Reddit reviews Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

Abortion providers need to follow the current law, even if there is debate about whether the law should be changed.

I remember reading about a couple of instances of abortion providers discussing doing such in their memoirs:

From Dr. Willie Parker's Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice:

>One day, a twelve-year-old girl was sitting in the waiting room in Tuscaloosa with her mother. She was caramel complected and physically mature, but with the face of a child. When she came in that morning she had been shy and silent, but she had been given a Xanax, the same as all the other patients, and now she was sitting there among a bunch of other women a lot older than her, feeling vouble and disinhibited. When her mother went outside tot he parking lot for a smoke, one of the other patients, a white woman who happened to have a twelve-year-old daughter at home, turned to her and gently struck up a conversation, hoping in a maternal way to guide her away from what she imagined was inappropriate contact with older boys at school. "Who were you messing with?" she asked the girl. "Don't you know not to go around with those boys?"

>The girl replied, so naively that she was almost sassy, "He isn't a boy. He's fifty-three and he's my daddy, and after this he's going to pick us up and go get ice cream." The waiting room went silent. And then the white woman got up from her chair and made her way past all the knees and crossed ankles and hands in laps, and through the swinging doors that led to the procedure rooms and down the long hallway to the owner's office. By the time the girl's mother came inside, we had taken the girl into a back office. Gloria Gray, the clinic's owner, had called child protective services and the police were on their way. Gloria and I were in complete agreement about our mandated duty to report situations of this type to the authorities, an obligation that I honor with all dependent minors.

And Susan Wicklund, in her book This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Provider:

>"Sometimes things happen that aren't easy to talk about. I need to know how you got pregnant. Did somebody do something bad to you?"

>She sits mute.

>"Who made you pregnant?" I insist, moving as close to the scared girl as I dare. "Who?"

>Long silence, but she finally lifts her head, looks at me. Her eyes are troubled. No fourteen-year-old eyes should look that way.

>"It was my daddy," she whispers.

>For a minute I don't speak. I can't speak. The rage exploding inside me is molten. I want that man's neck in my hands. "I just want what's best for my girl," he had said. The same man who violated her, who tortured her life in service to his perversity. I start shaking, trying to control my anger.

>"The man in the waiting room who you came with? Is that who you call 'Daddy'? Is he the one who did this to you?"

>"Yes," she says. "It's him."

>"No one else? No one else has touched you down there? Nobody has done this to you but your daddy? The man you came here with?"

>"No one."

>"Does your mama know?"

>She tightens up, looks down again. One question too many.

>"Listen. I won't do an abortion today. We have time to consider that. We won't touch you or deal with your pregnancy. Our first job is to make sure you are safe."

>Her head jerks up, fear flaring in her eyes. "He'll hurt me if I don't. I have to! He said if I didn't he'd beat me up again. He will! He's done it before."

>"You are a minor," I say. "We have to get you away from him for a while, someplace safe. You are very early in the pregnancy. We can talk again soon, but we have to make you safe."

>Her eyes plead with mine. They ask for honesty. They search for an adult to trust.

>I reach out, touch her, carefully, very gently. "We'll get you through this. I'm going to have a nurse come sit with you while I make some phone calls. We won't let him hurt you."

>Nearly an hour had passed before I felt comfortable leaving the young girl with a nurse and could return to the main office.

>"I want to see my girl!" the father demands, as soon as he sees me. His face is red; his hands are clenched in fists.

>I keep a lid on my own temper, quell the temptation to scream at him, and instead, impose a cool, professional demeanor.

>"It's taking a little longer than we thought," I tell him. "She's young, and we want to be careful. It takes time to prepare such a young patient," I lie. "Try to understand. She's perfectly fine, and we're doing everything to make sure she's safe."

>"I want to see her!" he paces back to his seat.

>I close the door and hurry to the administrator's office. "We have a reportable incident," I blurt out. "We have to hurry. The girl is a minor, an incest victim. She's identified her father. He's in the waiting room now, but he's really nervous and demanding. He may suspect something. I've told him we've been delayed."

>She has the phone in her hand before I finish. We notify both the police and the Child Protection Agency, stress that it's essential for them to synchronize. The girl will be escorted out the back door by a caseworker at the same time the police take the father out the front.

