Are Hospitals and Healthcare Providers the key to ending abortion?

[DL82]

Every hospital has to make budgetary decisions, and every healthcare provider, whether National Health Service trusts here in the UK, charitable providers or Health Insurance companies in the USA, have to make decisions about what treatments they can and cannot afford to offer on their program.

With the current financial crisis, it is surely only a matter of time before hospitals and healthcare providers, public, private and charitable, have to start making difficult decisions about what they can and cannot afford to pay out for.

Here in the UK, the ability to provide life-saving treatments in a timely and successful way is always the priority that the government and the media uses when evaluating healthcare. People dying on waiting lists for essential cancer treatment is not acceptable.

In the case of abortion, you have a procedure which few doctors are willing to perform, no doctors WANT to perform, which risks surgical complications, almost never saves lives, and is resource intensive (2 doctors to consent, 1 doctor to perform, counselling services on hand, etc.) Also, whereas other problems get worse with greater waiting times, the demand for abortion DECREASES with longer waiting times, women change their minds, legal limits on abortion time lapse, and, after 9 months, the baby is delivered, problem solved.

If healthcare managers are looking for something they can drop from their portfolio of offered treatments without losing any lives, surely abortion must be top of the list. Isn’t this a good step towards legal reform?

The reason prohibition worked in Utah was because they didn’t have any bars anyway. The reason it didn’t work in the North was because too many people were attached to the social use of alcohol. If we try to outlaw abortion in a state where nobody practices it, it will be much easier than in a state where it’s widely available.

 

[Kaninchen]

In the UK about 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester and are either ‘Mifepristone’ or ‘suction’ (as are abortions up to 15 weeks), neither of which require high-skill medical involvement. ‘Surgical’ D&E abortions account for only about 5% so your projected cash savings would not be considerable even if health managers/politicians were prepared for the furore - which is unlikely since abortion isn’t a party issue and nobody wants to lose votes.

There’s really no way around the fact that there’s no political will in any of the parties behind anything more than a reduction in the week limit and no chance of a pro-life movement on the scale of the US - ‘hearts & minds’ is what it’s all about.