Here’s the story of Lindsay Lowe: HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost
Lindsay smothered her twin boys as soon as they were birthed. She will be charged with murder but if she had performed an abortion procedure right before her due date, it would’ve been perfectly legal and she wouldn’t be in this mess.
So, there is a legal difference between pre-birth abortion and post-birth “abortion.”
…but is there any substantive difference at all?
Not that I can think of, to be honest.
I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere but… this is not satisfying.
Partial Birth Abortion (i.e. aborting the day before the due date) is illegal in all states and Canada I believe. I suspect in Canada exceptions can be made if the mother is very ill; however, I thought that particular exception was eliminated in the US. I would be happy to hear that is not the case and assume other, more knowledgeable dopers will be along shortly.
Abortion is a frustrating issue. Legally this woman is guilty of a double murder, and as far as I can tell, if she’d been able to find someone to do a last-minute dilation and evacuation, she wouldn’t have been.
It’s not easy to find someone who’ll do the “partial-birth” abortion, though.
I could go for a viability standard (if the fetus is viable, abortion is illegal except in cases where the mother’s life is at stake), but I don’t think it would reduce horrible situations like this.
In fact, the best way statistically to prevent abortions (and, I would extrapolate, infanticide), is to provide economic alternatives for the mother.
The way I understand the use of the word “abortion” is this: You abort a pregnancy, causing the fetus to die. Once the pregnancy has terminated naturally, in this case through childbirth, there’s nothing to abort. You can’t call killing a newborn a “post term abortion” because the word abortion doesn’t refer to ending a life, but to ending a pregnancy.
Before birth, the mother can morally terminate the pregnancy regardless of anyone else’s opinions because it’s her body. Afterward, the baby isn’t directly dependent on her body and can be cared for by others. For example, a father who wants to keep it when she doesn’t can’t take over the pregnancy for her; but he can certainly take care of a baby.
The entire case hinged on whether or not these babies were alive at birth (according to her own testimony, they were, so she got life.)
As to the OP…it is an uncomfortable and tricky question. IMO, killing a viable fetus or newborn is murder but the tricky part is deciding when the fetus or baby is viable. Since this is IMHO, I’ll state on the record that I think anything much past the first trimester is getting into dangerous territory.
You haven’t thought very hard then. If you don’t find it satisfying then don’t have any abortions, i am sure no one is going to force you Roger. Abortion is about a woman having absolute rights over HER OWN body, murdering a baby already out of you has jack shit to do with that.
I was surprised to learn the other day that, in California, you can get an abortion after the first trimester. For whatever reason, I genuinely thought you had to be within that time frame in the US. Turns out even my little hick town has a doctor who will do abortions up to 21 weeks.
On a personal level, my dividing line would be the viability of the baby. If I wait more than halfway through my pregnancy and the little thing could live outside me with some help, I’d probably just soldier through the next few months and give it up for adoption.
That said, my personal beliefs aren’t really reflective of my political beliefs, which are that so long as it is a woman’s body, it is her choice-- she should have safe, clean, and available options.
Stats: Of all abortions, more than 91% occur in the first trimester and an additional 8+% in the second trimester (usually very early in the second trimester). Third trimester abortions, even when legal, accounted for approximately 1% of 1% of all abortions. Cite from Fox News (i.e. hardly a left leaning site).
In that 1% of 1% of abortions there were almost always (in fact I would say always but I’m sure you could find some example of anything to prevent an absolute) extenuating circumstances. Usually the mother’s life was in danger, the child was severely deformed and would have no quality of life, and in at least a few cases the child was already dead but its removal from the mother was counted as an abortion because C-section and natural labor were not options.
Late third trimester has never been a routine “Nah, I changed my mind” occurrence and doctors who perform abortions really aren’t drooling psychopaths: most people, including those who are rabidly pro-choice, would see a to-term fetus as a baby and have major ethical problems.
I do not know the law on a woman intentionally killing a fetus who is capable of living outside of her body, but it would have been murder as I define it (emphasized because I’m not judging legality) if she had done so. I am very much in favor of legalized abortion during the first trimester, under certain circumstances in the second, and under extreme circumstances in the third.
It’s cases like these that point out our inability to divorce ourselves from ideological bickering. This case has nothing to do with abortion. It has everything to do with ensuring that all children have comprehensive sex education, universal prenatal support, and well publicized ‘safe havens’ for the surrender of unwanted infants.
Lindsey Lohan stated she didn’t want to believe she was pregnant, and that she never went for prenatal care. That kind of panicked denial just isn’t found among young women who understand what their options are when it comes to preventing or dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Odds are, I expect, that her parents are extremely Pro-Life, culturally or religiously opposed to premarital sex, and refused to give their daughter any guidance beyond that. If they had, she wouldn’t have been so afraid of her father hearing her infants’ cries that she smothered them instead.
It is not true that only girls who don’t know what their options are have the “panicked denial, then kill the baby” reaction. In fact, there is a whole category of “nice girls who kill their babies,” as decribed in this article. The particular girl that the article focuses on came from a liberal home, knew all about abortion and had a supportive boyfriend who was willing to help her with money, etc., but just didn’t want to believe she was pregnant. As the article states, this is by no means an isolated instance. This was just the first article I found in a search, but I have read this story many times, where a girl who was given appropriate sex education and had parents who would not have opposed an abortion, ended up killing her baby because she identified herself as a good girl who wouldn’t get pregnant.
I am a strong supporter of abortion rights, and would hope that every young woman would have access to birth control and abortion services if necessary, but I have no illusions that that would eliminate these types of crimes.
Words have meaning. You can’t say “It’s okay to stab a corpse, but not a living person. But if I stabbed a guy thirty seconds after he died, it’s pretty much the same as stabbing him when he’s alive?”
Even if the poor guy is in the last throes of dying…even if you believe that it is a good thing to end his suffering by easing his passing…there is a “bright line” in law, and we pretty much have to accept the complications of this.
Why does someone who was born 18 years before election day get to vote, but his friend, born 17 years and 264 days before election day doesn’t get to vote? Does that one day somehow magically make him competent to vote? Obviously not: it’s an arbitrary line that the law has created.
Does the drawing of one breath make a “fetus” into a “person?” Absurd, isn’t it? But that’s just the way the law works. Show me a better 'ole, duckie…