What's it like to be an abortion doctor?

When I read this article about Dr. Kathryn Treehuba at the Morgentaler clinic in Ottawa, I wondered like I often do, what it must be like to be an abortion doctor.

Why do they do it? It's a question I can't answer and I wonder if they can answer it. Are they just ordinary people with kids and a family of their own? Do they do it because they think they are helping the women they provide the abortions to? Do they do it for the money? Do they take pride in their work?

Putting aside what they do for a moment, it must be a very difficult job to do. To go to work every day and know that your job isn't exactly something you can easily broadcast to the world. Or to your neighbours. Maybe not even your families.

These are all questions any average person will ask themselves of the job they do each day. But for an abortion doctor, what they do seems so in-congruent with our usual notion of medicine where doctors heal the sick and offer patients hope for the future, that it must be quite difficult for them to reconcile their work to themselves. Or not. Perhaps I'm just naive.

I know that pro-choicers will tell us that a woman feels relief after an abortion, but I think the doctors see a lot of pain and suffering from the women they treat. And a lot of grief. Both before the abortion and after. How does the abortion doctor deal with that? How does she go home at night and feel at peace with what she does for a living? Does she ever regret her job? Does she wish she had made other choices?

I would love to be able to talk to one of them and ask them these questions. But I've never met an abortion doctor. At least I've never met a doctor who has told me that she or he performs abortions. Some do not hide the fact that they perform abortions, but what about the rest of them?

Maybe if we could take the time to listen to their stories maybe we could learn something. Maybe we could ask them if they've ever thought of giving it up. Maybe if we could put aside our judgement of what they do, just for a moment, maybe they would stop seeing us as the enemy. Maybe we could help them have a change of heart.

I don't know, but the idea intrigues me.

Election strategy: banning late-term abortions

I was startled to read this: Aggressive Incrementalism: A Winning Strategy for Pro-Lifers by Pete Spiliakos. Not because Spiliakos said anything I don't agree with, but because the author talks about how available late-term abortion on demand is in the US. Of course it is, but I always think that well, at least the Americans have some legal abortion restrictions unlike us Canadians. I guess I'm naive.

Spiliakos makes some good points about political pro-life strategies for Republicans. Our own Conservative MPs could learn a thing or two from his advice.

Spiliakos says:
"In the last few presidential elections, the strategy of the Republican presidential candidate has been to talk about abortion only when asked. The purpose seems to be to signal pro-life views while not alienating voters for whom abortion is a low priority issue. This strategy is about mobilizing an existing voting base and not at all about persuasion. It is almost an exaggeration of the general Republican approach to electoral politics recently.

This “speak only when spoken to” approach to abortion seems cautious, but it is really foolhardy. It allows Democrats and their media allies [to] decide when and how the abortion issue is discussed. So in a country in which third trimester abortions are legal on-demand, our abortion discussion centers on questions like “So why are you against the removal of a tiny clump of rapist-produced cells?” Republicans not choosing to talk about abortion doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about abortion. It means that we only talk about the issue when and how liberals choose."

Tim Hudak immediately comes to mind. Mr. Hudak barely spoke at all in the last Ontario election, when he was spoken to about abortion. Rather he fell all over himself with what many of us had thought was his pro-life world view, only to make a quick retreat to distance himself from himself.

In the next election he won't even do that. He'll pull a Mr. Harper. With his nice big spread in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday, the A word wasn't raised, and if it ever does get raised, he'll shut it down quicker than you can say I told you so. Judging from the number of abortion related letters I've sent to numerous Conservative MPPs that elicited not so much as the expected form letter response, I think I can safely conclude Mr. Hudak has told his MPPs to keep their mouths shut on the abortion issue. When the abortion issue is raised there will be no reply at all: see no evil hear no evil speak no evil. That's how the Ontario Conservatives will try and get in power.

I have already made a decision about how I will vote in the next election, Federal or Ontario. I will start by asking all the candidates in my riding about what they think about abortion. Their answer, if they have to courage to answer me, will decide how I vote.

I have voted Conservative pretty much my entire life. That automatic nod to the Conservatives has now come to an end unless the Conservative candidates respond favourably to my question.

Speaking of naive, many of us pro-life people kept telling ourselves that once the Conservatives got into power Federally that things would change. Then after they won a minority government we thought, okay they haven’t done anything, so let's wait for that majority and then they'll do something. They didn't. Silly us.

If another candidate gives me an answer that would support some legal restriction on abortion, say a ban on late-term abortions, they would get my vote.

