Follow-up to the Nebraska law LB 594:
OMAHA – A federal judge will hear arguments Tuesday about whether to block a new Nebraska law requiring mental health screenings for women seeking abortions.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed a lawsuit last month challenging the new law, saying it could be difficult to comply with and could require doctors to give women information irrelevant to the procedure.
State officials have defended the law. They say the law is designed to make sure women understand the risks and complications that may accompany an abortion.
Planned Parenthood generally tells women the in-clinic procedure takes 2-3 hours from start to finish, including “a recovery period of about one hour”. The pill procedure takes significantly less time at the clinic. This new law will require doctors to evaluate their patients to ensure they can mentally endure the procedure as well as determine whether or not they have been coerced, an evaluation Planned Parenthood’s attorney Mimi Lui calls an “exhaustive review”. Ultimately, it would take more time per patient. And in an industry that boasts…
Abortions are very common. In fact, more than 1 out of 3 women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old.
…time is money. The evaluations would also cramp the “no big deal” style of the organization’s message. With only two federal judges in the Nebraska District (one appointed by Bill Clinton, the other by George Bush Senior), the outcome is unpredictable.
by 
I’ve always wondered where they get the 1 in 3 woman have an abortion. If they simply compare the number of abortions to the number of woman, than it is inacurate. How do they not include repeat abortions? One woman can have two or more in the same year. Can someone help me find where the study regarding these numbers?
Yes, I would like to know as well. Joyce Arthur states that one in two women will have an abortion at some point during her reproductive years. And that just seems terribly false to me. They must not be counting repeat abortions, and that brings the average to 50 % of women. But that is a terribly misleading picture.
I found this information from the CDC:
“Results: A total of 820,151 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC for 2005 from 49 reporting areas, the abortion ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) was 233, and the abortion rate was 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years. For the 46 reporting areas that have consistently reported since 1995, the abortion rate declined during 1995–2000 but has remained unchanged since 2000.”
This is per year, so it’s difficult to determine a lifetime statistic from that information. 1.5 of every 100 women each year. If they multiply that number by the 29 year span, the number is 43.5 of every 100. Again, that may or may not be an accurate reflection for a whole host of reasons.
source: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5713a1.htm?s_cid=ss5713a1_e
Julie–
I believe that the official guttmacher statistic is that one in two women will have an unplanned pregnancy at some point in their lives. Actually, that statistic seems rather low to me, as I know plenty of women who have bundles of joy that weren’t planned (myself among them).
I’ve also long wondered about the 1 in three statistic. I’ve tried several times to come up with how they calculate it, and I just can’t see it being true. In Canada the abortion ratio is about 1 induced abortion for every 3 live births. That means that 1/4 pregnancies ends in abortion (not counting for miscarriages). But plenty of women will never be pregnant, and, of the people who end up visiting the abortion clinic, many have been there before.
Abortion certainly is common. But common to the 1/3 women? I have a feeling that that is a number that is tossed around like the “thousands of women” who died of back-alley abortions in the time before abortion was legalized.
Update: “U.S. District Judge Laurie Smith Camp granted Planned Parenthood of the Heartland’s request for a preliminary injunction against the law, which was supposed to take effect Thursday. […] “Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence that the disclosures mandated by LB 594, if applied literally, will require medical providers to give untruthful, misleading and irrelevant information to patients,” Smith Camp said in her ruling.
The law would require women wanting abortions to be screened by doctors or other health professionals to determine whether they were pressured into having the procedure. Women also would have to be screened for risk factors indicating if they could have mental or physical problems after an abortion.”
source: http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/article_477afeec-8f5a-11df-9993-001cc4c03286.html