Most Americans favor limiting abortions to special circumstances such as rape, incest and protecting the mother from very serious health risks or death. They also favor parental involvement and the restriction of abortions to early pregnancy so as to limit numbers and brutality of this procedure.
Reasonable laws have been passed and even Roe v Wade itself addresses some of these concerns. Today we face the threat of a federal bill, which would obliterate all restrictions on abortion. The "Freedom of Choice Act," which the president and many other previous sponsors have pledged to enact will establish a "fundamental right" to abortion though out the entire nine months of pregnancy and forbid any law or policy that could "interfere" with that right or "discriminate" against it in public policy.
This would also allow abortion by non-physicians and eliminate regulations which protect women from unsafe clinics and unscrupulous abortionists. It would force taxpayer funding of abortion and force every state to allow partial-birth abortions. Its supporters say the primary purpose of the bill is to ensure killing partially born children will again be permitted nationwide.
The bill will obliterate parental notification laws meant to involve parents in their daughter's decision, allowing minors to be taken out of state for abortions without the parents ever knowing.
It will deny the "conscientious objector" rights of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and religious hospitals forcing them to participate against their consciences or quit. A clone of this called the Reproductive Privacy Act has been introduced into the Minnesota legislature. I ask every person who believes in even modest protection for the unborn and the consciences of health care workers to oppose this legislation.
