Americans United for Life (AUL) today released their 2009 State Legislative Session Report. This year's report confirms that the majority of states continue to successfully pursue and implement a life-affirming legislative agenda.
. . .
According to the report, several notable and promising developments and trends emerged in 2009:
* Approximately 60 life-affirming measures were enacted in 2009, a substantial increase from 2008 activity levels.
* The states considered approximately 300 abortion-related measures, the vast majority of them life-affirming, and virtually every state considered at least one pro-life measure.
* Several states introduced resolutions opposing the federal Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), radical legislation that would enshrine abortion-on-demand into American law and override all federal and state laws regulating or restricting abortion. Meanwhile, attempts in five states to enact a state version of FOCA were handily defeated.
* Further, states continued to seek to protect the unborn in contexts other than abortion by enacting protections for unborn victims of violence, encouraging substance abuse treatment for pregnant woman, and providing legal recourse for families whose unborn children are killed through the criminal acts or neglect of others.
* Measures to regulate biotechnologies and to prohibit or restrict technologies that destroy nascent life increased by nearly 20% -- the first increase in such legislation in three years.
* For the first time in three years, measures to protect conscience outpaced measures to violate or compel conscience by a margin of 2 to 1.
Full report here.
Among the 300 abortion-related meddlings were all the usual hoops and hurdles: 'personhood' (fertilized egg = person) legislation, bans on various types of abortion (because state legislators all have medical degrees and know more than any woman's doctor), parental notification/consent laws, rigorous reporting regulations for providers, mandatory ultrasounds, mandatory waiting periods, funding for Crisis Pregnancy Centres (a.k.a., lying, manipulative, guilt-trippers), and so on and so on and so on.
One of my fave manoeuvres is 'informed consent' legislation. The Guttmacher Institute says that 33 states have such laws, but only 10 of them incorporate correct medical information. The other 23 states use bullshit to attempt to guilt or scare women out of abortion.
('Information' is also the ruse invoked by
Thing is -- as Antonia Zerbisias reports in a blogpost titled Brute Force -- such measures don't work.
She quotes a policy review from the Guttmacher Institute (I'm bolding the same bit she did):
Providing women information specifically geared to dissuading them from having an abortion is a perversion of medical ethics in general and the informed consent process in particular. But no matter how well-worn the tactic, it does not appear to be effective in its purported goal of materially reducing the number of procedures performed. In fact, there is no persuasive evidence that state abortion policies aimed, in one way or another, at talking women out of an abortion stop large numbers of women from having them. At most, there is some indication from the data that erecting substantial, direct roadblocks in the path of women seeing an abortion -- such as denying Medicaid subsidies to poor women or requiring women to make two separate trips to a facility to receive in-person counseling, and then wait 24 hours before the abortion —- may have that result.
Wow. Imagine that. Women making up their own minds and sticking with their decisions.
And another wow. 'Direct roadblocks' on the other hand may work.
Something to think about as fetus fetishists across North America assemble outside women's clinics for their 40 Days of Harassment starting today: what those perverts are doing may be intimidating, but ultimately it is FUTILE.
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