Columns

Janet Crowe ( Sidewalk Jesus )

Women’s health is not a joke

The young woman sits in the small office and listens as a nurse reads a long list of complications that could possibly occur during her upcoming gall bladder surgery. “Are these real problems of the surgery?” she asks with growing panic at each increasingly serious possibility, including death.

“Don’t worry,” the nurse reassures her. “We are required to inform you of all of the problems that could possibly take place as a result of the surgery. The doctor has been doing this same surgery for years. In all likelihood, none of these will ever happen.”

Across the hall, a man encounters the same situation before undergoing prostate surgery. “If the doctor is so highly qualified, why are there so many problems that might occur from the surgery?” he asks the nurse.

“Don’t worry,” the nurse reassures him. “This is just one of the requirements we have to follow in order to ensure that patients are fully informed of the risks involved in any surgical procedure. You are in good hands and it is unlikely that anything will go wrong. I can even show you the statistics of how often this surgery is done and how rarely any complications arise.”

However, down the hall a little farther, a woman enters the medical offices of an abortionist and is told misinformation aimed solely at selling her a procedure which could maim and injure her as well as certainly murdering her unborn child. Why is the abortion industry protected instead of the patient? Why are women being treated as if they have no brains and cannot make informed decisions? It is mandatory for the doctor’s office to give accurate and complete information before a person undergoes any type of surgical procedure, any surgery, that is, except an abortion. The pro-abortionists claim that being fully informed before consenting to an invasive and life-threatening procedure creates an undue burden on a woman making such an important decision.

Why can’t legislators see the transparent greed of an industry that claims it is better to lie to a patient than risk losing a sale when a fully informed woman realizes there are better options than putting her health into the hands of a doctor who lies about the risks involved in the abortion procedure?

Are we returning to the era when women were not considered smart enough to vote? Men protected and coddled their wives because women, obviously, were not intelligent enough to make their own decisions. Men told women what opinions to have. Men allowed women to have small amounts of money but only with the men’s guidance on spending or investing the money. Is this the America we want to bring back? If not, then why are women still being protected from knowing the potential damages they might endure in a surgical procedure? Why is it harmful for women to know the truth about a surgical procedure being performed on their own bodies?

Women’s health has nothing to do with it. Profits are the underlying reason for a lack of information being given to women before undergoing an invasive and destructive surgical procedure.

Texas, along with at least seven other states, has enacted legislation requiring clinics to provide complete and accurate information to a woman before she has an abortion. Past performance has shown that clinics lie to their patients, telling them that the abortion is a simple process to remove unwanted post-conceptual tissue with no mention of the humanity of the preborn child. Thus, to prevent the clinics from continuing their marketing propaganda rather than revealing true and accurate information, the new Texas legislation requires abortion clinics to conduct an informative ultrasound exam to show the women the truth behind the scam. The blob of tissue in her uterus has fingers, toes, and a beating heart. She is pregnant with a preborn human baby, not a disease to be removed.

Rather than applauding this effort to allow women to make an informed decision, pro-abortionists have satirized the importance of the legislation. A nationally syndicated cartoonist developed a week-long comic strip to continue propagating lies that women are too stupid and should be protected from the truth.

Calling the comic strip tasteless, the spokesperson from the Texas governor’s office states, “The decision to end a life is not funny.”

Those who make jokes out of protecting women’s health are not interested in the welfare of the patient but, instead, are clearly interested in protecting the abortion industry from losing what it considers its divine right to rake in murderous profits.

The joke is definitely being played on women. An escalation from the absurdity of a witless cartoonist is the new health care mandate that all insurance programs provide contraception, other abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization. Not only are all insurance plans required to provide this coverage but education and counseling must also be given in order to promote these procedures to all women of reproductive age. A woman of reproductive age includes girls as young as eleven, and mothers will most certainly be considered an undue burden on the girl’s right to be counseled by an industry invested in making a profit rather than a parent’s right to protect the health of her child.

The United States Council of Catholic Bishops asks for our help in waking up the legislators on Capitol Hill to the freedoms on which this country was founded. Freedom of religion, freedom to follow the teachings of our church, and freedom to raise our children without being forced to buy the products of an industry promoting death should be protected as much as a cartoonist’s freedom to express even the most tasteless of opinions in a newspaper.

It is our choice to either agree to pay for the abortion-inducing drugs mandated in the new health care plan or to get out of our comfortable chairs and contact our representatives in Congress. Either sit back and hand over our wallets or demand that Congress protect our Constitutionally-protected rights of Freedom of Religion through the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. At the same time, we must educate our friends, family, colleagues and representatives that women deserve to know the truth about medical procedures whether for a gall bladder or an abortion.

Neither truth nor freedom of religions hould be considered a joke.