Assault On Women's Right To Decide

Warning: this post contains some graphic material.

Conservative Florida anti-abortion lawmakers are pushing to go further in 2012. This latest assault on Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to decide includes an outright ban on some second-trimester abortions in the state, a 24-hour waiting period for abortions and a measure that forces doctors to sign affidavits saying an abortion is not being sought because of the race or the gender of the fetus.

The ultimate goal of these so-called Christian conservative Republicans in Florida and elsewhere around the country is to take women back to the good old days of "barefoot and pregnant":

• Abortion was not a crime and was quite common in the U.S. during the 1700s and early 1800s. During this period, primitive methods such as physically striking a pregnant woman's abdomen or introducing foreign objects into the uterus were used to induce abortion, frequently killing or injuring the woman.

• The mid-1800s campaign to criminalize abortion stemmed from the medical profession's desire to establish the supremacy of physicians over midwives and homeopaths and an increasing resentment towards the growing women's rights movement.

• Laws passed across the country between 1860 and 1880 prohibited abortion at any point during pregnancy. However, illegal (back-alley) abortion remained widely available throughout the next century.

• Approximately 50% of all maternal deaths resulted from illegal abortion during the first half of the 20th century.

• Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 60s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million, even though abortion procedures were unsafe and often life-threatening, in addition to being illegal.

            Gerri Santoro  August 16, 1935 - June 8, 1964

• During the 1950s and 60s, each year an estimated 160 to 260 women died from illegal abortions, while thousands more were seriously injured.

The name of the woman in the photo is Gerri Twerdy Santoro. She was just 28 years old. She was a sister, a daughter, and she was the mother of two daughters when she died a very painful and frightening death.

The Supreme Court's historic Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 secured the right to safe and legal abortion in the U.S. Although the legalization of abortion has led to many important improvements in the lives of women and families, this right remains vulnerable.

Legal abortion is credited with decreasing both maternal and infant mortality. Today, abortion is 11 times safer than childbirth and less than 1% of those who undergo abortion procedures experience major complications.

The political party of "Less Government is Good Government" seems obsessed with subjecting not only women but all Americans to their interpretation of how life in this country should be lived. Apparently, to them anyway, life was better for all back in the good old days of mid 19th century America.