Oklahoma Law Equivalent to 'Scarlet Letter' for Women Who Seek Abortions, Column Says

October 19, 2009 — "In Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece, 'The Scarlet Letter,' Hester Prynne is forced to walk amid her small, Puritan community wearing a red 'A' on her chest for the social crime of having sex outside of the bounds of marriage," columnist Megan Carpentier of London's Guardian writes. A new Oklahoma law requiring abortion providers to report detailed information about women seeking the procedure proves that "[s]ome things in America haven't changed as much as we'd like to believe," Carpentier says.

The law would create an online, publicly accessible database of all women who have sought or had an abortion, Carpentier reports. The database would omit names and addresses but would include answers to a 37-question survey stating women's race, age, education level, county of residence, whether they are a state employee and their method of insurance for the procedure, as well as the number of previous pregnancies, births, miscarriages and abortions. In addition, the survey asks the length of pregnancy and whether birth control was being used at the time of conception. The survey results would be reported to the Oklahoma Department of Health. The health department employees would then "aggregate the data into a searchable, sortable database and make it available to 'researchers' online," Carpentier writes.

According to Carpentier, "Aside from the fact that a woman working for the state health department could, in fact, have her survey reviewed and posted by her own colleagues (and have her identity compromised to her co-workers), there are other privacy concerns." She notes that in some Oklahoma counties, there are so few residents of certain ages and races that a woman's abortion "will be immediately apparent to her neighbors -- and to antiabortion protesters whose tactics include individual threats and harassment."

Carpentier continues, "Legislators who passed the law are open about their motivations" to "use the questionnaire and the online database to stop women from having abortions." She adds, "Seemingly, they don't care whether they do so by intimidating women, allowing others to harass them or by making it difficult to obtain medical care." However, the "absence of any political will to do so through comprehensive sex education, economic support or a dedication of law-enforcement resources to protecting women from rape and sexual abuse seems rather telling about the antiabortion movement's priorities," she continues. She notes that a recent Guttmacher Institute report shows "yet again that antiabortion advocates' obstructionary tactics do little to reduce the prevalence of abortion," adding, "The only proven way to stop women from having abortions is to help them make their own choices about when to become pregnant."

However, antiabortion-rights advocates "are no sooner going to turn into pro-contraception advocates than they are to adopt the children that result from forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term," according to Carpentier, who adds that "[t]heir focus is on the fetus, and the fetus alone." She concludes that while "Republicans like to tout themselves as the party of limited government, ... when it comes to reproductive health decisions, it seems, Oklahoma Republicans are proud to stand between their female constituents and their doctors, scarlet letters at the ready, and be the party of a limiting government" (Carpentier, Guardian, 10/14).