Abortion Capital of America

[Lil Red]

[url="http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/15248/"]http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/15248/[/url]

[quote]In 1970, New York passed the most permissive abortion law in America, one that defined the state as the country’s abortion refuge. Overnight, a new industry materialized in New York City, promoting itself to women across the country. The pitches were often blunt. A newspaper ad from the time inquired, “Want to be un-pregnant?”

Thirty-five years later, New York has the highest abortion rate in America. In 2000, the last year for which good data are available, 39 out of every 1,000 women in the state ended a pregnancy, for a total of 164,000 abortions that year. In America, one of every ten abortions occurs in New York, and in New York, seven of every ten abortions are performed in New York City. In absolute terms, there are more abortions performed on minors, more repeat abortions, and more late abortions (over 21 weeks) in New York City than anywhere else in the country. In parts of the city, the ratio of abortions to births is one to one.

Over the past twenty years, while legislatures have circumscribed access to abortion in state after state, especially for the poor and the young, New York has remained an island of unrestricted abortion rights. Medicaid pays for abortions for low-income women. Teenagers don’t need a parent’s permission to have an abortion. There are no 24-hour waiting periods. Thirty-four major clinics in New York City each perform more than 400 abortions per year.

New York becomes more pro-choice every year. After years of electoral free fall, the New York Right to Life Party failed to win enough votes in 2002 to stay on the ballot. The party doesn’t even have a Website anymore. The New York Right to Life Committee, which founded the national anti-abortion movement in 1967, hasn’t had a legislative victory in years. No pro-life candidate can win statewide office in New York. Ambitious Republicans climbing toward the governor’s mansion, like George Pataki, and now John Faso, hastily ditch their pro-life pasts. New York City’s mayor is one of the most pro-choice politicians in the country.

In short, New York is the abortion capital of America.

The United States is slowly turning into two places when it comes to abortion. In one, easy access to the procedure is being eroded by regulations, while conservative legislators dream up new restrictions, waiting periods, and consent laws. In the other, abortion is accessible, inexpensive—often government-subsidized—and safeguarded by powerful interest groups. The Supreme Court set the country down this path in 1992. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court retreated from a core principle of Roe v. Wade and upheld several restrictions in a Pennsylvania law called the Abortion Control Act. States, the Court said, could force women to wait 24 hours before having an abortion, and they could require doctors to read “informed consent” scripts to women before an abortion. The Court only struck down a more onerous section of the act that required women to notify their husbands before seeking abortions. The test for any future state regulation, the Court decreed, was whether it constitutes an “undue burden,” defined as a law that places a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.

The Casey decision inspired a crusade by pro-life lawyers. True, the Court had not overturned Roe, but the right believed Casey was the go-ahead to gut it. One line in Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent stood out as particularly inspiring: “Roe continues to exist, but only in the way a storefront on a western movie set exists: a mere façade to give the illusion of reality.” The new strategy would be to systematically test the boundaries of what the Court meant by “undue burden” and “substantial obstacle.” Pro-life lawyers hatched a series of increasingly clever legal restrictions that have defined the abortion wars for the past decade and a half.

Now we are at another turning point. The Supreme Court will soon decide a case that may allow states to go well beyond current abortion restrictions. Last week, the Court heard arguments in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood, a challenge to New Hampshire’s parental-consent law and perhaps the most important abortion case since Casey. The New Hampshire law prevents a doctor from performing an abortion on a minor until 48 hours after one of her parents has been notified. Most similar laws have an exception to the waiting period if the minor’s health is at risk, but the only exception in the New Hampshire law is if the girl is about to die. At stake are two issues. One is whether New Hampshire’s law is unconstitutional because it lacks a health exception, a feature of abortion restrictions that the Court has regularly required. The second issue is technical but of greater consequence. Until now, doctors and patients have been able to ask courts to strike down abortion restrictions if some potential harm can be proved. But the new standard requested by New Hampshire, and supported by the Bush administration, is to allow courts to leave potentially unconstitutional abortion laws intact unless it can be proved that application of the law is unconstitutional in every case.[/quote]

this is just the first page of the article. if you want to read more that will break your heart, click on the link at the top.

