South Dakota just signed a new law into effect that will require all abortions performed to be by the doctor who did the initial consultation and only after a 72-hour waiting period. About half the states have a 24-hour waiting period, and this is the first extension of it to 3 full days. The reason for this is pretty obvious. Many significant decisions deserve the space a waiting period might offer for calm, patient consideration of the implications. If after a day, a woman still wants to go ahead, hopefully free from the coercion or fear of the moment, we permit it. But one day isn’t really a lot. Three days isn’t really a lot, but it’s a reasonable middle ground.
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The opponents who are decrying this as unconstitutional need to explain why 24 hours is okay but 72 hours is a bridge too far. In any event, the basic idea is simple. Some women may choose to keep the child at hour 40. Don’t we want to give her the chance to best express her true long-term choice this way rather than allowing her to act more impulsively but then regret it because we didn’t let her take enough of a breather to digest the information she has received? I would think that people who want to honor a woman’s choice and the fact that she’ll have to live with it would understand this. Clearly, she might still regret it at 90 hours, and there’s no way to be sure she won’t.
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Now, the typical pro-choice argument is that women in rural areas will have to travel some distance, possibly taking off work, in order to get first the consultation and then the abortion itself. Although both current law and the new law will often require two trips, at least it’s only one night in a hotel, for instance, the old way. But the real goal isn’t to inconvenience women into being unable to get an abortion. And so the real question isn’t whether some women will be occasionally inconvenienced seriously, but whether more women who would otherwise make a very regrettable (by them) decision will now not do so.
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In a sense, we’re not only making sure the choice doesn’t change, but we’re giving the woman herself the knowledge that she actually did make this choice with a 72-hour delay and didn’t change it. This is a way of giving her more certainty that she didn’t get pressured into it so that she doesn’t come back and second-guess herself as much. The goal is to make sure her choice is as committed and certain as it should be. And given the significance and the very real risks of coercion from family members or boyfriends, three days seems perfectly reasonable.
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