Seeing California stand up in support of women’s rights instead of belittling them is a breath of fresh air. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law allowing medical practitioners who are not doctors, such as nurses and certified midwives, the ability to perform early abortions, according to Los Angeles Times. This new law called AB 154 can make abortions more available to women seeking one within the first trimester of pregnancy. This move by the most populous state in the country could be an inspiration to others in supporting women’s rights.
The procedure is called “aspiration,” according to the Washington post, and it involves inserting a small tube through the cervix to remove the fetus early in the first trimester. The bill has been a year in the making, testing it out on more than 11,000 women who got abortions in the first trimester of their pregnancies, reports Los Angeles Times. Half of the abortions were performed by doctors and half were performed by other medical professionals such as nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives and physician assistants.
The results were promising. Los Angeles Times reports that less than 2 percent of the 11,487 patients required any additional care post-abortion. Only six women out of the entire study needed hospital based care, three of whom had their abortion done by a doctor, and the other three by other medical professionals. Los Angeles Times writes “‘The first major conclusion is that abortion is incredibly safe no matter who performed it,’ wrote Tracy Weitz, a medical sociologist and researcher at UC San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, which oversaw the program.” The study showed that the aspirations performed by other medical professionals were just as safe as ones performed by doctors, proving them well qualified to do the procedure.
The bill was initially sponsored by Assembly Majority Leader Toni Atkins, D-Calif., who released this statement about the law: “Timely access to reproductive health services is critical to women’s health … AB 154 will ensure that no woman has to travel excessively long distances or wait for long periods in order to obtain an early abortion. I appreciate Governor Brown’s support of women’s health.” Four other states in the country (Oregon, Vermont, Montana and New Hampshire) already allowed nurse practitioners to perform abortions using a tube and suction, according to New York Times. In addition, some states, including California, allowed nurse practitioners to provide drugs to terminate an early pregnancy.
New York Times writes, “By contrast, 68 restrictions on abortion have been passed by states so far this year, according to Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that studies reproductive health issues.” When other states passing abortion laws lately all seemed to be going right, California decided to go left. “We are trending in a different direction, and we’re very proud of it,” Atkins said.
Not surprisingly, with progression comes resistance. Several Republican figureheads and anti-abortion groups have come forth in opposition to the new law, but no argument was as shocking as a few made by Steve Macias, a California Republican Party officer and executive director of the anti-abortion group Cherish California’s Children, according to Los Angeles Times.
Last May when the bill was still in the works, Macias came out saying in a YouTube video “This isn’t about whether abortion is wrong or right… We believe that this bill will hurt and potentially even kill women in this state…. We were told that abortion should be legal so that we can prevent back-alley abortions, but what this bill does is create back-alley abortions. It’s taking what they consider safe and legal and making it dangerous and dirty.”
Where he is getting this information from, no one knows, but he seemingly has nothing backing up this statement. If the opposition was “not about whether abortion is wrong or right” then he would have facts and evidence to back up his statements. The trial run on more than 11,000 women shows excellent standards of health in the women who had abortions, and, according to Weitz, none of them experienced any long term physical harm.
Brian Johnston, director of The National Right to Life’s western regional office, had a similar statement to make on the new law, saying “It will massively expand the number of abortions and at the same time reduce safety. For those who say they care about women’s health, they’re doing the opposite, reducing the medical standards for abortion,” according to the New York Times. I think any nurse practitioner or certified nurse midwife can be taught to do the procedure as well as any doctor could. Who is he to say the medical standards would be reduced from being performed by a fully qualified nurse? The audacity of these opponents who make up these arguments based on no facts at all is mind boggling to me, but even more ridiculous is that their followers blindly agree with them without a desire for any evidentiary support at all.
At least the California Catholic Conference (CCC) tried to make a logical argument against the bill. According to Los Angeles Times, the CCC emphasized that California was in no need for more accessibility to abortion providers.
“Although 22% of California counties have no abortion provider, only 1% of women live in those counties. In addition, in June and July of 2013, volunteers called abortion facilities all over the state and were offered appointments on the same day or in a few cases, within a week,” they wrote on their online blog last month.
The statistics of their post is questionable since Atkins, the initial assemblywoman who wrote the bill, said more than half of the counties in the huge state don’t have an abortion provider. It seems to me that allowing abortions to be done by other medical professionals would free up more time for licensed doctors to see other patients and make other diagnoses as well as create more jobs in abortion clinics and hospitals.
Now for the doozy of a comment made by Macias last May: “We looked up the statistics for jumping out of an airplane in a parachute,” he said in the YouTube video. “And the rate of mortality there — 1 in 100,000 people die from jumping out of an airplane with a parachute. Then we looked at what this bill is trying to do. [AB] 154 is trying to allow aspiration abortions, and the risk there is 1 in 100 women will suffer bleeding, tearing, infection from this type of an abortion. So it’s 1,000 times more dangerous to have this aspiration abortion than it is to jump out of an airplane with a parachute.”
The statement is so ridiculous it hardly needs any explaining. He is comparing death by jumping out of an airplane to minor complications by abortion. Of course it is almost guaranteed a person is going to die if something goes wrong when jumping out of an airplane. I repeat: they are jumping out of an airplane. And as with any procedure, it can be expected that something minor may go wrong; something is being removed from the body and the body is going to react. Even so, out of the study of 11,487 women, less than 2 percent experienced any complications, all of which were minor. It is preposterous that he would even try to relate and compare skydiving with aspiration abortions.
So far, allowing medical professionals such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform aspirations has proved exceptionally safe for women, all while increasing accessibility for them to obtain abortions. Opponents will inevitably continue to release statements based on no factual support, but hopefully more people than not will see through them. California has proved to be a role model for women’s rights by supporting their choices of what happens to their bodies. Hopefully other states will follow suit and stop allowing men to make controlling decisions on what a woman does with her body; that’s her right.
Avery Twible can be reached at avery.twible@spartans.ut.edu