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Legislator Says Women Should Witness Abortions


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looks like even GOP woman can be lousy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/2 ... 68386.html

A Republican state legislator in Arizona reportedly wrote an email to a constituent saying that women should witness an abortion before having an abortion.

The email published on a political blog on the Arizona Republic's website Tuesday is apparently from State Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson) and appears to have been sent from a state email, the paper said.

The email was in response to a constituent who said she emailed Proud and fellow lawmakers to let them know she opposed the bill pending in the Legislature that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The site reports that the email is unedited.

"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a "surgical procedure". If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."

An aide in Proud's Phoenix office told The Huffington Post that Proud was performing legislative duties and unavailable for immediate comment. She has not returned a message left with her office.

The email is drawing quick criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

"This is another instance of them going off the deep end on this," House Minority Leader Chad Campbell (D-Phoenix) told HuffPost. "This is a continued attack on women's health care and women's choice. I wonder if Representative Proud would agree with this on every surgical procedure. This is ludicrous."

Campbell said he hopes Proud was not serious in her email and would not be proposing it as an amendment to the bill.

Rep. Matt Heinz (D-Tucson), a physician, said Tuesday Proud's email shows a misunderstanding of laws and procedures governing medicine and medical education. Heinz said there are laws in place to prevent spectators from watching surgery, which would include abortions. He also suggested that Proud consider other issues.

"My only response is for this Legislature to stop this embarrassing obsession with social issues that do not create a single job in our state," said Heinz, who also characterized the email as a "hodgepodge of crazy."

In addition to the abortion ban, the Arizona Legislature is considering bills to defund Planned Parenthood, allow doctors to withhold information from patients to prevent abortions, and to allow employers to opt out of contraception coverage for religious reasons. The contraception bill also would allow employers to demand women provide reasons for why they are using birth control and allow for firing if it is for nonmedical reasons.

Proud is known as one of the more conservative members of the Legislature and earlier this month passed a bill to allow public schools to teach the Bible as an elective class.

Campbell said though that the email could be revealing a liberal bent in his colleague. "Talk about big government, that's the epitome of big government," Campbell said. "This is getting out of hand."

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looks like even GOP woman can be lousy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/2 ... 68386.html

A Republican state legislator in Arizona reportedly wrote an email to a constituent saying that women should witness an abortion before having an abortion.

The email published on a political blog on the Arizona Republic's website Tuesday is apparently from State Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson) and appears to have been sent from a state email, the paper said.

The email was in response to a constituent who said she emailed Proud and fellow lawmakers to let them know she opposed the bill pending in the Legislature that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The site reports that the email is unedited.

"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a "surgical procedure". If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."

An aide in Proud's Phoenix office told The Huffington Post that Proud was performing legislative duties and unavailable for immediate comment. She has not returned a message left with her office.

The email is drawing quick criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

"This is another instance of them going off the deep end on this," House Minority Leader Chad Campbell (D-Phoenix) told HuffPost. "This is a continued attack on women's health care and women's choice. I wonder if Representative Proud would agree with this on every surgical procedure. This is ludicrous."

Campbell said he hopes Proud was not serious in her email and would not be proposing it as an amendment to the bill.

Rep. Matt Heinz (D-Tucson), a physician, said Tuesday Proud's email shows a misunderstanding of laws and procedures governing medicine and medical education. Heinz said there are laws in place to prevent spectators from watching surgery, which would include abortions. He also suggested that Proud consider other issues.

"My only response is for this Legislature to stop this embarrassing obsession with social issues that do not create a single job in our state," said Heinz, who also characterized the email as a "hodgepodge of crazy."

In addition to the abortion ban, the Arizona Legislature is considering bills to defund Planned Parenthood, allow doctors to withhold information from patients to prevent abortions, and to allow employers to opt out of contraception coverage for religious reasons. The contraception bill also would allow employers to demand women provide reasons for why they are using birth control and allow for firing if it is for nonmedical reasons.

Proud is known as one of the more conservative members of the Legislature and earlier this month passed a bill to allow public schools to teach the Bible as an elective class.

Campbell said though that the email could be revealing a liberal bent in his colleague. "Talk about big government, that's the epitome of big government," Campbell said. "This is getting out of hand."

What I bolded should be, with some tweaking, Obama 2012's election campaign slogan.

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I'd go watch an abortion. I'd like to learn how to do it, hoping my state will eventually allow it to be within Advance Practice Nursing's scope of practice.

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Is this the sort of thing that she envisions?

http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/wp- ... 00x225.jpg

In fairness, I'm wondering if she would also mandate that women watch c-sections being performed having one, even if it may make someone hesitate to consent to one. Perhaps we could also have some QF advocates, especially the men, watch videos of both vaginal birth and c-sections, and maybe throw in some footage of uterine rupture for those who don't see past multiple c-sections as any reason to use birth control.

http://www.savevideosfacebook.com/cesar ... slide.html

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You know, I wasn't forced to watch a tonsillectomy or a wisdom teeth removal before having those procedures done.

Oddly enough, I did have to watch a wisdom tooth removal (video) before mine was done. This was about 15 years ago.

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Way back in the 60's I worked with a surgeon who made his own kids come in and see kids in ICU who had been drinking and driving. The idea sounds good but it just doesn't work. One of his kids died from drinking and driving.

A woman who wants an abortion likely isn't going to change her mind. In addition such a technique is coercive. Too many mothers lost their babies to adoption in the Baby Scoop Era due to coercion. Decisions need to be freely made.

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The person proposing this has obviously never watched one... I have not seen a surgical abortion but I have seen a very similar procedure that is used post-miscarriage to clear out the womb, it is the most boring procedure I have ever seen. Basically they put in a succession of dilators and then suck.