Spiliakos then says:
"In my experience, a substantial number of self-identified pro-choicers are in favor of generally restricting late-term abortions. Many are not even aware that such abortions are legal or that President Obama supports them. It isn't simply that such pro-choicers could become allies in moving politics in a slightly more pro-life direction (though it is that too.) To some extent, presence can determine issue salience. It is all well and good to have some vague idea that late-term abortion exists and that President Obama is "pro-choice." It is another altogether to see human beings and know that some politicians are in favor of their destruction at-will."

Spiliakos could be writing about Canada. I think we all know that there are a lot of Canadians who are against late-term abortions, yet they don't all call themselves pro-life. In fact LifeCanada's latest poll  commissioned by Environics and published just last week tells us that :
"Two-thirds (65%) of Canadians think abortion should be illegal in the last three months."

Unlike most politicians, I don't think publicly stating that one is against late-term abortion is a nail in the coffin of a political career. And apparently a majority of Canadians are also against late-term abortions. All we need, is for a few good, closet anti-late-term abortion men and women candidates to say so. They might be surprised at the result.

In her own words

Joyce Arthur says that :
“I have never said what Jeff Watson claims I did in his survey. He’s tried to sum up what he thinks our position is, but he’s put his own anti-choice spin on it,” she said. “He’s inserted this phrase ‘at any time, for any reason — including for sex-selection or birth control’ as if it’s part of my position and it’s not."

If her position on abortion is not an any time, any reason position, including for sex-selection or birth control, then what exactly, is her position?

I've put together a few choice quotes from Ms. Arthur herself, to help readers see if they can figure out for themselves, what those gestational limits might be, and for what reasons, that Ms. Arthur would not condone abortion.

From here

From Point 3:
"It is senseless and cruel to restrict or ban abortion because giving rights to fetuses or banning abortion does nothing to 'protect the unborn' or women."

From Point 4:
"Historical and medical evidence clearly shows the negative and often catastrophic results when the state interferes and imposes restrictions on the reproductive rights of women in the interests of “protecting” fetuses,[16] [17] as if women are incapable or irresponsible. But the only person who can make conscientious and informed decisions on behalf of an embryo or fetus is the pregnant woman herself. The state’s only role should be to ensure that women have the resources and supports they need to achieve the best pregnancy outcomes – which may sometimes include having an abortion. We can trust women to know what is best for their families and themselves, which means there’s no need to re-open the abortion debate in Canada."

From Point 6:
"If late-term abortions were restricted by law, it would penalize women in the most tragic circumstances by making it difficult or impossible for them to obtain desperately needed abortions."

And from her comments below about sex selection:
"Yes, sex selection can be a sexist act, but it's nonsensical to protect women from discrimination by restricting their rights. In India, laws against sex-selection abortion cause women to resort to unsafe and illegal abortion to avoid having a girl, and some may even face abuse and violence from their families if they bear a girl.
.....
"Of course, abortions are not something women want to do -- they make this difficult decision for one reason or another -- family needs, their personal circumstances, their health, or their own inability or reluctance to be a parent. As blogger Jane Cawthorne explains, having an abortion for reasons of sex selection is not much different than having one for financial reasons, or because the baby will be disabled. The answer is not to coerce a woman into giving birth to an unwanted girl just "to make some sort of anti-sexist point." Instead, we must strive to "make the world a place where little girls are as wanted as little boys, where the systemic discrimination of women is a thing of the past."

And here are some excerpts from her article, "Canada does not need an abortion law":
"Most anti-abortionists confidently state as “scientific fact” that human life begins at conception and therefore embryos deserve legal protection. The question of when life begins is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one, and there can be no consensus. The moral value of a fetus is also a matter of personal opinion, so it must be left up to individual women to decide what their fetus means to them, if anything. But even women who believe abortion is murder often need abortions, so the nature of the fetus and its moral status are ultimately beside the point. Women’s lives, health, and basic human rights depend on the availability of abortion, and those are the only factors necessary to justify abortion.

"A common anti-abortion claim is that there’s no difference between a newborn and a 9-month fetus, therefore a fetus should have legal rights. But a fetus is inside the woman and completely dependent on her, which makes all the difference in the world. A pregnant woman cannot hand over her fetus to someone else to take care of, like she could with a newborn. Further, pregnancy has a major effect on a woman’s body and emotional state, and every pregnancy carries some risk of serious complication or death. The crucial decision to take on that risk—no matter how small—can only be decided by the pregnant woman herself."
....
"Women now have well-established constitutional rights to life, liberty, conscience, security of the person, and equality. Such rights cannot be easily removed or compromised, and all are directly implicated in the abortion issue.

