Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: mlizzy; Ohioan from Florida; Goodgirlinred; Miss Behave; cyn; AlwaysFree; amdgmary; angelwings49; ..
Women should be told about the physical, mental and spiritual consequences BEFORE they kill their baby.

Thread by mlizzy.

Nebraska First to Allow Women to Sue for Psychological Injury After Abortion

Springfield, IL (April 13, 2010) – A new Nebraska law will allow women to sue abortion providers for psychological injuries related to unwanted, coerced or unsafe abortions, according to the Stop Forced Abortions Alliance.

"This is the first law in the country that allows women to hold abortionists accountable for negligent pre-abortion screening and counseling," said Paula Talley, one of the organizers of Stop Forced Abortions. "If it had been in place in 1980, I would have been spared the years of grief, depression, and substance use which followed my own unwanted abortion."

Judicial rules normally do not allow women to sue for psychological injuries after abortion unless the injuries stem from a physical injury. The new Nebraska law is the first law in the country to eliminate the requirement that the woman must prove that psychological injuries from an abortion stemmed from a physical injury.

The law also puts into place a specific standard of care for appropriate pre-abortion screening. Abortion providers may be sued for negligence if they fail to ask a woman if she is being pressured, coerced or forced to have an abortion. They may also be held liable if they fail to screen women for other statistically significant risk factors that may put them at higher risk for psychological or physical complications following an abortion.

Research has found that as many as 64 percent of women feel pressured by others to have an abortion. In addition, one study found that even though more than half of women reported feeling rushed or uncertain about the abortion, 84 percent said they did not receive adequate counseling and 67 percent said they weren't counseled at all.

In Talley's case, she said, the pressure to abort came from her employer.

"My abortion counselor never asked if I was being pressured," Talley said. "Nor did she inquire about my psychological history. If she had, she should have known that I was at higher risk of experiencing post-abortion trauma because I had a history of depression. Plus, I had moral beliefs against abortion, but I was rushing into a poorly thought out decision because I was so filled with fear and panic.

"If the abortion counselor had bothered to ask the right questions, she would have seen that I was more likely to be hurt than helped by the abortion, But I was never warned. They just took my money, and my baby, no questions asked."

The measure easily sailed through Nebraska's Unicameral Legislature with a 40-9 majority. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman is scheduled to sign the bill today. The law will go into effect on July 15.

Legislators Argue Burden and Constitutionality

The law requires that abortion providers must screen women for risk factors that have been established in the research for a year or more prior to the abortion. Legislators opposing the bill argued that it would be nearly impossible for abortion providers to keep track of all the research on risks factors. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Cap Dierks, disagreed.

Dierks said that a report from the American Psychological Association found that an average of 12 studies per year are published on the subject.

"Surely it’s not too much to ask abortion providers to read 12 studies per year," Dierks said. "Women rightly expect their doctors to keep up to date on their area of specialty. Why would we want the standard of care for abortion to be less than that for other medical procedures?"

Among those opposing the bill was Sen. Danielle Conrad, who argued that abortion providers are already giving women sufficient information.

"We do not need an additional layer on top of that," she said. She also argued that the bill was unconstitutional and placed an undue burden on women.

But Sen. Brad Ashford, an attorney and the chair of the Judiciary Committee that reviewed the bill, told the Legislature that the law did not raise any obvious constitutional issues because it relies only on civil remedies and does not place any burdens on women. He said that any burden caused by the screening requirements falls primarily on the abortion provider, not on the women whose rights are expanded by the bill.

State Lobbying Effort Focused on Injured Women

Greg Schleppenbach, Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Nebraska Catholic Conference, led the lobbying effort for the legislation. He said that "women deserve better than one-size-fits-all counselingor no counseling at all."

"Ninety-nine percent of abortions in Nebraska take place in two abortion facilities," Schleppenbach said. "Their informed consent counseling consists of recorded phone messages 24 hours before the abortions and most women never see the abortion provider except during the 10 minutes or so he is doing the abortion. Women deserve better."

Schleppenbach said that the stories he had heard from women who have suffered from emotional problems after an abortion provided the impetus for passing legislation that would improve their right to redress.

"Most people don’t realize that under the existing rules of law, it is essentially impossible for women to hold abortion providers liable for inadequate screening and counseling," he said. "This is why the standard of care for abortion counseling has fallen to such a dismal level. If abortion providers face no liability for inadequate screening, cost-cutting measures will inevitably lead to an assembly line process with one-size-fits-all counseling.”

