THESE DAYS, abortion opponents can’t seem to decide whether to discourage prenatal testing because it might lead some women to consider abortion, as Rick Santorum has suggested, or to require it, as the Virginia legislature has sought to do in order to persuade pregnant women that the fetus has a beating heart.
Both initiatives are political gestures disguised as medical policies. They try to provoke guilty feelings to sway women from having abortions. Thankfully, the vice-presidential aspirations of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell seem to have led him to alter his support for the bill requiring women to undergo physically invasive ultrasounds before consenting to abortions. But the watered-down version, requiring noninvasive ultrasounds, is objectionable as well.
The orginal bill required a test that would physically violate women. An ultrasound performed during the first trimester of pregnancy - when the bulk of abortions take place - usually involves inserting a probe into a woman’s vagina. McDonnell says he still supports that concept, but fears it might be ruled unconstitutional. Instead, he wants to require women to have a noninvasive scan. It’s still an unnecessary step.
Opposition to abortion is a principled, understandable conviction. But the latest string of anti-abortion efforts nationwide has been marked by a dangerous brand of overreaching. Virginia legislators have also passed a “personhood’’ law similar to the one that failed, by referendum, in Mississippi last fall; it grants a fetus the legal rights of a person, and could wind up outlawing certain kinds of intrauterine contraception and in vitro fertilization.
What supporters of such bills want most is a Supreme Court battle that could override Roe v. Wade. But the patent disregard for women’s autonomy and privacy, in the process of waging this battle, is both astounding and counterproductive.