Why We Need Late-Term Abortion Providers

like Dr. George Tiller, brutally assassinated yesterday in the lobby of his church in Kansas.

....a compassionate and courageous doctor who provided abortion services to women in some of the most distressing circumstances imaginable, when their pregnancies had gone horribly, tragically wrong.
Read the full story.

Every minute, around the world:

380 women become pregnant.
190 face an unintended pregnancy.
110 experience a pregnancy-related complication.
40 have an unsafe abortion.
1 dies as a result of her pregnancy.

Source: EngenderHealth

Multiply that by 60 minutes per hour. 24 hours per day. 365 days per year.

That's over half-a-million deaths per year from pregnancy.

Reproductive justice is integral to social, economic, political justice. If you don't own your body, you are not free. Access to safe, legal contraception and abortion are fundamental human rights.

According to NPR, Dr. Tiller was one of only two remaining physicians in the US who provide late-term abortions, under a comprehensive terror campaign from America's fascist Christian right. Now there's only one left.

Why is the need for doctors like him so great?

Fact: Poor women--teens or adults--are the only group in America, whose abortion rate is rising. Black women have an abortion rate nearly four times that of white women. Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women have an abortion rate about two and a half times that of white women.

Fact: The federal ban on abortion entitled the "Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003" outlaws a range of the safest and most common abortions, performed as early as 12 weeks and fails to provide any exception if a woman's health is at stake.

Fact: In the past 10 years, state legislatures around the country have passed or considered bills making it increasingly harder for women and girls to get safe legal abortions early in their pregnancies. Tactics include mandatory waiting periods, mandatory parental consent and state-mandated misinformation fed to women (like abortion increases your risk of breast cancer). Not to mention slashed state funding for abortion and basic contraception to the poorest, most vulnerable categories of women - the uninsured, women of color, new immigrants, low-wage workers, sex workers, minors.

If a woman in America has a late-term abortion, it's likely to be because she had to wait months to:

a) Find an abortion provider
b) Save, scrounge or borrow the money to pay for her abortion
c) Find the transport and funding to travel out of county or state for the procedure
d) Get the time off work - risking job loss, and permanent poverty
e) Find childcare for her other children
f) Go through state-enforced counselling and mandatory delay periods to make her change her mind

Think about Katrina. If hundreds of thousands of poor black Americans hadn't the resources to leave to save their lives, how many of them could come up with resources to access an abortion in the first trimester?

More Info:

Medical Students for Choice was created by my college friend, the brilliant, dynamic Dr. Jody Steinauer, to train the next generation of abortion providers.