The "Women Are Too Stupid To Understand Telephone Conversations" bill in the Kentucky Senate has passed overwhelmingly, and will now go to the state House where it is expect to sail easily to Gov. Matt Bevin's desk.
Women in Kentucky must have a face-to-face meeting with a doctor at least 24 hours before having an abortion under a bill that cleared the state Senate on Tuesday.
The Republican-controlled chamber approved the bill 32-5. Kentucky law has required women meet with a doctor since 1998. But since then, many doctors have discussed the procedure with women on the phone. The new bill clarifies that patients must meet with doctors in person.
Kentucky has just two abortion clinics, one in Louisville and another in Lexington, the state's two largest cities.
"You can see, have better understanding, watch body language," Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said. "When you have that type of personal interaction, I think (it brings) more to light what the implications of the decision are."
The bill updates Kentucky's "informed consent law." But critics, including Derek Selznick with the American Civil Liberties Union, call it "forced delay," saying it creates "needless obstacles for women, especially burdening those that live outside of Louisville and Lexington."
Republican state Sen. Julie Raque Adams of Louisville, who sponsored the bill, said the bill does not add cost because "a woman does not need to travel outside of her own community" to receive the information.
Adams said the language of the bill allows a doctor to designate someone to represent him or her at the face-to-face meeting. For instance, she said, a doctor in Louisville could designate a social worker or nurse practitioner to meet with patients in distant counties.
Well, she didn't need to travel at all to have an informed consent conversation with her doctor before, because of this great invention called a "telephone". Hell, these days you can take telephones with you because they are "mobile". But, apparently, without visual body language cues, women are too stupid to make decisions.
Oh wait, these days you can have things called "teleconferences" to actually see your doctor when you are talking to them. In fact, telemedicine to help doctors reach patients in states with a lot of rural patients, states like, say, Kentucky, is on the rise.
But apparently the subject of abortion infantilizes both physicians and patients so that technology readily available for decades doesn't work and the meeting must be in person.
The notion that this is a needless hoop for women tto jump through? Of course not, a woman proposed the bill, silly!
Welcome to Bevinstan, where women are too stupid to be allowed to use the telephone.
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