Brunswick Beacon, 06.22.23
June 24 marks one year since Roe v. Wade and your constitutional right to privacy were revoked. The first casualty was a woman’s freedom to decide what happens to her own body. Women are being forced to give birth in state-sanctioned medical torture.
An Oklahoma woman began bleeding in her first trimester. An ultrasound showed a non-viable pregnancy and a placenta with cancerous cysts that had ruptured. Left untreated, she could die. Her doctors could not perform the necessary abortion under Oklahoma law. "The best advice we can give you,” they said, “is to go sit in the parking lot until you bleed out, and we will be ready to help you when that happens." She got her life-saving abortion out-of-state.
A Texas woman’s water broke at 19 weeks, leaving insufficient amniotic fluid. Doctors could not perform an abortion. “I was told if I tried to discharge myself, or seek care elsewhere, I could be arrested for trying to kill my child.” After five days of captivity, she delivered a dead baby. “I was made to feel less than human,” she said. “Texas law caused me to be detained against my will for five days and treated like a criminal during the most traumatic and heartbreaking experience of my life.”
A Florida woman learned at 23 weeks that her fetus had underdeveloped lungs and no kidneys. She was forced to carry it to term. For four months she had to tell her 4-year-old son that his brother-to-be would not survive. The baby she delivered endured 99 minutes of agony struggling to breathe before he died. After watching the family suffer, her father said, “To me it’s just pure torture. The law has created torture.”
NC MAGA Republicans’ new law restricting women’s right to choose takes effect July 1. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson wants to become governor and eliminate that freedom entirely. “Once you make a baby,” Robinson says, “it’s not your body anymore.” That’s how medical torture begins.
Shelley Allen
Holden Beach
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