Texas Senate Approves Abortion Survey Bill to Reduce State Numbers
Texas Senate Approves Abortion Survey Bill to Reduce State Numbers
The Texas Senate gave preliminary approval to a bill that would allow the state to collect information associated with abortions such as insurance payments used to pay for it or the women's reasons for having one. The idea behind the bill is to learn more about why women have abortions so those reasons can be addressed.
Many of those who support abortion claim to want to make it "safe, legal and rare,' borrowing the phrase that President Clinton used in the last decade. Yet, whenever an opportunity comes up to actually reduce abortions, they find some excuse not to support the action. The claim this time is doctor-patient confidentiality:
However, the bill has drawn opponents including the Texas Medical Association, which says it introduces on the doctor-patient relationship even though women considering an abortion have no prior relationship with the abortion practitioner.Laurie Felker Jones, spokeswoman for NARAL's Texas affiliate, told the Dallas Morning News that he group opposes the bill as well.
"Most Texans don't need an exhaustive study and a laundry list of questions for patients to know why women are seeking abortions in Texas. It's because they're accidentally pregnant," she said.
If you read the article, it seem quite clear that this information would be collected anonymously and therefore doctor-patient confidentiality would not be an issue. Also, while Ms. Jones is seemingly correct that women have abortions because they become accidentally pregnant, might there not be other causes? Plenty of women get pregnant accidentally, but raise their children, so there must be more to the decision. Texas is merely trying to see what puts women in the situation where they feel they must have an abortion and seek to help them come a solution to it. This wouldn't infringe upon anyone's "right" to an abortion and would deny no one any freedom they currently have under the law. There's no pressure, no coercion, so what's the beef?
The only reason to oppose this is either strict libertarian grounds (which I think we can safely assume are not being honestly used among the pro-abortion faction objecting to this bill) or the idea that all abortions are good things, even if they'd never make that claim in public. Once again, we see that for many the claim to want to make abortion "safe, legal and rare" is just another political lie.