- There are two ways to enforce laws against abortion: prosecute doctors or prosecute women. Historically, as well as in most countries today, abortion prosecutions typically target the doctor. This practice is endorsed by today’s anti-abortion movement, which regularly proclaims that women are abortion’s “second victims,” deserving compassion rather than punishment.
Abortion drugs complicate this strategy. When no doctor is involved, the woman who uses abortion drugs might seem less like a “second victim” and more like a criminal.
In Chile, the small number of abortion prosecutions annually typically target doctors. El Salvador prosecutes women. Government officials there have toured the country’s hospitals to inform doctors of their duty to report women suspected of having induced their miscarriages. Not only does this policy violate near-universal norms of patient confidentiality, but because doctors have no reliable way to tell a natural miscarriage from an abortion, reports are made on the basis of suspicion. Whom do doctors tend to suspect most readily? Poor women.
Not to mention, I’m only one data point in Canada but pharamcist are apparently already bitches too you if you are picking up misoprostal to help with insertion of an IUD... the most reliable form of birth control we have. You can almost guarantee a ban on abortion would limit access to the drug that enables many young women to be able to use IUD’s which only makes the problem worse.
Hold on. Forget about the women and the doctor for one second, and let's talk about the child. If abortion is banned then that means that every woman who will get pregnant will have to give birth to their child (unless the woman had a miscarriage). Everyday, hundreds if not thousands of women give birth to a baby. If abortion is banned then the country will have some serious overpopulation problem. Also, what about the father? Why should it be just the doctor and the mother who will be prosecuted? Isn't he at fault, too?