decisions they made, but this is insulting, patronizing and, well, evil.

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