You’ve prolly heard by now that the Supreme Court banned partial-birth abortions, making no exceptions for a woman’s health. This is the first time the Supreme Court’s banned a specific abortion precedure, versus specifying the timing of a legal abortion. And this ruling trumps California’s own, more pro-choice laws.
The partial-birth abortion isn’t common, and thus won’t affect that many women. However, it’s one that’s sometimes necessary to preserve a woman’s health. The ban, as NARAL points out, “opens the door for further political interference in our personal, private medical decisions.”
The Supreme Court decision has rather neatly split the presidential candidates along party lines, as you can see here.
So now, NARAL’s encouraging people to send in choice-related questions for the first Republican presidential debate in LA, happening on MSNBC’s The Politico on Thursday, May 3, 2007.
I’m all for getting politicians to take a stand, but considering the fact the the Republican candidates have already like unanimously come out in favor of this ridic ban, I’m not sure what asking more Qs about it will do, besides get all of them to agree on it again.
I suppose it would get pro-choice Republicans tuning into the debate to realize — if they weren’t before — that all of their party’s candidates don’t care much about women’s health. But the Republican candidates could very easily let the convo devolve into grotesque descriptions about partial-birth abortions. Yet if we relied on the blood and gore type descriptions of surgery to determine our vote, even knee surgeries would be banned, as my MD sis points out.
So I guess I’m saying: If you wanna send in your pro-choice Q to Republican candidates, that’s cool. But in my opinion: What’s more important is making sure a pro-choice candidate — and at this point, that’s not gonna be a Republican — becomes the next prez.
