NPR lost me for good in 2016 when their post-convention Morning Edition wrap-up didn’t mention either “Lock Her Up!” or “I alone can fix it.” And I don’t do podcasts. So can you summarize?
My impression is that the Dems (with rare exceptions like Dan Lipinski) have moved unequivocally to a stance of both contraceptives and abortion being legal and easily available. Which would result in abortions of healthy fetuses becoming much more infrequent, so the main thing that’s changed is what’s being emphasized. Do I have that wrong?
I just spent a few weeks helping out with the Firebug’s middle school play. Yes, definitely in the middle school bathroom too - some of those boys and girls looked more like they’re in their junior year of HS rather than 7th or 8th grade. Middle school is weird - a lot of those kids are still physically just kids, but a lot of them are already in pheremone city.
Hell, if we’re gonna get God into this, we should consider God’s track record with respect to fetal life. There are varying estimates of what percentage of pregnancies end in miscarriages, but at a minimum it’s a pretty substantial minority. (And nobody really knows what fraction of fertilized eggs fail to successfully implant in the uterine lining.) So God seems to be saying He’s perfectly OK with an abundance of fetal deaths.
Like I said, that is the only real reason that I oppose abortion, I did not say that it was a strong reason to oppose abortion, which is why I only put it out as a preference, certainly not as a command. I also oppose strawberry ice cream, but I’m not gonna lobby my legislature to make it illegal.
Going to mostly crosspost from the other ongoing abortion thread here, mostly relevant
How is this determined?
If the doctor thinks that she has a 90% chance of death, should she have to go against the odds? at a 50/50 chance, should she have to flip that coin? If it is only a 10% chance that the pregnancy kills her, does she have to take that risk?
How does this comport with quality of life? If she will have to spend 5 months in excruciating pain, is that the cost that she must endure? If it is only 2 months, 1 month, a week?
What about after effects? If she will be able to deliver a healthy baby, but be left crippled after, what level of quality of life reduction must she endure? If it leaves her with diabetes, is that fine, since diabetes is treatable? If it leaves her crippled and unable to walk, is that acceptable, as the baby is worth more than her “convenience”? If delivering this baby means that she will never be able to have another, is that just really for the best?
Who exactly is deciding this? Can any doctor make these calls, and will they be second guessed? Will the people making these decisions be all licensed doctors, or will there be lawyers and real estate developers on the board? Who is appointing these people, the medical community, the public, or the legislature?
Will there be an appeals process? If you go to one doctor, and they refuse based on their opinions, can you go doctor shopping for one who will, or will you need to appeal to that doctor’s superior? How long will these appeals take? If they have a backlog, so they come back and say, “We would have approved you application when you submitted it in the 10th week, but as it is now the 21st week, we will not.”, or even “We see the medical necessity in performing this abortion immediately to protect the life of the mother, unfortunately, she has already died due to complications, so, ummm, sorry?” If someone is in excruciating pain while waiting for a reply, even if it comes, it still is essentially torturing people while waiting for wheels of bureaucracy.
These are all hard questions, and need to be applied to every case. I don’t have answers, and anyone who claims they have them all is either a god or a liar.
Since I do not believe that these questions (and dozens more that I can think of) can adequately be answered, I find the best solution is to leave the decision to the person most equipped and involved, and that would be the mother.
And at least, I do agree that these positions can be described, not just labeled, as pro-life.
Canada used to have a committee system, the “Therapeutic Abortion Committees” of three doctors who had to approve an abortion before it could be performed.
The Supreme Court struck it down, because of all the issues k9befriender mentions. The committees plied varying standards, so there was no consistency in availability of abortion; there was no review mechanism; not every hospital would establish one; they took time to make their decisions. That latter point was important: the TAC requirement actually increased the threat to the woman’s health, because abortions are safer the earlier they are performed. Because the TAC process added time to the decision, the committee requirement was itself a risk to the woman’s health.
All of these factors contributed to the Court’s finding that the TAC system infringed the woman’s security of the person, contrary to principles of fundamental justice (Canadian equivalent to due process).
A large majority (75%) supports the legality of even third-trimester abortions when the woman’s life is in danger, for example. And a slight majority (52%) supports the legality of third-trimester abortions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. A slight minority (48%) supports allowing third-trimester abortions if the baby would be born with a life-threatening illness, and a smaller minority (35%) think third-trimester abortions should be legal if the baby would be mentally disabled.
