Dr. Bez' comments in her Feb. 18, 2021 letter to the Guam Daily Post regarding Guam's abortion reporting law are worth taking another look at if we want to understand what Dr. Bez and others who support the ACLU lawsuit are really aiming at:
There are other problems with Guam’s outdated abortion laws, as well. For example, abortion reporting law requires physicians to provide the government with 25 pieces of personal data about each patient who has an abortion. In so doing, this law interferes with a woman’s right to privacy by requiring so much personal information that her identity could be revealed. No other medical treatment or procedure requires a patient to disclose so much personal information to the government.
These restrictions represent more than limiting the right to have an abortion. They take away each woman’s right to make medical decisions for herself - privately. They violate a woman’s right to privacy by requiring disclosures so excessive that the woman seeking an abortion can be identified. They deny women access to health care which is their legal right. They undermine the physician-patient relationship by raising suspicions that a doctor may be reacting to the fear of being prosecuted rather than the patient’s interest.
Bez' last sentence gives us the real clue to what her objection to the abortion reporting law is. It is not the identity of the woman procuring the abortion, it is the identity of the doctor performing the abortion, and Bez, despite her virulent support of a woman's right to an abortion, is apparently not willing to provide that abortion if it can be traced to her.
The abortion reporting law has been on the books since the 1970's and it never stopped Guam's two "advertised" abortionists from performing hundreds of abortions each year. And it's not stopping any one of Guam's hundreds of doctors, including Bez, from performing abortions now, right here in Guam.
The abortion report law never required the doctor performing the abortion to be named in the report. But it does require the name of the facility/clinic at which the abortion was performed. So all people like Bez have to do is lobby the legislature to remove that one requirement from the abortion reporting law, but of course that would tell us who they really care about, and it is not the women who they pretend to protect.
So what is the reason for the abortion reporting law in the first place?
Even promoters of abortion admit that abortion is not normal. "Safe, legal, and rare," has been their mantra. Why rare? Why not just as normal as "childbirth?" An answer hardly needs to be provided.
Abortion, specifically elective abortion, the "choice" that its promoters are referring to when they use that word, is the surgical or chemical interruption of the most natural of all natural things: procreation, the continuance of the race.
"Safe, legal, and rare" functionally admits that there is something wrong that needs to be fixed, i.e. how do we make it rare?
Like any other problem, in order to fix it, we have to find out what is wrong. We do that by first collecting data and analyzing the data, in this case, the abortion report.
Even though our abortion reporting law has been on the books since the 1970's, until 2008, when The Esperansa Project was formed, it appeared that no one ever asked for it. And because no one ever asked for it, we spent years believing that it was high school kids who were getting pregnant and having abortions.
"Guam had 1,107 cases of chlamydia in 2017, making it fifth in the nation for the sexually transmitted disease, according to the Department of Public Health and Social Services." - Guam Daily Post, Apr. 6, 2019
Note: For those who may not know, the FDA's published literature on birth control notes that condoms - the most common birth control device - fail 18% of the time: "Out of 100 women whose partners’ use this method, 18 may get pregnant." - FDA.gov
However, after The Esperansa Project began requiring copies of the annual abortion report required by law to be published annually, the data showed that the problem was not teen-agers, but women old enough to know better (age 25 to 35), who formed the largest demographic.
Another myth that the data busted was that abortions were being procured on Guam by outsiders - since no one believed that a local population made up of mostly Catholics could be aborting their children.
However, this is exactly what the data showed. Since 2008, when The Esperansa Project first began requiring these reports, the data has shown that women identifying their ethnicity as Chamorro consistently accounted for at least two-thirds of the abortions year after year.
This is an astounding fact given that the Chamorro population on Guam has already been reduced to only about 30% of the island's population, and even more astounding given that the biggest promoter of abortion on Guam is its current Chamorro governor.
Whether or not lawmakers and pro-life activists want to do anything to address the real problem (instead of the myths), is up to them. Meanwhile, thanks to Guam's abortion reporting law - and those that ask for it - at least we have the data.
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