On May 3 an Oklahoma judge delayed enactment of a new law mandating that mothers get ultrasounds before abortions for 45 days.
Oklahoma's ultrasound law goes farther than others. According to the Associated Press:
The law requires doctors to use a vaginal probe, which provides a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound, and to describe the fetus in detail, including its dimensions, whether arms, legs and internal organs are visible and whether there is cardiac activity.
That is just not true, obviously skewed to bias readers away from supporting the law.
The law actually states that the abortion or technician "us[e] either a vaginal transducer or an abdominal transducer, whichever would display the embryo or fetus more clearly."
That said, this is indeed the first pre-abortion ultrasound legislation to specify the option of using a vaginal transducer. These are different in probe placement than typical abdominal ultrasounds.
Pro-choice Democratic House candidate Brittany Novotny referred to vaginal ultrasound transducers as state-mandated "rape by instrumentation." At least Tenured Radical argues the new ultrasound law is literally "legaliz[ing] rape" by countermanding Oklahoma's rape statute that indeed includes "rape by instrumentation."
News organizations are promoting the negative depiction of vaginal transducers. An Associated Press piece in The New York Times called them "intrusive." The Maine Civil Liberties Union called this a "highly invasive... most hostile ultrasound law." Another Associated Press story reposted by several news outlets repeated the incomplete portrayal of the legislation by stating it would "require women seeking the procedures early in their pregnancies to undergo an invasive form of ultrasound."
Yet no news organizations contrasted benign vaginal ultrasounds to that which is actually comparable to rape: violent abortion procedures. Dr. David Reardon of After Abortion explained:
[M]any women report that their abortions felt like a degrading and brutal form of medical rape. This association between abortion and rape is not hard to understand.
Abortion involves a painful examination of a woman's sexual organs by a masked stranger who is invading her body. Once she is on the operating table, she loses control over her body.... This experiential association between abortion and sexual assault is very strong for many women. It is especially strong for women who have a prior history of sexual assault, whether or not she is presently pregnant as the result of an assault. This is just one reason why women with a history of sexual assault are likely to experience greater distress during and after an abortion than other women.
The difference, according to the pro-choice blog, Oklahoma Voice of Reason, is that a mother doesn't give consent to the former but does the latter. But simply giving one's consent to abortion does not erase its trauma.
Abortion proponents trivialize rape by calling vaginal ultrasounds "rape by instrumentation." They also draw the obvious comparison to abortion, to all except the political correct MSM.
