Planned Parenthood Seeks End to "Abortion" Discrimination
A guest satire by HENRIETTA G. TAVISH
Special to The Dawn Patrol
WASHINGTON, DC, September 18 – Claiming that it is subject to discrimination by local building codes which require clinics to disclose in advance whether they will provide "abortion" services, Planned Parenthood is supporting legislation that would permit a uniform, neutral term to be used to describe all forms of medically-assisted reproductive choice.
Under a bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), municipalities would be required to allow the term "fetal relocation" to be used on building permit applications and to recognize it as referring to both abortion and childbirth. The law is intended to ease tensions in cities where medical facilities are being built, as fewer protests occur when the community believes it is possible that the staff might be delivering rather than killing babies.
"Scientifically speaking, both procedures result in the transfer of fetal tissue from the inside to the outside of a woman's body," said Mahoney. "It's wrong to stigmatize a particular outcome by linguistically differentiating between two equally valid alternatives." Maloney also noted that every day of so-called "living" is actually a day closer to dying, and recommended that the legalistic distinction between "life" and "death" be eventually phased out as well.
Legal scholars predicted that the proposed law would survive judicial scrutiny in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. In Gonzales v Carhart, Associate Justice Ginsburg condemned the use of the misleading term "abortion doctor" to describe doctors who perform abortions, insisting that they should instead be referred to as "obstetrician-gynecologists" and "surgeons." "It violates equal protection to draw an arbitrary distinction between physicians who perform delicate, life-saving fetal surgery in the operating theatre of a university hospital and those who engage in late-term skull-crushing with an unsterilized nutcracker in a store front mill," she opined. Although Ginsburg technically wrote for "the minority," experts suggested that that term was functionally equivalent to "the emerging majority."
