Pennsylvania governor: Forced ultrasounds are 'the way to go'

Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is asserting that forced ultrasounds are "the way to go" if they stop women from having abortions.

Corbett had been criticized for supporting one of the most restrictive anti-abortion bills in the country because he said that women could just "close your eyes" during the mandatory ultrasound.

The bill was eventually shelved by the state House, but Corbett recently told The Seattle Times that he still supported the measure.

"I said, you can't make somebody watch it," the governor explained. "You can put the monitor in front of them but you can't make them watch it."

"I think we have over 30,000 abortions a year in Pennsylvania," he continued. "When you see that kind of number, if an ultrasound, which is not invasive at all, would convince somebody maybe to carry that baby to term and give it up for adoption and save that life, I think that’s the way to go."

An ongoing study at the University of California, San Francisco indicates that forcing a woman to view a sonogram often does not impact her decision on whether or not to have an abortion.

"Women do not have abortions because they believe the fetus is not a human or because they don’t know the truth," Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences assistant professor Tracy Weitz explained in a 2010 presentation previewing the study.

In fact, she found that 60 percent of abortion patients had previously delivered a child and most women “have abortions because of the material conditions conditions of their lives.”

Watch this video from The Seattle Times via Think Progress, uploaded April 30, 2012.

(h/t: Think Progress)