So no, it’s not true that under one-third of Americans “believe second-trimester abortion should be legal”. Americans’ support for late-term abortion (and for early-term abortion, for that matter) varies widely depending on the reason an abortion is chosen. And most of the reasons that pregnant women do in fact choose to have a late-term abortion are reasons that over one-third of Americans believe justify having a late-term abortion.
Yup. If you make sex ed, birth control, morning-after pills, and early-term abortion easily accessible to women, you’re going to wind up with extremely few women seeking a late-term abortion for reasons that a doctor considers irresponsible or unjustifiable.
Even nowadays, with access to sex ed, birth control, morning-after pills, and early-term abortion so difficult and unreliable, there are extremely few women seeking a late-term abortion for reasons that a doctor considers irresponsible or unjustifiable. Requiring women advanced in pregnancy to jump through bureaucratic hoops to obtain a late-term abortion is just maliciously burdening women for no pragmatically useful purpose.
Kimstu, you are again evading the issue of second trimester abortions. Which are about ten percent of the total, and are predominantly of normal, healthy pregnancies. Which is frankly a slow-rolling holocaust.
No, it’s just the political messaging they, and I, are talking about. But political messaging is extremely important!
I don’t see how you get that I’m “evading” this issue. AFAICT, Americans consider second-trimester abortions justifiable for all the same (or more) reasons, and to a similar (or greater) extent, that Americans consider third-trimester abortions justifiable.
If what you’re saying is that a second-trimester abortion is morally objectionable if it terminates a normal, healthy pregnancy, then I don’t see how you are logically distinguishing that from a first-trimester abortion that terminates a normal, healthy pregnancy. I get that for many people there are gray areas around the issue of fetal viability, but they don’t align neatly with trimester boundaries.
If you think an elective abortion at the end of the third month of a normal, healthy pregnancy is okay, then on what grounds are you objecting to an elective abortion at the start of the fourth month of a normal, healthy pregnancy (much less stigmatizing it as part of a “slow-rolling holocaust”, whatever the hell that means)? Such abortions might officially occur in different trimesters while being only a day or two apart in terms of the pregnancy duration and consequent fetal development.
First, let’s dispense with the “day or two apart” sophistry. This is also sometimes true of the distinction between ordinary, perfectly legal consensual sexual intercourse and the felony of statutory rape, which can incur prison time and a lifetime on the sexual offenders registry. Does it follow that age of consent laws should be repealed? :dubious:
Secondly, my concern has nothing to do with either conception or viability. It is rather the balancing of a continuum of progression toward human sentience with practical concerns. I’m not terribly interested in finding the last possible date of pregnancy that doesn’t cross some fine line (there certainly are no bright lines here). I am instead drawing an admittedly arbitrary line after a period of time that I believe gives the vast majority of women enough time to take care of it (which the “heartbeat” laws do not). A line which would have broad appeal to a large group of voters in the middle, while serving as an uneasy stalemate for those on the extremes.
How about, roughly, start of the third trimester? Before that, cannot be legislated or regulated away by states. Afterwards, up to statehouses across the nation!
I think you may have missed my point. The “only one or two days” deal was not about the disparity in two people’s ages, but about the younger person being a day or two before or after their birthday.
For instance, in my state the age of consent is 17. I’m in my forties. If I have sex with a teenager the day before her seventeenth birthday, I can go to prison and be put on a sex offender registry. If I wait and have sex with her the next day, people can frown at me, but as long as I am not her teacher or camp counselor or anything like that, and she is not intellectually disabled or otherwise mentally incompetent, if she wants to have sex with me we can have sex and it’s perfectly legal. When you zoom in on that difference (which, when you get down to it, becomes a matter of seconds before or after midnight on a given date), it can be made to look silly. But I think we’d all agree that it’s important to have age of consent laws. Right?
AGI, a respected source on both sides of the debate, says “women with lower educational levels, black women and women who had experienced multiple disruptive life events in the last year—such as unemployment or separation from a partner—were more likely than others to have had an abortion at or beyond 13 weeks.” And: “Exposure to disruptive events was associated with increased likelihood of obtaining a second-trimester abortion.” https://www.guttmacher.org/evidence-you-can-use/later-abortion
Disruptive events can happen to women with newborns, toddlers, preschoolers, or teenagers for that matter. Whatever the case, we should try to help these women, but not in the “go ahead and kill your kid: that ought to make things easier” manner.
