Virtual Abortion Comes to Montana

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I currently live overseas, where our cable provider gets U.S. TV programs with some delay. Right now, they’re advertising the new “Candid Camera,” a takeoff on the old show in which people are observed in incongruous situations, their reactions recorded by means of a hidden camera. “Laugh, relax a bit,” is the advertising hook.

One of the strange situations depicted is “Your Online Dental Exam.” Patients are led to believe that they are taking part in a new way of getting your teeth checked: a “virtual” visit to the dentist.

The computer voice instructs a teenage girl: “carefully inject upper right gum.” “I’m supposed to inject myself?” she asks incredulously?

We all have a laugh when Peter Funt announces “smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”

 But I didn’t know Montana governor Steve Bullock might be gunning to replace Funt.

On April 27, Bullock vetoed a bill that would have banned abortion by DVC in Montana.   For those unfamiliar with the procedure, a pregnant woman is “examined” by television by a doctor who can be several hundred miles away.  He has no physical contact with her, never touches her. Once his “examination” is complete, he pushes a button that opens a drawer at the woman’s location. She removes the package of pills in it, goes home, takes the drugs and, within a few days, undergoes a self-induced miscarriage. For safety’s sake, she is counseled to return for medical follow up within two weeks, just to make sure that she might not be going into toxic shock because of an incomplete abortion. Sepsis, after all, can be so unpleasant.

This “telemedicine” is essentially a “do-it-yourself abortion.” Unlike Peter Funt’s “do-it-yourself online dental exam,” however, these guys are deadly serious … deadly for the unborn child, potentially deadly for mother.

Yet Bullock applied his veto pen the day before the Montana Legislature adjourned sine die, ensuring his decision could not be overturned and Internet abortions will go on in Montana.

“[W]e should all be working together to expand access to health-care services in Montana” wrote Bullock in his veto message. (The quote is from a newspaper; don’t try to find the message on the Governor’s website. Those who support the Governor’s veto; but we don’t have to be too public about being pro-abortion).

Bullock characterizes the procedure as “a safe, effective, and efficient means of delivering health care.”  One might question whether giving a woman mifepristone and prostaglandins to abort herself is “health care,” much less good medicine.

But Planned Parenthood has embraced it. As more and more physicians refuse to sully their hands with prenatal bloodletting, Planned Parenthood has found webcam abortions an “effective and efficient means” to make money on abortions in large, rural states where it just doesn’t have enough abortionists—even carpetbagger abortionists riding circuit, plying their trade—to rake in the money. 19 states have already banned the procedure, and Iowa has been a major point of controversy where Planned Parenthood has pushed “do-it-yourself” abortion.

The paradox is, of course, that while Steve Bullock embraces a form of “health care” that ensures Planned Parenthood doesn’t even have to touch a patient, much less get blood on its hands, he wants to force you—contrary to your conscience rights—to get blood on yours. The Montana Legislature also sought to protect conscience rights by requiring health insurers who cover abortions in their medical plans also to offer the same plan without abortion coverage. Bullock also vetoed that bill this week.

(The reasons for that veto are also clear. It’s not about Bullock’s claim that duplicating health plans that leave something out—in this case, abortion—are going to “ultimately lead to increased costs for consumers”  It is about the ongoing effort of the abortion establishment to treat abortion unapologetically as perfectly normal and ordinary, about which the public has no qualms. It is about eviscerating the Hyde Amendment—something that has been a covert operation under Obamacare—in order to create a public perception and policy that abortion is “just another health service.” And this is advanced by those who call the opponents of forcing people to subsidize abortion “extremists”).

See, abortion is a “private choice” of a woman whom the public—including those who dissent—must endorse, facilitate, and subsidize.

For right now, Montana women will be the prey of abortionists who are willing to make money on them while leaving them essentially to their own devices when it comes actually to aborting. “Carefully inject yourself,” one might also hear. But don’t smile; you’re really on Planned Parenthood camera, which thinks this farce is good medicine.

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