Religion caused this.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. it's working now, if you want to read it

I do recommend it. It shows how close to reality the Doonesbury cartoons were - the sympathetic doctor forced to read from a script and everything. In this case, the fetus was so badly malformed that it either wouldn't have gone to term, or, if it had managed to do so, the baby would have been in constant pain for however long it managed to live (and, I suppose, in pain in the womb too). They still had to go through all of the 'shaming' moves and delays (eg 3 sonograms in a day, showing the malformations - original, a 2nd consultant opinion, and then the mandated 'shaming' one, which has the condition of the fetus read out again, although the woman was in tears by that time); though it turned out that they wrote some regulations a short time later that would have avoided the 3rd sonogram in such a case - but the lazy Texas legislature/government hadn't got round to doing that before the law came into force - so the clinic had to force the woman to go through it all, because they thought that was the law.