"Some commentators simply presume that since all other developed nations have abortion laws, Canada should have one too. But this ignores the historical context. Legal restrictions in liberal countries are a relic of patriarchy and religious tradition – they evolved from total abortion bans that were in place earlier in the 20th century. Canada is lucky, in a sense, that the revised abortion law we had in place from 1969 to 1988, was so bad that our Supreme Court threw it out as unconstitutional. Other countries took a different path, with legislatures tinkering with the original abortion law. For most of the 20th century, people could not comprehend the idea that women should or could exercise a right to abortion on request. As a result, existing abortion laws were revised on the unquestioned and false assumption that some kind of abortion law was necessary."
......
"The abortion debate will probably never be resolved on a philosophical level, because the anti-choice movement is strongly motivated by religious ideology. Their fixation on the fetus, with their foregone conclusion that fetuses are full human beings with rights, cancels out any competing claim for women’s rights. Underlying all the pro-fetus rhetoric is the unquestioned assumption that women were made to have babies, this is their God-given natural role, and the law must enforce that. "
.....
"But access to safe and legal abortion is a fundamental human right for women, not something that should even be up for debate, let alone negotiation or compromise. This is not about “a woman’s right to choose,” which just trivializes the issue. It’s about a woman’s right to life. Because the right to life means more than just mere physical survival, it must be backed up by democratic rights and freedoms, including the right to pursue happiness on one’s own chosen path."
......
"On the abortion issue, Canada has shown that women and doctors act in a timely and responsible manner, without punitive criminal laws to control them. Canada enjoys a low abortion rate compared to the rest of the world, and most Canadians support women’s rights and equality. This gives Canada a special responsibility to be a role model to the world. Let’s demonstrate that abortion practice can be successfully managed as part of standard healthcare, and that having no law is better for women."

And excerpts from her article, "We Don't Need a Law Against Abortion" where she talks about funding:
"Let’s be clear — There is absolutely no justification for regulating abortion via criminal or civil law. That is no “radical feminist” proposition, but one based on evidence, common sense, and the widely-accepted belief that women deserve equality.

"As the only democratic country in the world with no legal restrictions against abortion, Canada serves as a valuable model for other countries."
....
"There’s another important reason we should not pass any abortion restrictions—to protect women’s rights. Only women get pregnant. Therefore, any regulation of pregnancy is inherently discriminatory, because such laws place a special burden on women that is not placed on men. This also means all abortion care should be fully funded under the Canada Health Act as “medically required,” just like childbirth. After all, we fund the costs of delivery even though women choose to get pregnant for socio-economic reasons, not medical reasons. Unless all pregnancy outcomes are funded equally, the government holds the "right to choose" instead of women—poor women in particular. That's discrimination, and a violation of women’s constitutional equality rights. "

"The case for repealing anti-abortion laws":
"All anti-abortion restrictions are unjust, harmful, and useless because they rest on traditional religious and patriarchal foundations. Laws kill and injure women, violate their human rights and dignity, impede access to abortion, and obstruct healthcare professionals."
....
"A fetus is not innocent, as anti-choice people claim. Although an unwanted fetus has no ill intent, it is exploiting the woman's body and endangering her life and health against her will. Bringing a pregnancy to term is far riskier than having an abortion, and any pregnancy has a profound effect on a woman's whole being, mentally and physically. Therefore, a woman has the right to defend her life and health with an abortion."

In this article, she calls decriminalizing abortion, taking the "moral high road":
"The Canadian pro-choice movement will do all it can to ensure that Canada never goes back, and we encourage other countries to embark upon a similar journey. When women can make their own reproductive decisions without interference from the state, society takes the moral high road -- one that saves lives, raises women's status and potential, and ultimately benefits everyone."

So can you tell us then, Ms. Arthur; in your own words, please. What are those specific reasons, and your position, on when you would not condone abortion? We're all dying to know.

Abortion statistics published for 2011

CIHI's 2011 abortion statistics

Re Quebec's statistics this year (they weren't reported at all in 2010):

"Hospital and clinic breakdowns for Quebec were not available for 2011 at the time of publication"

Quebec totals were published though. However, they are most probably under reported like all abortion statistics, because clinics are not mandated to report.

There are also still no statistics reported on abortions done in private physician's offices.

CIHI 2011 abortion statistics

I understand from CIHI that their 2011 abortion statistics will be available on their website at 3:00 PM today.