One thing gets lost when we focus only on the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. And that is that pregnancies terminate themselves all the time. And, when they do, there is frequently a problem that the remnants of that pregnancy do not expel themselves fully or adequately. I’m not going to get all medical on you, but the process for cleaning out a woman’s uterus after her fetus dies is not necessarily any different from the procedure used to perform an abortion. In fact, if a D&C is preformed, it is often termed an abortion, even though it is not.
And this is where privacy can really become a major issue. If abortion were illegal, all these D&C’s would become potential crime scenes. But, under the language of the Stupak Amendment, the same would be true. In the former case, we might be talking about a murder investigation. In the latter, it’s a matter of potential insurance fraud. I won’t discuss my personal history with these issues out of respect for other’s privacy, except to say that I have experienced miscarriage. It is heartbreaking and traumatic. And, the idea that my partner and I might be put in the position of having to explain how our pregnancy was lost spontaneously to an insurance agent, or a prosecutor, is something too horrible to really put into words.
How do I prove that the heart just stopped beating? Imagine having to make sure your doctor would certify that your wife had extreme hypertension, or some other life-threatening problem? Imagine having to prove that your pregnancy resulted from rape, or whether or not to turn your incestuous uncle in to the authorities so you could get your insurance money. When the Supreme Court ruled that abortion should be completely legal in the first trimester, they were taking these practical privacy issues into consideration. The loss of a pregnancy, for any reason, is a deeply personal trauma. Nothing could be more psychologically harmful than casting legal doubt over every pregnancy that ends short of term.
It is the violation of private grief, more than anything else, that would make a repeal of Roe v. Wade so deeply unpopular. But exposing grieving would-be parents to this type of abuse through restrictions in the provision of health insurance would create the same reaction. You cannot restrict or regulate abortion in this way without creating all kinds of collateral damage among people who didn’t have an abortion in the first place.
Sometimes we lose sight of this in our desire to argue from first principles. But it’s actually a point that I’ve made to many anti-choice people, and I’ve never failed to make them think twice about their lazy assumptions.