Audio By Carbonatix
Do you know what your Senate was doing yesterday?
Among other things, it passed HB 1127. This is an anti-abortion measure, I suppose, but it’s so profoundly useless that it’s hard to imagine it seriously offending even Florida’s baby-hatingest abortionists.
Here’s the summary.
Requires that ultrasound be performed on women
obtaining abortion; requires that ultrasound be reviewed with with
patient before woman gives consent for abortion procedure; requires that
woman certify in writing that she declined to review ultrasound &
did so of her own free will & without undue influence; provides
exemption from requirement to view ultrasound for women who are victims
of rape, incest, domestic abuse or human trafficking or for women who
have serious medical condition necessitating abortion; provides grounds
for disciplinary action for failure to comply with such requirements;
provides rulemaking authority to AHCA.
The AHCA is the Agency for Health Care Administration, by the way.
So what we have here is mandatory ultrasounds for women who don’t have to look at the results, so long as they sign a paper.
This
is a waste of both ultrasounds and paper. It is also a waste of the
Senate’s time. (And the Senate doesn’t have much of that precious stuff.
While they managed to pass this bill yesterday, they neglected to
update their website to say as much.)
The bill is a bit more
complicated than all that, of course. It requires abortion doctors to
discuss with women the various stages of fetal development (a discussion
which, if the doctor’s got half a brain or heart, could easily be
dispensed with in three or four pain-free sentences), and to alert women
to the existence of abortion alternatives. Which one hopes they did
anyway. All good doctors discuss alternative treatments.
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