I think a lot of anti-choice men are really misinformed about the realities of human reproduction. They start from the premise that as soon as a sperm fertilizes an egg you have a new human life that has all the same rights as a 35 year-old white man with no felonies on his record. But the formation of life is a lot more complicated than that. For example, perhaps as many as 50% of all fertilized eggs will not result in a live birth (without accounting for potential abortions). Somewhere between 10% and 20% of fertilized eggs will successfully implant in the uterus only to end in miscarriage (usually in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy). Another 10%-30% of fertilized eggs will never implant successfully, with some getting stuck in the fallopian tube (ectopic pregnancy) and others having too many chromosomal abnormalities to do basic cell division.
Most miscarriages happen so early in pregnancy that there is a good chance the woman will not know (or be certain) that they have occurred. But when the pregnancy is somewhat established before it is lost, women start having to ask questions like: What should I do if my practitioner tells me I’ve lost the pregnancy but I still haven’t passed the tissue? and What is curettage like? And it might surprise to learn that curettage is a lot like having an abortion. It’s not a pretty picture:
For suction curettage, the doctor will pass a hollow plastic tube through your cervix and suction out the tissue from your uterus. For a traditional D&C, she’ll use a spoon-shaped instrument called a curette to gently scrape the tissue from the walls of your uterus. The whole thing may take about 15 to 20 minutes, though the tissue removal itself takes less than ten minutes.
Now, if you were overjoyed to be pregnant one minute and then having your uterus scraped with a spoon-shaped instrument the next, you might be feeling a little traumatized. You might be feeling depressed. You might be feeling all kinds of horrible things that you don’t want to have to discuss with anyone, let alone a police officer who wants to make sure you haven’t just engaged in unauthorized vaginal bleeding. Your husband probably feels the same way. The loss of pregnancy is one of the most difficult and trying things any two people can go through, and treating it as a crime scene is the clearest and cruelest violation of privacy that I can imagine.
But, here’s the thing. According to Republican ideology, any non-menstrual bleeding should be treated as a potential crime scene. A potential murder has taken place, even if the mother doesn’t know it. And why not call the cops? It seems totally consistent to me. If you want to protect the unborn, then you jolly well better protect them damn it.