>All this takes more time. It's been almost two hours since the girl checked in.

>"Where's my girl?" the father demands when I return. "I want to see her!"

>I have to physically block him from coming through the door. "Please. Be reasonable," I say. "I'm sorry it's taken so long. We'll be through soon, but it only prolongs things if I have to keep coming out here. It won't be long now."

>"I know something is wrong," he accuses. "What's going on?"

>He finally storms back to his chair, muttering to himself.

>Back with the girl, I fill her in. "People from a place called the Child Protection Agency are coming to pick you up. They are set up to take care of young people who have troubles at home. They'll keep you safe while you figure things out."

>"He'll never let them take me," she says.

>"The police are coming to ask him some questions. They won't let him hurt you."

>The events daze her. By turns she looks relieved, anxious, scared, thankful. The door opens, and the administrator calls me out.

>"Everything's set," she says. "The police are coming in."

>I get to the waiting room just as they open the door. The father is looking at me, about to speak, when an officer takes his arm.

>"What's going on?" he explodes. "What is this?"

>"You're coming in for questioning." The officer handcuffs him as they speak.

>"My daughter's here. You can't do this."

>He shoots me a haunting, burning look. He'll be back, I think. He'll be back, looking for me. I watch just long enough to be convinced they will indeed take him away, then turn and go quickly to the back of the clinic. The girl is just about out the door with the social worker, but I stop them briefly.

>"Please come back and talk to me when you feel safe," I say.

>She nods distractedly. She looks tiny and vulnerable. A child starting a new life.

>I tell the caseworker I'm available any time. I write down my phone numbers. The car drives off.

>I have a moment of doubt. I didn't have to probe for the truth. I could have performed the procedure and let her return to her life. It was only through my persistence, and my legal obligation to act on information, that this happened.

>In the end, though, it is these cases that make me feel I'm performing the best medicine. It would have been easier not to be thorough, to ignore the red flags. But that extra twenty minutes spent digging for the truth, or explaining something a patient doesn't understand, or answering the hard questions can make a difference for the rest of a woman's life. The moment I simply become a technician performing procedures is the moment I have to quit.

These are just snippets- each book has a little more detail, but I think I've transcribed enough to get the general gist.

Well I just disagree with everything you say above. Doesn't matter though I'm wise enough to know when it's a lost cause. You truly live in a very different world from the one I inhabit as a woman. I truly don't have any personal experience of taking any man's money away myself but I guess you must mean child support to help raise their kids since women don't just make babies on their own? Perhaps you would like women and children to go back to living under the poverty line if their man just walks off and abandons them? That might not be such a problem though if women were paid the same as men to do the same job. https://www.hrdive.com/news/women-are-paid-up-to-45-less-than-men-for-the-same-job-study-says/520768/

I'm guessing the 'people' women kill are foetuses? I guess also you are actively campaigning to take away autonomy of women over their own bodies? Ireland's women just got the right to have abortions after a woman died when by law they denied her an abortion. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/world/europe/savita-halappanavar-ireland-abortion.html

There are a great many facts that conservatives feel comfortable ignoring when it comes to the abortion debate. They can pretend fetuses are indistinguishable from babies, despite the fact that medical evidence tells us fetuses cannot live unsupported, even with a respirator before 21 weeks. They can pretend they feel pain, even though scientific consensus tells us that until at least 24 weeks, a fetus cannot feel anything like pain because they do not yet have the brain connections to do so.

They can pretend that every fertilized egg is a human, ignoring the fact that the majority do not actually make it to birth and this does not seem to upset people overmuch. (Jill Filipovic, lawyer and author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, has quite reasonably pointed out that, “There has been no concerted anti-abortion effort to demand research funding into why all of these fertilized eggs die, or to find a cure. Perhaps that’s because even the most active anti-abortion advocates know the truth is that a fertilized egg is not the same as a three-year-old, and they do not genuinely believe that it has the same right to life.”)

For every abortion there was a man who impregnated a woman when she wasn't ready for a child. Women don't just impregnate themselves.