[Lil Red]

[quote]This is now the third period in American history in which New York has become the nation’s abortion capital. In many ways, the story of abortion in the United States is the story of abortion in New York. There were no laws against the procedure until the 1820s. Before that, British common law allowed abortions before “quickening,” or the moment when the fetus first moved. It was in New York in 1828 that America’s first real abortion law was passed. The debate of the day wasn’t driven by religious concerns about when life begins. Instead, as James C. Mohr’s classic history of the subject, Abortion in America, explains, Albany responded to pressure from doctors who were aghast at quacks’ butchering women and scamming them with phony abortifacient potions. The law was really about medical regulation, and, according to Mohr, it went completely unenforced.

At that time, semi-clandestine abortion clinics dotted the city. Inside, women could have a pregnancy terminated or they could purchase “French lunar pills,” “Portuguese female pills,” or other exotic-sounding medicines that would purportedly trigger a miscarriage. [b]The customers were mostly wealthy native-born Protestant women looking to put off their childbearing years or who had decided they’d had enough children.[/b][/quote]

[Lil Red]

[quote]A study from 1868 found that one in five New York City pregnancies ended in abortion.

But Restellism produced a backlash. In the 1870s, the Times stopped accepting abortion ads and launched a crusade against the industry. “There is a systematic business in wholesale murder conducted by men and women in this City, that is seldom detected, rarely interfered with, and scarcely ever punished by law,” read a front-page report from 1871 headlined THE EVIL OF THE AGE. Laws against abortion advertising were passed, and abortionists were prosecuted. Madame Restell, who had already been through several trials, was arrested again in 1878 for selling her abortifacient concoctions. On the eve of a court appearance, she dressed herself in diamonds, slipped into her marble bathtub, and slit her throat. By 1881, New York had passed some of the most severe abortion bans, laws that were imitated throughout the nation.[/quote]

[Lil Red]

[quote]In 1967, the Reverend Howard R. Moody, a Texas-born Baptist minister of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park, began consulting friends about how to help women get safe abortions. He organized 21 ministers and rabbis and built an underground network of reliable doctors; in May 1967, a front-page piece in the Times announced the creation of Moody’s Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. Clergymen worked weeklong shifts taking calls from women across the country.[/quote]
this makes me so sad! i never knew about this!

[Lil Red]

[quote]When the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was founded in 1969, it made New York its first target. Several states had already passed reform laws, but for the most part they allowed abortions only if the health of the mother was at risk. The push for repeal in New York was built in stages, first by the referral system, then by pro-abortion activists converting Democratic clubs in New York City to the cause, precinct by precinct. The turning point in the debate came when several Long Island legislators signed on to the bill. The Times also joined the cause, printing a steady beat of pro-repeal editorials.[/quote]
this sounds like the referral system i mentioned in an earlier post was the starting point to repeal these laws. oh how sad! how sick!

[Lil Red]

[quote]The abortion capital of New York is at the corner of Bleecker and Mott. That’s the home of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Center, the largest abortion provider in New York. Doctors at this one clinic perform some 11,000 abortions per year. “I’m sure we provide a good chunk of the abortions in the U.S.,” says Dr. Maureen Paul, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood New York. In fact, the Margaret Sanger Center provides about one in every ten abortions in New York and about one in every thousand abortions in the United States.[/quote]
they proudly proclaim this woman's name!

[homeschoolmom]

[quote name='Lil Red' date='Dec 7 2005, 03:59 PM'] this makes me so sad! i never knew about this!
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Yeah, sadly most Evangelicals got on the right side of the abortion issue waaaaay too late. Most Evangelicals today are not aware of this black mark in their history.

