Doctors stung by abortion ruling

Dr. Paul Blumenthal feels like one of his surgical instruments has been taken away.

Blumenthal is the director of contraceptive health and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University. He is also an abortion doctor. For Blumenthal and others in his profession, the recent Supreme Court decision to ban partial-birth abortion isn’t about politics; it’s about the government regulating how he saves a woman’s life. As it stands now, if Blumenthal were to perform a partial-birth abortion, he would be looking at two years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

“If our medical training and reviewing of evidence are going to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, we may need to change the way we practice medicine altogether,” Blumenthal said.

“It’s a fine line judging when health endangerment crosses into life endangerment.

“What’s really critical is the interference of Congress and the Supreme Court in the practice of medicine,” Blumenthal said. “It’s one thing to legislate policies, it’s another to legislate procedures.”

The court’s decision last week was a milestone victory for anti-abortion advocates, as it laid the groundwork for more state-level abortion restrictions. While the
decision doesn’t affect a woman’s right to decide to have an abortion, abortion rights advocates say it affects a woman’s right to health and a doctor’s rights to perform a medical procedure.

Abortion rights advocates consider partial-birth abortion to be the safer of the two procedures.

The problem, others say, is that the decision offered no alternative procedure, which puts women’s health into question.

Sarah Aronson, director of NARAL and Students for Choice in Missoula, said partial-birth abortion is a safer procedure for women to receive.

“When you raise the status of the fetus over the woman, what are we really valuing here?” Aronson said. “Politics and law shouldn’t be intervening in the practice of medicine, and physicians shouldn’t be punished.”

Partial-birth abortion is a simplified term for “intact DNE,” a procedure during which labor is induced, the fetus’s head is extracted from the vagina, and the skull is collapsed or surgically cut. The legal alternative procedure is simply called a DNE, during which the fetus is dismembered as it is removed from the mother’s body with forceps. Both procedures are usually performed in the second trimester of pregnancy.

Gregg Trude, executive director of the Montana Right to Life Association, said the argument that a regular, second-trimester DNE endangers the lives of abortion patients is ludicrous.

“If they’re against a procedure inside the uterus, how then can they be in favor of other abortions that are all performed inside the uterus?” Trude said. “They could perform a C-section in 30 seconds.”

The text of the decision is the first to recognize the unlikelihood of partial-birth abortion being performed in the U.S. It states, “Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 1.3 million abortions performed each year in the United States take place in the first three months of pregnancy.”

Beth Cogswell, development director of Planned Parenthood of Montana, said that the frequency of the procedure didn’t matter as much as the fact that the accessibility of the procedure was taken away.

“The more restrictions are placed on abortion, the harder it becomes for women to access care,” Cogswell said. “First and foremost we believe in the health and safety of women.”

But for anti-abortion advocates like Trude, the decision was a sign that people were becoming more educated about the damage abortion causes.

“They’re going to lose the battle eventually anyway, because with technology taking over, with advances like four-dimensional ultrasounds, people are realizing that babies can suck their thumbs at six weeks,” Trude said. “People are starting to think, ‘Wait, this isn’t just a ball of tissue.’”