WRT showing people the consequences of their actions for other things - apparently it doesn't matter how many stats you give people or how many pictures you show them that isn't what is going to help them change their behaviour - it is finding out why they don't change and working with them to give them the confidence to change that behaviour. And of course it only really works if they *want* to change. Perhaps showing them the scary pictures might make them want to in the first place though.

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I enjoy watching medical shows and find medical procedures interesting. My husband can't stomach it and thinks it's all gross...but I'm fascinated by the human body and how far medicine has come. So to be honest, I wouldn't mind watching an abortion. I think it'd be interesting, if not boring...I've seen someone show how to do it on a papaya and it looks pretty uneventful...the papaya didn't seem to mind. :) If I ever have to have one I'd probably ask to at least look...I also asked to have them put a mirror up during my root canal so I could watch. So yeah.

I guess I really just wish the stigma would disappear and the medical procedure of abortion would be no more than any other "gross" medical procedure. Although I'd never want anyone to be forced to watch...just like I wouldn't want to be forced to watch a childbirth (which is the one thing I don't like watching). I'll keep dreaming about that whole "disappearing stigma" thing though.

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I had a mate in school whose dad caught him smoking, his first time. He grounded him, went out and bought 5 packets of ciggies and stood over him while he smoked them all. Tony's addicted now.

How does she know that women watching abortion procedures won't be inspired to retrain as doctors so they can perform them?

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This is making me wonder what anti-choice people really think happens during an abortion. Do they envision some grisly, blood-spattered-all-over-the-walls operation? I've seen video and basically, it's a woman in stirrups and the doctor is working between her legs with dilators and then the contents of the uterus are suctioned out and that's it. Like 5-10 minutes total.

I think they've been taken in by their own propaganda.

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I've seen procedures used in abortion but performed for patients that had miscarried. It was far less gory than most other surgeries I've seen. I saw more gore during a lap chole ('course, having a camera inserted probably magnifies the gore...). What does prolife people think they're going to get?

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You know, I wasn't forced to watch a tonsillectomy or a wisdom teeth removal before having those procedures done.

Word.

What's with legislators being all up in women's vaginas lately? :x

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So much for small government. It seems like some conservatives want no government involved in helping the poor, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless but militant about regulations relating to female sexual organs. I wonder what passage in the Bible stresses these values?

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There's something hilarious and sad about how anti-choicers assume that the majority of pro-choicers don't know what abortion looks like, and the majority of people don't know what fetuses look like. When I was in grade 9, we watched a video that detailed human reproduction, from the erection to childbirth (very awkward stuff to see with your classmates at 15). Anyway, there was tons of close up footage of embryos and fetuses at various stages (no idea how they got a camera in there). At the end the evangelical girl said something along the lines of "that's why they shouldn't allow abortions" and half the class verbally jumped on her because, as it turns out, watching fetuses wiggling around their amniotic sacs for an hour does not change many people's minds about abortion.

If Ms. Proud had bothered to read the stories of actual people who've had abortions, she'd realize how common it is for women to ask to see their fetal tissue after the procedure (there's an awesome essay by Jeannie Ludlow that describes, among other things, how about 5% of her patients choose to see their fetus and how beneficial it is to them).

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What I bolded should be, with some tweaking, Obama 2012's election campaign slogan.

SRSLY!!!!

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This makes absolutely NO SENSE. Because a "BABY" (please note quotation marks) has to be "Murdered" in order for them to witness it, and doesn't that go against hippa to watch another patient's procedure?

unless they're talking about a video which is horse shit anyways, because that shit can be edited. Silent scream anyone?

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Quite possible that part of this is aimed at the people BEING watched rather than the people coming to watch. If you knew that your abortion would be watched by a bunch of other people, maybe you'd reconsider!

...which is just crazy stupid, but I wouldn't put it past them. It's all about slut shaming, after all.

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Maybe OK, as long as every male past puberty who wants to engage in sex has to witness a vaginal birth, a C-section, and an abortion, AND spend 3-4 months wearing one of those fake baby bellies, then a minimum of 6-8 weeks taking care of one of those newborn dolls that can be programmed to scream and pee and poop (I'd make it a real baby if there were any way to do that). WITHOUT any help or relief. Oh, and he has to successfully keep up with EVERYTHING he's doing (school, work, etc.), remain clean and well-groomed at all times, and STAY SWEET while doing all this.

Isn't it interesting that it's always only females who are subject to all this nonsense, which is always perpetrated by males. I believe it still takes two sexes to procreate?

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Maybe OK, as long as every male past puberty who wants to engage in sex has to witness a vaginal birth, a C-section, and an abortion, AND spend 3-4 months wearing one of those fake baby bellies, then a minimum of 6-8 weeks taking care of one of those newborn dolls that can be programmed to scream and pee and poop (I'd make it a real baby if there were any way to do that). WITHOUT any help or relief. Oh, and he has to successfully keep up with EVERYTHING he's doing (school, work, etc.), remain clean and well-groomed at all times, and STAY SWEET while doing all this.

Isn't it interesting that it's always only females who are subject to all this nonsense, which is always perpetrated by males. I believe it still takes two sexes to procreate?

HAHAHAH The reason I laugh is because when I was in high school, they made us watch "the miracle of birth" or something similar. It was a forceps delivery with a HUGE episiotomy.

I didn't have sex for 10 years after I saw that movie because I was not just terrified of being pregnant, I was terrified of THAT happening to me.

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I saw an abortion video at school and I'm still prochoice.

I watched an abortion video a couple of years back with my cousin. She attended the same college as me and she took a medical ethics class and she was given a private video link by her professor to watch a video of an abortion. I watched it with her and like another poster mentioned it isn't a long or brutal procedure. I too am still pro-choice.

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