Twenty-Five Year Effort to Change Malpractice Laws

Dierks’ bill was patterned after model legislation called the Protection from Coerced and Unsafe Abortions Act. The legislation was developed by the Elliot Institute, a post-abortion research and education group based in Springfield, Ill.

Elliot Institute Director Dr. David Reardon said that inspiration for the bill came from a 1985 article written by the group Feminists for Life.

"The article was identifying obstacles and loopholes in the law that made it nearly impossible for women to recover damages for abortion related injuries," Reardon said. "Plus, the short statute of limitations when dealing with medical procedures meant it was likely that women injured by abortion wouldn't be emotionally ready to come forward until it was too late. The article said this was similar to cases in which women who have been raped may feel too ashamed or afraid to come forward."

Reardon—who is the author of numerous studies linking abortion to higher rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse—said these observations shed new light on something he had been observing in the medical literature on abortion.

"Nearly every study done on abortion and mental health, whether before or since 1985, has found that certain subgroups of women were at higher risk of negative reactions," he said. "Most of these studies have been done by pro-choice researchers, so you can’t accuse them of bias. Many of the researchers openly recommend that these risk factors should be used to screen for at-risk patients so they could be given more pre- and post-abortion counseling."

One such study was published in a 1972 issue of Family Planning Perspectives, a publication of Planned Parenthood. The authors of that study found four risk factors that reliably predicted more post-abortion problems. They suggested that pre-abortion screening should be done using a short psychological profile which could be administered for less than a dollar per patient.

A similar 1977 study identified five risk factors that accurately predicted which women would have subsequent problems adjusting after abortion 72 percent of the time. But in interviewing women who were experiencing problems after abortion, Reardon found that abortion providers were ignoring the research. He was unable to find evidence that even one clinic in the country was doing evidenced-based pre-abortion screening.

Reardon said that this observation, combined with the insights from the Feminists for Life article, made him realize that the loophole in the law protecting abortion providers from liability for psychological injuries meant they could simply ignore all of the research on screening and risk factors. In fact, if proper screening led to a reduction of abortion rates among coerced and high risk women, they might actually lose money.

Reardon believes this lack of screening is an act of a medical negligence in and of itself.

"Without screening, it is impossible for a doctor to give informed medical advice," he said. "Performing an abortion on request, regardless of the risks, is contrary to both medical ethics and the law."

"If a woman walks into a doctor’s office and says, 'I have a lump in my breast and need a mastectomy,' and the doctor says ‘Jump up on the table and we’ll take it right out,' we don’t call that medicine. We call that malpractice. Added to that, the situation with abortion is even worse because many women and girls are having abortions they don’t really want, due to lack of resources and support, pressure, coercion, threats, emotional blackmail, disinformation or even force from others."

Reardon said that while Roe v Wade created a right for women to seek an abortion in consultation with a physician, the Supreme Court also wrote that "the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician."

Reardon believes that Roe intended for doctors to be held liable for inadequate screening and counseling.

"Nebraska has now done what the states should have been doing a long time ago," he said. "They have removed the loopholes in civil law that prevent women from being able to hold abortionists accountable for the negligent screening that predictably leads to so many unwanted, unsafe, and unnecessary abortions."


174 posted on 07/25/2010 1:11:45 PM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 173 | View Replies ]


To: marshmallow; Ohioan from Florida; Goodgirlinred; Miss Behave; cyn; AlwaysFree; amdgmary; ...
Ayn Rand is certainly popular for a reason, but she also had some very dangerous ideas.

Thread by marshmallow.

Ayn Rand: Architect of The Culture of Death

No philosopher ever proposed a more simple and straightforward view of life than the one Ayn Rand urges upon us.

"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis … Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley and the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality …. but to discover it."

Thus spake, not Zarathustra, but Ayn Rand's philosophical mouthpiece, John Galt, the protagonist of her principal novel, Atlas Shrugged. The "moral crisis" to which he refers is the conflict between altruism, which is radically immoral, and individualism, which provides the only form of true morality possible. Altruism, for Galt and Rand, leads to death; individualism furnishes the only path that leads to life. Thus, in order to go on living with any degree of authenticity, we must abandon the immoral code of altruism and embrace the vivifying practice of individualism.

Throughout the course of history, according to Ayn Rand, there have been three general views of morality. The first two are mystical, which, for Rand, means fictitious, or non-objective. The third is objective, something that can be verified by the senses. Initially, a mystical view reigned, in which the source of morality was believed to be God's will. This is not compatible either with Rand's atheism, or her objectivism. In due course, a neo-mystical view held sway, in which the "good of society" replaced the "will of God. The essential defect of this view, like the first, is that it does not correlate with an objective reality. "There is no such entity as 'society,'" she avers. And since only individuals really exist, the so-called "good of society" degenerates into a state where "some men are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang's desires."

