01 February 2007

The Abortion Ratchet.


How "choice" works for young women in trouble on college campuses:

Imagine that you were a college student, and pregnant. So you go to the university health services for advice. Two of the employees there, university employees, recount to you the embarrassment and inconvenience associated with pregnancy. If you do decide to have the child, they explain to you, the university will almost certainly give you no support; it will do nothing to make things easier for you. And then they urge you to have an abortion.

It’s the sort of story I’ve heard numerous times on college campuses across the country. But there’s nothing like a firsthand account: Some UCLA students decided to go undercover to find out for themselves how the university’s health services would treat a pregnant student. They published their findings in an independent student newspaper in January.

“UCLA doesn’t support people who are pregnant and make things easier for them necessarily,” a health center nurse practitioner allegedly told UCLA’s Lila Rose, the student reporter who wrote the story published in The Advocate on January 22. Rose posed as a pregnant student and, with a friend, attended counseling sessions with health-center employees.

The nurse practitioner laid out the options for Rose: drug-induced abortion (RU-486) or surgical abortion. She also told Rose how to obtain a free abortion through Medi-Cal, a federally and state-supported health-care system for the poor. Rose is covered under her parents’ health-insurance plan, but to use that she’d have to let them know about the abortion. To use Medical, she’s supposed not to be covered under any health insurance plan. But the nurse practitioner knew how to get around that regulation.

This, apparently, is what is meant by “choice.”

 

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