Anti-Abortion Measure a Waste of Paper

​Do you know what your Senate was doing yesterday?

Among other things, it passed HB 1127. This is an anti-abortion measure, I suppose, but it's so profoundly useless that it's hard to imagine it seriously offending even Florida's baby-hatingest abortionists.

Here's the summary.

Requires that ultrasound be performed on women obtaining abortion; requires that ultrasound be reviewed with with patient before woman gives consent for abortion procedure; requires that woman certify in writing that she declined to review ultrasound & did so of her own free will & without undue influence; provides exemption from requirement to view ultrasound for women who are victims of rape, incest, domestic abuse or human trafficking or for women who have serious medical condition necessitating abortion; provides grounds for disciplinary action for failure to comply with such requirements; provides rulemaking authority to AHCA.

The AHCA is the Agency for Health Care Administration, by the way.

So what we have here is mandatory ultrasounds for women who don't have to look at the results, so long as they sign a paper.

This is a waste of both ultrasounds and paper. It is also a waste of the Senate's time. (And the Senate doesn't have much of that precious stuff. While they managed to pass this bill yesterday, they neglected to update their website to say as much.)

The bill is a bit more complicated than all that, of course. It requires abortion doctors to discuss with women the various stages of fetal development (a discussion which, if the doctor's got half a brain or heart, could easily be dispensed with in three or four pain-free sentences), and to alert women to the existence of abortion alternatives. Which one hopes they did anyway. All good doctors discuss alternative treatments.

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