Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Abortion rights activists gather outside VA Department of Health ahead of June 15 vote


Close to 25 abortion rights activists assembled on Saturday outside of the entrance to the Virginia Department of Health on Governor Street to protest regulations that could be approved on June 15th by the department’s Board of Health, a 15-member panel of consumers and health professionals.

According to Molly Taylor Vick, spokesperson for the abortion rights activists, the vote constitutes another step in an approval process required to produce permanent regulations that require abortion clinics and larger medical facilities to adhere to the same standards, among other things.[1]

So-called abortion clinics offer a host of services that uninsured women particularly rely upon including cancer screenings, yearly exams, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and breast exams and treatment.

This time, the peaceful protesters were not met by a frightening visual of Capitol Police and buses to haul the protesters off to jail with.[2] The peaceful protest went as peaceful protests are supposed to go, peacefully.

Abortion rights is an issue about respecting the bodies and individual rights of women, plain and simple. To those conservatives who trumpet abortion rights as a moral issue of respecting life, then one would think that these same individuals would also oppose the death penalty, but this isn’t always the case.[3]

As with so many other issues, conservatives accuse their opponents of picking winners and losers while themselves undertaking that very activity.

Progressives and liberals agree that human life is well worth respecting, in particular the life of the woman whose life could be radically and negatively changed if an abortion were not allowed. It is a question then of whose life is worth protecting more: an embryo or a fully cognizant woman.

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