Newspaper review (Carmen de Carvajal)

CLOUDY AND COLD-THE NEW YORK TIMES (REVIEW)

Two more abortion clinics were closed in Texas this week. The largest state in the U.S, with 268,000 square miles and 26 million people, will only have six places to end pregnancy by the end of the year if the courts don’t intervene. Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, said goodbye to her lifetime work last Thursday when she shut the doors of a small clinic in Rio Grande Valley, recalling all the women she had served.

The law requires that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital, but Ms. Miller said that nearly all their doctors were unable to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, and that some hospitals declined to even provide doctors with applications for admitting privileges. Another part of the law, which takes effect in September, requires clinics to meet surgical-center standards, meaning all abortions, including nonsurgical procedures, must take place in hospital-style operating rooms. It’s too much money.

The state’s government alludes to the poor health conditions of these clinics as their reason to close them, but their real reason is God. The state is trusting a man who campaigns saying he is “a Christian first” and who claims that illegal immigrants are threatening Texas with “third world diseases” like leprosy. They refuse to believe that sex can have a different aspect other than procreation, and don’t see the point in birth control pills. This is basically because they’ are not receiving the sex education they should.

I’ve chosen this article for the indignation this same issue has caused in Spain. Maybe our government has not expressed their reason as loudly and clearly as Texas has, but the terrifying idea of going back to Middle Ages customs’, when everyone was driven by God, is equally felt in every nation suffering from these fanatics. The ability of a woman to have control of her body is critical to civil rights. Take away her reproductive choice and you step onto a slippery slope.

One of their favorite arguments is to call us assassins. But, in my opinion, the concept of personhood is different from the concept of human life. Human life occurs at conception, but fertilized eggs used for in vitro fertilization are also human lives and those not implanted are routinely thrown away. Is this murder, and if not, then how is abortion murder?

As I respect their beliefs, I want them to respect science and politics. If we were to go back to a theocracy, then all these progresses, all the people that have sacrificed their lives for what they believed in would have done it for nothing. If they want to stop abortion, I suggest they start giving appropriate sex education, like northern states do, and stop talking about God.