I want to focus, however, on one particularly disturbing obstacle that was mentioned in city after city: doctors refusing to care for women who have had abortions. Mind you, these are not doctors refusing to perform abortions. What we heard, in three separate communities, was that there are doctors who refuse to perform routine post-abortion check-ups or even to provide care for completely unrelated ailments to women who previously had abortions. What’s worse, in two instances we heard that these doctors were some of the few who were accepting Medicaid patients at all – meaning that poor women would have to face greater obstacles to receive needed medical care. In one instance, we heard of a doctor throwing a patient’s medical records on the ground and storming out after he learned she had had an abortion.
Hey, what could be more “pro life” than refusing to give medical treatment to someone because you disapprove of something they did in the past? I wonder what would happen if a woman showed up and proved she was sufficiently sorry? Would you treat her then?
Look, most of us women know that the whole anti-choice movement is really about making women feel bad for being sluts. That’s it in a nutshell. Any doctor who turns a female patient away because she had an abortion is pretty much trying to make her pay. It’s a punitive thing. And to those people I say: Fuck You.
