Women in Virginia will now be given a few more of the facts before making a serious medical decision. According to LifeNews, the Virginia State Senate has approved a bill
requiring abortionists to allow women to view ultrasounds of their preborn children before going through with the abortion.
Abortion advocates stirred up controversy over this legislation by claiming the legislation would require women seeking abortions to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds, which they compared to rape. Not only is the analogy between ultrasounds and rape completely false, it is insulting to victims of actual sexual abuse to suggest that the trauma they suffered is equivalent to a routine medical exam.
Furthermore, this claim ignores the fact that 99 percent of Planned Parenthood’s facilities routinely perform them to determine the location of the baby before performing the abortion. In fact, Planned Parenthood’s policy requires that an ultrasound be performed before an abortion. As Adrienne Schreiber, an official at Planned Parenthood’s Washington, D.C., regional office, told Commentary magazine, “That’s just the medical standard. To confirm the gestational age of the pregnancy, before any procedure is done, you do an ultrasound.”
It’s common sense. Without ultrasounds, abortions are much more dangerous, and can be life-threatening, as in the case of the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 (mifepristone), which can kill women if an ectopic pregnancy is not detected through an ultrasound.
This bill does not force women to do anything the abortion industry does not already make them do, nor does it specify what kind of ultrasound should take place. The word “transvaginal” never appears in the bill. Rather, the bill gives a woman the chance to see the ultrasound of her baby, an option the woman can refuse if she so desires.
The hysteria from the abortion front was enough for Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell to have the bill amended to ensure that it does not require a transvaginal ultrasound, even though this was not required originally. The state House then approved the amended legislation 65-32, and the Senate has now approved it 21-19.