Also I think it's important to say that while your outraged at how easily a man in muslim countries can be punched for uttering motherfucker, a woman over there can be beaten for doing absolutely nothing by her husband who is having a bad day or feels like she didn't make his dinner fast enough and it's totally permissible by religious law. Just like over there women can be raped in marriage as many times as the husband wants with no recourse. Most likely the marriage was arranged, usually to a much older man while she was in her teens and she can't leave as she can't work because by law she can't work without her husband's permission. And if they happen to get raped by a stranger they have to have male witnesses to the fact as their word is worth half of a man's before the law and even if they do they will be punished as well for being alone with an unrelated man while being raped.

Also with the open borders and prisons, the people who pass laws are overwhelmingly male so go ask them why they did it. Men set the system up but according to you, somehow women are in the background pulling all the levers. Is so why did the campus sexual assault laws get repealed? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/devos-colleges-sex-assault.html, why is it getting harder for American women to get abortions? https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-12-17/access-abortion-gets-harder-us-women-turn-online-service-netherlands

While you are getting upset over feminists talking about men in media, women are having what they can and can't do with their bodies legally defined by men, who feel 100% entitled to do so, because it seems that although men's bodies are their own property, women's bodies are considered public property.

Regarding child abuse: 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse http://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/child-sexual-abuse-statistics

Who abuses children?

Research suggests that both mothers and fathers may physically abuse children. Findings from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) indicated that of participants who had experienced physical abuse before the age of 15, 55.6% experienced abuse from their father/stepfather and 25.9% experienced abuse from their mother/stepmother. A further 13.7% experienced abuse from another known person and the remainder were family friends, other relatives, or strangers (ABS, 2005). Further research shows that when taking issues of severity into consideration, fathers or father surrogates are responsible for more severe physical abuse and fatalities than female perpetrators (US Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2005)

Emotional abuse/ neglect

Evidence also suggests that mothers are more likely than fathers to be held responsible for child neglect. In a large representative study that examined the characteristics of perpetrators in substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect in the United States, neglect was the main type of abuse in 66% of cases involving a female caregiver, compared to 36% of cases involving a male caregiver (US DHHS, 2005). This finding is consistent with the fact that mothers tend to be the primary caregiver and are usually held accountable for ensuring the safety of children even in two-parent families. In light of societal views on gender roles, it has been argued that this may constitute unreasonable “mother blaming” (Allan, 2004; Jackson & Mannix, 2004).

Sexual abuse

Research focusing on perpetrators of child sexual abuse is extensive compared to other forms of abuse. Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males (ABS, 2005; McCloskey & Raphael, 2005; Peter, 2009).

Cortoni and Hanson (2005) examined international studies based on official records of sexual offences as well as self-report victimisation surveys, which included but were not restricted to, child sexual abuse offences. The proportion of male perpetrators across studies averaged more than 95%.

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Violence by women is not the only thing underreported, so is violence by men.

https://jech.bmj.com/content/58/7/536

http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/sexual-assault-remains-dramatically-underreported

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Also seeing how domestic violence is women's fault in the western world since they keep preferring abusers, tell me why is domestic violence such a problem in the middle east where women have little control over who they marry?

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I don't have any friends that would stay with a man that hit them or raped them on the first date. Abusers lead the women in until they feel they have enough control to show their true colours just like narcissists do in relationships:

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https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/dating/how-i-ended-up-in-an-emotionally-

Women hold many misconceptions about how an abuser looks, and many women wrongly profile the men they meet. This means that they often have their guard down when exposed to abusive behaviour. But as 30-year-old Makena* found out, danger lurks everywhere.

https://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/saturday/RELATIONSHIP-The-devil-in-disguise/1216-3266048-13oq3r1/index.html

Having a violent partner is now high on the list of risk factors affecting women's health according to new research by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare - but the men (and sometimes women) who end up abusing their partners don't come with health warnings.

In fact it's just the opposite. Potential abusers can be so thoughtful and charismatic that 'charm' heads the list of warning signs of a potential abuser according to Charmed and Dangerous, a guide for women at risk of domestic violence developed by the Tweed Valley Women's Service.

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/charm-offensive-a-surprising-red-flag-for-domestic-violence-20161120-gstk4o.html

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So tell me if violent thugs are so charming to begin with that women are being fooled into thinking they are nice guys, how are women going out of their way to choose violent thugs?

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