Quick Hit: One woman’s experience with Texas’ new mandatory ultrasound law

*Trigger warning*

Here’s a rule: When you, as legislators with neither professional medical experience nor personal experience being pregnant, pass laws that result in doctors and nurses repeatedly apologizing to sobbing women, you’re doing something wrong.

“I am so sorry,” the young woman said with compassion, and nudged the tissues closer. Then, after a moment’s pause, she told me reluctantly about the new Texas sonogram law that had just come into effect. I’d already heard about it. The law passed last spring but had been suppressed by legal injunction until two weeks earlier.

My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.

In this horrifying case, the woman was terminating a much-wanted pregnancy. But it only takes a little imagination – and I suppose the compassion that anti-choice politicians have shown they clearly can’t muster – to think of other reasons patients and doctors might not want clueless politicians inserting their own views into the doctor’s office. As Carolyn Jones asks, “Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters?”