[Lil Red]

[quote]One-third of the Margaret Sanger Center’s patients rely on Medicaid for their health care. In New York, Medicaid treats abortion no differently than any other health issue. But in 29 states, the program is barred from funding abortions in most cases except rape, incest, or to save a woman’s life. The prohibition is the most effective of all state laws in preventing abortions. “One-third of women who are covered by Medicaid and would have Medicaid abortions continue their pregnancies when Medicaid funding isn’t available,” says Stanley Henshaw of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. [b]In 2003, Medicaid paid for 43 percent of abortions in New York City.[/b] Every year, pro-life legislators try to ban it, and every year they fail. “That’s one of the reasons we have one of the highest abortion rates in the country,” says Christina Fadden Fitch, the legislative director of the New York State Right to Life Committee. “It’s really sad. It’s like throwing abortion at the poor.”[/quote]

[quote]Regulating abortion in the United States is like playing whack-a-mole. Every time a state tightens its laws, abortions rise somewhere else. If Roe is overturned, Cristina Page, author of the forthcoming How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, estimates that as many as 30 states would likely move toward criminalization, vastly increasing the traffic of abortion seekers into New York, just like in the early 1970s.

But then what? The lesson from the 1870s and the 1970s is that the more the city becomes a place of last resort for abortion, the more uncomfortable New Yorkers become with the procedure. Restellism produced bans nationwide. After the 1970 law was passed, several abortion-rights legislators in New York were drummed out of politics, including the tearful George M. Michaels. Later, the Assembly actually repealed the new abortion law, though it was vetoed by Rockefeller. When Roe was decided in 1973, it was like a giant release valve. The city was no longer inundated with planeloads of women dropping into town for the procedure. The end of New York’s monopoly brought the end of the more unsavory operators and practices that marred the early seventies.[/quote]

[Lil Red]

[quote]Despite the state’s overwhelming support for legalization, New Yorkers, like Americans generally, start to get queasy when confronted with the best weapons in the pro-life movement’s arsenal: graphic descriptions of rarely used late-term-abortion methods, and the fact that thousands of New York women return each year to clinics for a third or fourth abortion. When we nod our heads at Bill Clinton’s famous formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” or Hillary Clinton’s more recent proclamation that abortion is “a sad, even tragic choice,” we admit some discomfort with the procedure.

Among New York’s pro-choice leaders, reaction to this message is divided. Political groups like NARAL say they understand the need for conceding to public opinion. But to providers, the Clintonian reframing of the issue capitulates to pro-lifers. “Hillary can say anything she wants about whether an abortion is a tragedy,” says Dr. Paul. “What I know when I perform an abortion for a patient is that the overwhelming feeling is one of relief. Because the abortion has solved a huge problem in her life, whether it’s because she couldn’t afford another child, couldn’t afford to be a good mother to another child, or doesn’t have the money to raise a child.” She becomes increasingly passionate as she speaks. “Every time I do an abortion I save a woman’s life. If you want to call that a tragedy”—she pauses and exhales a sharp sigh—“I don’t consider it a tragedy, I’m sorry.” Dr. Anne Davis of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center thinks that even as New York retains its status as a restrictionless oasis, the larger war over normalizing abortion is being lost. “We would like to keep abortion part of regular medical care,” she says. “Our view is, abortion is nothing special. Abortion is right up there with having a baby or getting the care for whatever other medical needs you have.”[/quote]
Abortion is nothing special because a baby - a life! - isn't anything special!

and abortion solving a huge problem - getting rid of a HUMAN LIFE!!

[DancesforLove]

UGH! I hate abortion ;(

[Cathurian]

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and the whole world.

[jezic]

none of this article sounds good at all.

wake up America, (and the rest of the world) before it is to late.

[ThyHolyLove]

The good news about all of this is that NYC has some awesome religous there stamping out the culture of death. Orders such as the Sisters of Life (rock on!), Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Renewal and the Missionaries of Charity.

