"Partial-birth abortion" and the uncertainty of medicine

There are so many things wrong with the recent Supreme Court decision banning "partial birth" abortion that it's hard to know where to begin. But what's on my mind today is that there is no exception for the health of the mother, just for the life of the mother. In other words, if giving birth, or having a different, less safe abortion procedure, will make a woman sick, or infertile, or blind, that's okay, as long as she won't die.

And in addition to the fact that it's just a heinous thing to say, that it's just an evil thing to value a fetus that won't survive anyway over the health of a human woman, it's also not what medicine is.

We like to think that it is. We like to think that medicine is the thing where they figure out what's wrong and what will happen, and they tell you, and that's what will happen, and they tell you how they're going to fix it, and they do. But often it's not like that.

We're going through a thing in my family now, I don't want to go into it, but it's a diagnosis, and then a recovery period, and then a relapse, and then it turns out the first diagnosis was wrong, and then tests, and then more tests, and still no information. But discarding that first diagnosis, throwing us back into uncertainty, that's what a lot of medicine is like. It's like "We don't know so let's try this and if it doesn't work we'll try that and if it doesn't work we'll think some more."

So a woman is bleeding out or septic or whatever. A doctor has to look at the decisions he could make: If she has this procedure she has a really good chance of being fine, and if she has that procedure there's a greater risk of blood loss but probably she'll still be fine. And the Supreme Court wants to be a fly on the wall and say, "That's not a 'life of the mother' situation. That's greater health risk versus lower health risk." But in fact, the doctor isn't certain, and in fact, the woman might die.

A year from now, we're going to have dead women who might have survived had they had the intact D&E procedure falsely named "partial birth abortion." They will be women who appeared to have a health risk and not a life risk by the uncertain close-one-eye-and-aim world of medicine, and they will be the tragic and enraging posthumous flag-bearers of the fight for reproductive freedom.

Because five men on the Supreme Court decided that health isn't life. And decided it was up to them to make that decision.

(Cross-posts are between a woman and her Blogger.)