One day not long ago I heard a very heated Definition argument on the radio on my way to school that equated doctor visits with rape.
The conversation was about requirements some states are placing on doctors to perform a more invasive ultrasound on women requesting abortions than the benign “jelly on the belly” technique we all recognize.
JELLY ON THE BELLY ULTRASOUND
The procedure mandated by some states now requires the physical insertion of an instrument into the vagina that civil rights advocates are characterizing as “state-sponsored rape” of the women who must submit to it or carry their pregnancies to term.
THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF THE INSERTION TECHNIQUE
If you think Definition Essays are vapid academic exercises in semantics, take a listen to the passion raised by this definition problem. It comes in a link to an NPR editorial identifying Virginia’s Ultrasound Bill as Unconstitutional.
And here’s a link to the story of an Illinois woman’s lawsuit over what she calls a violent vaginal ultrasound probe. Marianne Keith, 52, said the physician at the Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, Illinois, “physically abused” her for one hour with the vaginal probe.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE NPR BROADCAST
LITHWICK: Well, you know, one thing about the Virginia law that makes it different [from] – other states have ultrasound laws, but most of them can be taken care of what we sort of colloquially call the jelly-on-the-belly ultrasound, the benign one that you see on TV where they squirt a water-based jelly on the mother’s stomach, and then they manipulate the ultrasound from outside.
What’s different about both the Texas and now the Virginia law is that it mandates a level of specificity in the image that really is going to mean that certainly in early pregnancies – and let’s recall 90 percent of abortions happen in early pregnancies – that external ultrasound is not going to give sufficiently detailed information, and the Virginia statute requires the doctor to know what the gestational age is. And that’s where you get this extra layer, which is that it’s going to have to happen through this transvaginal procedure where a probe is actually inserted into the woman’s body through her vagina and then manipulated internally, and so that’s the difference. The Texas and Virginia ultrasound laws can’t be kind of glossed over by saying this happens outside the woman’s body.
CONAN: And you, in your piece for Slate.com – and you certainly say you’re not the first to note this – say that is forcing a woman to undergo an invasive procedure, the details of which, under other circumstances, would be described as rape.
LITHWICK: That’s quite right, Neal. And it’s worth noting that the FBI just changed their definition of rape in January, so that the new definition is, quote, “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part of object or oral penetration without the consent of the victim.” So that dovetails pretty perfectly with the procedure we’re seeing here.
In Virginia, we have something called an object sexual penetration statute that is more precisely than our rape statute applicable to the situation. But I think in either situation you’re looking at the real possibility that when doctors, for no medical reason and without the consent of the woman, are actually physically penetrating someone’s body, whether it’s rape or object sexual penetration, they certainly look like they’re complicit in something that under any other set of facts would be a crime.
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 