Only the third view of morality is realistic and worthwhile. This is Rand's objectivism, a philosophy that is centred exclusively on the individual. It is the individual alone that is real, objective, and the true foundation for ethics. Therefore, Rand can postulate the basic premise of her philosophy: "The source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A – and Man is Man."

An individual belongs to himself as an individual. He does not belong, in any measure, to God or to society. A corollary of Rand's basic premise is that "altruism," or the sacrifice of one's only reality – one's individuality – for a reality other than the self, is necessarily self-destructive and therefore immoral. This is why she can say that "altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value." On the other hand, individualism, cultivated through the "virtue of selfishness," is the only path to life. "Life," she insists, "can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action." Man's destiny is to be a "self-made soul."

Man, therefore, has a "right to life." But Rand does not mean by this statement that he has a "right to life" that others have a duty to defend and support. Such a concept of "right to life" implies a form of "altruism," and consequently is contrary to the good of the individual. In fact, for Rand, it constitutes a form of slavery. "No man," she emphasizes, "can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as 'the right to enslave.'" Moreover, there are no rights of special groups, since a group is not an individual reality. As a result, she firmly denies that groups such as the "unborn," "farmers," "businessmen," and so forth, have any rights whatsoever.

Making sacrifices for one's born or unborn children, one's elderly parents or other family members becomes anathema for Ayn Rand.

Her notion of a "right to life" begins and ends with the individual. In this sense, "right to life" means the right of the individual to pursue, through the rational use of his power of choice, whatever he needs in order to sustain and cultivate his existence. "An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is evil." As Rand has John Galt tell her readers, "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence." Man's existence must stay in existence. This is the mandate of the individual and the utility of the virtue of selfishness. Non-existence is the result of altruism and careens toward death. Making sacrifices for one's born or unborn children, one's elderly parents or other family members becomes anathema for Ayn Rand. She wants a Culture of Life to emerge, but she envisions that culture solely in terms of individuals choosing selfishly, the private goods of their own existence. If ever the anthem for a pro-choice philosophy has been recorded, it comes from the pen of Ayn Rand: "Man has to be man – by choice; he has to hold his life as a value – by choice; he has to learn to sustain it – by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practise his virtues – by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

No philosopher ever proposed a more simple and straightforward view of life than the one Ayn Rand urges upon us. Man=Man; Existence = Existence; only individuals are real; all forms of altruism are inherently evil. There are no nuances or paradoxes. There is no wisdom. There is no depth. Complex issues divide reality into simple dichotomies. There is individualism and altruism, and nothing in between. Despite the apparent superficiality of her philosophy, Rand considered herself history's greatest philosopher after Aristotle.

******************************

Barbara Branden tells us, in her book, The Passion of Ayn Rand, of how Miss Rand managed to make the lives of everyone around her miserable, and when her life was over, she had barely a friend in the world. She was contemptuous even of her followers. When Rand was laid to rest in 1982 at the age of 77, her coffin bore a six-foot replica of the dollar sign. Her philosophy, which she adopted from an early age, helped to assure her solitude: "Nothing existential gave me any great pleasure. And progressively, as my idea developed, I had more and more a sense of loneliness." It was inevitable, however, that a philosophy that centred on the self to the exclusion of all others would leave its practitioner in isolation and intensely lonely.

Ayn Rand's philosophy is unlivable, either by her or anyone else. A philosophy that is unlivable can hardly be instrumental in building a Culture of Life. It is unlivable because it is based on a false anthropology. The human being is not a mere individual, but a person. As such, he is a synthesis of individual uniqueness and communal participation. Man is a transcendent being. He is more than his individuality.

The Greeks had two words for "life": bios and zoe. Bios represents the biological and individual sense of life, the life that pulsates within any one organism. This is the only notion of life that is to be found in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Zoe, on the other hand, is shared life, life that transcends the individual and allows participation in a broader, higher, and richer life.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis remarks that mere bios is always tending to run down and decay. It needs incessant subsidies from nature in the form of air, water, and food, in order to continue. As bios and nothing more, man can never achieve his destiny. Zoe, he goes on to explain, is an enriching spiritual life which is in God from all eternity. Man needs Zoe in order to become truly himself. Man is not simply man; he is a composite of bios and zoe.

Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.

The transition, then, from bios to zoe (individual life to personal, spiritualized life; selfishness to love of neighbor) is also the transition from a Culture of Death to a Culture of Life.


175 posted on 07/25/2010 1:16:40 PM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 174 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson