Though rejected in Slovakia, informed consent laws are needed everywhere

On December 5, 2019, in Slovakia, a conservative bill that would have required women seeking abortions to view their own ultrasounds prior to their abortions was voted down in the name of “women’s rights.”

Monica Costa Riba from Amnesty International stated, “Today’s vote is a victory for women and for reproductive rights. By rejecting this bill, lawmakers in Slovakia chose to protect women’s privacy and autonomy and reject any further roll back of women’s hard-fought rights.”

The New York Post reported that the goal behind the bill was “to ensure that women are informed about the current stage of their pregnancy” and to encourage “positive impacts on marriage, parenthood and family.” It explains further that the law required women seeking abortion to be informed about the “development stage of the embryo or fetus whose development is to be terminated” by using ultrasound images, and that “if technically feasible, the physician must also enable her to listen to the heartbeat of the embryo or fetus.”

READ: The abortion industry lies to women. That’s why we need ultrasound laws.

While forcing women to view ultrasounds prior to abortion is questionable, women should always be given the option of viewing the real-time ultrasound of their preborn child beforehand, and they should at the very least be informed of fetal development at their preborn child’s gestational age. The reason why this seems unreasonable to abortion advocates, however, is likely because it all reveals that abortion isn’t destroying some sort of blob or tumor, but a living human being.

In fact, just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to overturn Kentucky’s informed consent ultrasound law, which — in the worlds of a circuit court judge will “provide[] the patient with more knowledge about the effect of an abortion procedure: it shows her what, or whom, she is consenting to terminate. That this information might persuade a woman to change her mind does not render it suspect under the First Amendment.”

Baby Development Week by Week

A physician preparing a patient for heart surgery or some other medical procedure would thoroughly inform the patient about what he or she was about to experience, explaining the procedure and its risks. Informed consent is a basic requirement for any medical procedure or scientific study. Informed consent empowers patients. If anything, this bill might have been a step closer to honoring women’s rights to fully know what an abortion entails. Since abortion is claimed to be “just another medical procedure,” why is information about what that procedure entails being withheld from women obtaining one? But that’s just it: it’s not just another procedure — which is why no one wants to talk about what truly happens. In the video below, a former abortionist explains the most common abortion procedures:

Abortion Procedures: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Trimesters

Informing women of the details of abortion has never exactly been a priority for abortion providers. Too often we have seen how abortion profiteers like Planned Parenthood fight against informed consent laws, even going so far as to claim that ultrasounds add to the cost of abortion or that they are simply used as coercive techniques. These claims were previously debunked by Live Action News here.

The abortion industry — while it is busy fighting against informed consent laws (like ultrasound laws) because informed consent measures supposedly steal women’s autonomy — claims on the other hand that viewing ultrasound images prior to abortion doesn’t change women’s minds about abortion anyway. One questionable study done in abortion facilities examined the relationship between viewing ultrasound images and women’s decision to abort. It found that that of the 42.5% of women in the study who opted to view their ultrasound image, a shocking 98.5% of them continued with the abortion anyway. However, what this study did not consider are extra variables — like the attitudes of some abortion workers who have been known to pressure women into not viewing their ultrasounds.

But pregnancy centers tell a different story; they report that when women are shown live, real-time ultrasounds of their babies, about 80% of women reject abortion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the abortion industry has been known to try to avoid this sort of viewing. The angle of the ultrasound machine is sometimes placed in such a way that the mother cannot view the screen, and sometimes what is presented as an “ultrasound viewing” is actually a still shot of an “ultrasound printout stapled to a sheet” — sometimes even with “a big index card taped over the picture of the baby.” Not exactly being upfront and honest with patients, is it?

This is quite possibly the type of deception that the Slovakia bill was attempting to prevent. The truth is, abortion facilities don’t want to allow mothers to see their preborn babies. Why would they, when doing so might allow their abortion business dollars walk out the door? They thrive on ignorance. They have to, because when many women discover the truth about abortion, it becomes no longer an option for them.

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