[Piccoli Fiori JMJ]

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v359/LausTibiChriste/BannerDivineMercy.jpg[/img]

[MilesChristi]

[quote]“What I know when I perform an abortion for a patient is that the overwhelming feeling is one of relief. Because the abortion has solved a huge problem in her life, whether it’s because she couldn’t afford another child, couldn’t afford to be a good mother to another child, or doesn’t have the money to raise a child.” She becomes increasingly passionate as she speaks. “Every time I do an abortion I save a woman’s life. If you want to call that a tragedy”—she pauses and exhales a sharp sigh—“I don’t consider it a tragedy, I’m sorry.”[/quote]

That quote is painful to read. Abortion is a two-fold tragedy: it murders a baby and hurts a woman. Rather than solving problems, it creates more and more. I'm reminded of a sign I've seen before. "How Long Does an Abortion Last? Forever......"

[argent_paladin]

[quote name='MilesChristi' date='Dec 7 2005, 07:22 PM']That quote is painful to read. Abortion is a two-fold tragedy: it murders a baby and hurts a woman. Rather than solving problems, it creates more and more. I'm reminded of a sign I've seen before. "How Long Does an Abortion Last? Forever......"
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[quote]“What I know when I perform a hit for a client is that the overwhelming feeling is one of relief. Because the hit has solved a huge problem in her life, whether it’s because she couldn’t afford the blackmail, couldn’t afford to be a good wife to her husband, or doesn’t have the money to pay her debts.” She becomes increasingly passionate as she speaks. “Every time I do a hit I save a woman’s life. If you want to call that a tragedy”—she pauses and exhales a sharp sigh—“I don’t consider it a tragedy, I’m sorry. ”[/quote]

If we can justify the killing of a person in order to solve our problems, then what is wrong with hired murder?Surely there are many who think their lives would be better if someone in their lives just "disappeared"? And if you could just pay someone do to it for you? And if the government paid for it ? After all, hired assassination is a choice, and part of the right to privacy. Right?

[Carrie]

It really is too easy to get an abortion here. Sadly, I know quite a few girls/women who have had abortions. Even insurances make it too easy. According to my health plan, I can have one abortion per year that is fully paid for and that doesn't need a referral, but I can't get a regular checkup, see a specialist, or go to the dentist without fees or a referral. It's so sad and infuriating all at the same time.

[Cow of Shame]

[quote name='Carrie' date='Dec 8 2005, 07:42 AM']According to my health plan, I can have one abortion per year that is fully paid for and that doesn't need a referral, but I can't get a regular checkup, see a specialist, or go to the dentist without fees or a referral.  It's so sad and infuriating all at the same time.
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wow

[Sojourner]

[quote name='Carrie' date='Dec 8 2005, 07:42 AM']

It really is too easy to get an abortion here.  Sadly, I know quite a few girls/women who have had abortions.  Even insurances make it too easy.  According to my health plan, I can have one abortion per year that is fully paid for and that doesn't need a referral, but I can't get a regular checkup, see a specialist, or go to the dentist without fees or a referral.  It's so sad and infuriating all at the same time.
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From an economic perspective, it's much more cost-effective for the insurance carrier if you have an abortion than if you give birth to a child. It's no surprise that they make it easy. I think it's another sign that we as a culture are moving towards seeing personhood in terms of economic value -- what you can contribute into the system in relation to what you take out of it -- rather than seeing persons as having intrinsic value.

[Lil Red]

[quote name='Carrie' date='Dec 8 2005, 07:42 AM']

It really is too easy to get an abortion here.  Sadly, I know quite a few girls/women who have had abortions.  Even insurances make it too easy.  According to my health plan, I can have one abortion per year that is fully paid for and that doesn't need a referral, but I can't get a regular checkup, see a specialist, or go to the dentist without fees or a referral.  It's so sad and infuriating all at the same time.
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wow!