Pamela White's blog

Amendment 48: An Absurd Lack of Empathy

2008-10-27T08:00:00-04:00

Editor's Note: This is Part 2 in Pamela White's two-part series on the Colorado personhood amendment, coming to the ballot this November. Read the first installment, Amendment 48: Constitution and Consequences, here.

Although it's hard to imagine the American public, even anti-abortion extremists, tolerating the medical neglect of women in the name of protecting life, there are those in the United States who would use the force of law to ensure that women give birth to badly deformed, doomed babies rather than aborting them.

Dr. Andrew Toledo, an OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist who practices in Georgia, listened to such people testify in a subcommittee hearing regarding a referendum that anti-abortion extremists hoped to get onto his state's ballot. The referendum, which did not get on the ballot in Georgia, is like Amendment 48 in Colorado, giving the same rights human beings have to eggs at the moment of fertilization. VIDEO: Life & Fertilization

"There were countless couples who got up and told their story about how they had to have an abortion because of a child that was anacephalic or deformed in some terrible way," Toledo says. "It didn't move these people at all. They didn't care. They just didn't care. It didn't matter if the woman was raped. It didn't matter if it was incest. It didn't matter if the girl was under age."

For Toledo, who helps couples facing infertility problems to have the children they so desperately want, this lack of compassion was chilling.

"If the child is not going to survive, it's bad enough that the woman's having to carry this inside of her," he says. "Knowing what women go through to have this wonderful event occur only to be told that you've got a child that's not going to survive birth, and then to think that you have to carry that child, go through the pain of the delivery process and then watch it die..."

Such an experience would be devastating for most women, he says, adding that he fully supports any woman who wants to carry a nonviable fetus to term, if that's her choice.

In addition to listening to the testimony of others, Toledo spoke before the subcommittee about the possible impact of Georgia's proposed referendum on women's health and on couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) for infertility.

"Where do you start?" he asks. "First of all any form of [hormonal] contraception would be considered criminal. The family-planning person would be considered a criminal because you are killing potentially a person because the embryo is not being allowed to implant. There are so many aspects of this that are just horrific."

A father of three, Toledo says he believes life is sacred, and he also believes that the health and lives of women need to come first. Laws such as Amendment 48 trivialize women, in his opinion.

"What they're asking people to do is pass laws saying that these fertilized eggs are equal to a woman in every way," he says. "Here's the key element that they're forgetting from my perspective: Hey, those embryos still need a uterus. No uterus, no baby."

As an IVF specialist, he wonders how Amendment 48 would impact IVF clinics in Colorado.

"You have to deal with those little embryos in the deep freeze if you're an in vitro fertilization center. What do you do with them if the couple doesn't want to use them?" he asks. "Are you going to assign them to the state? Are you going to give them up for adoption and therefore the couple loses their rights to utilize them or dispose of them in whatever way they want?"

He says he sees couples agonize over what to do with their embryos, doing their best to make the right decision. Most keep them for later use. Others donate them to other infertile couples who can't afford the full in-vitro process. Still others donate them to research. And some have them destroyed.

"Those are decisions that are very difficult to make but should be made by the couple, not by the government," he says. "When the government gets involved in those decisions, we are stepping into a huge mess."

Of course, some of the implications of Amendment 48 are absurd. If a fertilized egg is a person, how should society respond to the millions of "persons" who fail to implant inside the uterus and go unnoticed as part of women's menstrual flow? Is every menstrual period a reason to mourn?

"I have 10,000 frozen embryos in my lab," Toledo says. "I told the subcommittee that, according to the referendum, that would constitute a small city. I asked if my small city gets voting rights. If I put them in my car, do I get to ride in the HOV lane? There are so many offshoots of this that are so illogical. It's just insane."

This post is excerpted from a longer story by the same author for the Boulder Weekly.

Amendment 48: Constitution and Consequences

2008-10-23T08:00:00-04:00

Kristi Burton, 20, a resident of Peyton, Colorado, is the public face of Amendment 48 in Colorado, the ballot measure that would change the state constitution to bestow all rights currently held by human beings onto a fertilized egg. Burton told the press that the idea of fighting for the unborn came to her when she was sick in bed at the age of 13.

"Me and a lot of my friends want to do what we can to create a culture of life," she says, using the oft-repeated favorite phrase of fundamentalist Christians.

Burton claims she hasn't really thought about the implications of the proposed constitutional change and is happy to leave the fallout to the courts. She also says she sees a future for herself in public policy.

If her interest in public policy should one day include considering the impact of the policies she hopes to enact, she could study the emerging situation in Nicaragua, where in November 2006 the conservative government banned all abortions for all reasons, including rape, incest and the life and health of the mother. Prior to this change, a woman could have a therapeutic abortion if her life or health were in danger or if the fetus were malformed in such a way that it would not live after birth. VIDEO: Life & Fertilization

But now any doctor who performs an abortion for those reasons can be sent to prison. Likewise, a woman who has an abortion, even to protect her health, can also be prosecuted and sent to prison.

According to Human Rights Watch, an international nonprofit organization that has studied the situation in Nicaragua, the law has resulted in an increase in preventable women's deaths from causes related to pregnancy. The organization's findings were published in October 2007 in a report titled "Over Their Dead Bodies."

"Although it appears that actual prosecutions are rare," the report states, "the ban has very real consequences that fall into three main categories: denial of access to life- or health-saving abortion services; denial or delay in access to other obstetric emergency care; and a pronounced fear of seeking treatment for obstetrical emergencies. The net result has been avoidable deaths."

The report details instances in which doctors have hesitated to treat women suffering from ectopic pregnancies, uterine hemorrhaging or even life-threatening cancers because doing so would either terminate her pregnancy or put it at risk, thus leaving both doctor and hospital vulnerable to prosecution.

Though the Nicaraguan Health Ministry issued a number of mandatory protocols regarding obstetrical emergencies hoping to address the unforeseen consequences of the blanket abortion ban, many hospitals are still hesitant to enact them for fear that the protocols are still open to interpretation. So, although the ministry calls for immediate termination of ectopic pregnancies, Human Rights Watch documented cases in which women died of ectopic pregnancies that went untreated due to the hospital's or doctor's fear of prosecution.

The report also documents a very real fear among women who miscarry naturally that they will be accused of having an abortion if they seek medical treatment. Again, women have died.

And yet, for all of this, the law hasn't stopped women from seeking abortions. As the report further documents, the law has simply resulted in more women dying from the procedure.

Women are suffering in other ways, as well. Before the ban was in place, a woman found to be pregnant with a badly deformed, nonviable fetus - a fetus afflicted with congenital deformities such as anacephaly (missing most of the brain) or trisomy-18 (a complex of deformities incompatible with life) - could terminate her pregnancy. Now, she is required to carry the pregnancy to term and endure labor on behalf of a fetus that cannot possibly survive for long outside her uterus.

"To make a woman who knows that she has an anacephalic child in her womb carry it to term and make her suffer though giving birth - a patient who sees her child born with those problems suffers devastating psychological consequences," an obstetrician from a major hospital in Managua told Human Rights Watch. "What we normally do when there are malformations incompatible with life is to terminate the pregnancy when we detect it. But now, according to the law, it cannot be done. We have encountered various cases of young girls whose pregnancies we could not terminate; so we told her... that she has a pregnancy, that the baby is not going to live, and that it will die when it is born. But we can only explain; there is nothing we can do."

Our Reality: My Name is Monica and I Had an Abortion, Part 1 from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

Visit RH Reality Check tomorrow for Part 2 of Pamela White's coverage of the Colorado personhood amendment. This post is excerpted from a longer story in the Boulder Weekly.