Virginia Senate is Wrong in Continuing to try to Mandate Sonograms Before Abortion

Great news, folks – Virginia’s governor has backed down on the forced ultrasound issue.

Facing an issue that could redefine his political legacy, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) retreated from a measure that would require women to have invasive ultrasounds, performed by inserting a probe into the vagina, before receiving abortions.

“No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition,” McDonnell said Wednesday.

Not to be dissuaded, the Virginia Senate (115 of the 140 are men, by the way) turned around and amended the bill to mandate transabdominal sonograms instead.

Wrong move, gentlemen. Here’s why –

1. While transvaginal sonograms are invasive, transabdominal sonograms can actually be even more difficult to endure. In order to do the transabdominal study, one has to drink 32 ounces of water and sit and wait, sometimes up to an hour, until your bladder is full almost to overflowing. Then another person presses on your very full bladder for about 5-10 minutes to take pictures of your uterus. And in case you didn’t know, the urge to urinate with a barely filled bladder is one of the first and more common symptoms of early pregnancy.

2. Transabdominal sonograms are not as good as transvaginal sonograms . Transvaginal is far superior for confirming gestational age and excluding ectopic pregnancy in early first trimester pregnancies.  The law makes no sense clinically.

3. State legislators are ordering a medical test without a medical indication. And that’s bad medicine.

4. The issue of informed consent applies for any procedure, whether it’s vaginal or not. You cannot force a person as a condition of informed consent, to undergo a procedure without her consent.

Finally, the biggest argument of all –

5. Mandatory ultrasounds have little to no impact on abortion choice. In fact, they can have other than their intended effect, by reassuring women having very early abortions just how small the pregnancy is. Before 6 weeks, an embryo is not even visible within the gestational sac.  And on transabdominal sonogram, later but still early embryos will be even less visible, as will the heartbeat.

In one of the few studies of the issue — there have been none in the United States — two abortion clinics in British Columbia found that 73 percent of patients wanted to see an image if offered the chance. Eighty-four percent of the 254 women who viewed sonograms said it did not make the experience more difficult, and none reversed her decision.

That generally has also been the case in Alabama, which enacted its law, the first of its kind in the United States, in 2002.

“About half of women opt to view them,” said Diane Derzis, who owns the Birmingham clinic. “And I’ve never had one patient get off the table because she saw what her fetus looks like.”

In some instances, the ultrasounds have affected women in ways not intended by anti-abortion strategists. Because human features may barely be detectable during much of the first trimester, when 9 of 10 abortions are performed, some women find viewing the images reassuring.

“It just looked like a little egg, and I couldn’t see arms or legs or a face,” said Tiesha, 27, who chose to view her 8-week-old embryo before aborting it at the Birmingham clinic. “It was really the picture of the ultrasound that made me feel it was O.K.”

Enough. We are  spending our time and energy on fruitless attempts to limit access to a legal medical procedure.  If we were to spend a tenth of that energy working together to increase contraceptive use by both men and women, we actually might be able to reduce the need for abortions.

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Read the Va proposed legislation.