ETA:
I’m not okay with that. (And, again, neither are an overwhelming majority of Americans.) Have you seen what a 16 or 20 week fetus looks like? That is a baby. Killing perfectly healthy babies because they are unwanted is wrong.
How 70+ percent of Americans FEEL is rather significant when it is a political issue. Maybe you believe it shouldn’t even be a political issue, but legislators backed by people with guns and handcuffs make it inherently a political issue, like it or not.
What other inalienable rights can we give up by majority vote? Can 60% of Americans vote to take away the franchise from brown people? Can 80% vote to reinstate slavery? How about a 52% vote to take away guns from Republicans?
The right to self-determination is the most important. It’s the right from which all other recognized rights stem from.
So no, I don’t give a shit if you FEEL a fetus is a “baby”. If it’s still in the womb and unviable outside, it’s not a person. It doesn’t have feelings. And as such, it’s rights do not supersede that of the mother.
Sure, nobody denies that such arbitrary distinctions can produce wildly different outcomes based on insignificant chronological differences.
But in the case of statutory rape, the arbitrary line itself is at least drawn somewhere that makes some kind of rational sense. That is, we typically say that the legal age of consent is 16 or 17 because we consider that most 16- or 17-year-olds are capable of meaningfully consenting to sex with an adult. Of course there are a lot of gray areas and individual variation, but the cutoff age of 16 or 17 is reasonable in itself.
Your choice of the start of the 13th week of pregnancy as a hard dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion, on the other hand (if that’s in fact what you’re advocating) seems not just arbitrary but whimsical.
Well then, you can’t be surprised if a lot of people find your arbitrary cutoff line to be meaningless and unreasonable.
And you still haven’t explained how on earth you’re rationalizing your claim that abortions after your arbitrary cutoff line (but not before it, apparently) constitute a “slow-rolling holocaust”. Care to clarify that?
A 16-week fetus doesn’t even have any air sacs in its lungs to make breathing possible. It has no hearing. And it doesn’t “look” much more like a baby than the 12-week fetus you think it’s okay to abort.
I get that you admit that the distinctions you’re making are arbitrary, but you’ve got a very peculiar combination going on here of irrationally arbitrary choices together with dogmatically insistent assertions that your choices are objectively correct.
OK. But, as Kimstu says, the arbitrary line needs to be set somewhere sensible. Age of consent laws shouldn’t make the age 10, or 35.
To me, and to a lot of other people, the age of viability outside the womb makes a lot more sense as a line above which it should be necessary to show serious medical need for an abortion.
I strongly suspect that this association has to do not only with the disruptive events directly, but with the fact that people whose lives are otherwise full of disruptive events, and/or who have “lower educational levels”, and possibly even who are black because for multiple historical reasons that’s associated with poverty, are also likely to have less access to abortion before 13 weeks. Did they correct for that factor?
Even if they did: I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some people who thought they were in a good position to raise a child but suddenly find out in or after the 13th week that they’re in a terrible position to raise a child decide not to. The factors that put them in a terrible position to raise a child may also put them in a terrible position to continue a pregnancy. A level of physical debilitation that can be worked around while in a stable partnership, for instance, or while in a particular job, may be too much to handle while suddenly needing to shoulder two people’s worth of responsibilities or hunt up other work.
And disruptive events that happen to people with “newborns, toddlers, preschoolers, or teenagers” can be dealt with, if there are no better choices, by having someone else raise them either temporarily or permanently. As has been said over and over and over, there’s a bright line there precisely because this is not possible with a pregnancy. When we actually develop uterine replicators, let me know.
An overwhelming majority of Americans aren’t okay with what, exactly? Killing newborns or teenagers? Elective abortions with no medical need at 35 weeks? At 30 weeks? At 25? None of those would be week 13 1/2.
Results of polls tend to depend massively on how the questions are asked. If you ask questions in terms of trimesters, you’re going to get answers in terms of trimesters. There may be quite a difference in attitude beween week 13 and week 25; but there’s no way to indicate that in such a poll.
Whether a 16 week or 20 week fetus looks like a baby to you or to me isn’t the issue; or at any rate, it certainly isn’t the issue to me.
I think you may have missed my point. The “only one or two days” deal was not about the disparity in two people’s ages, but about the younger person being a day or two before or after their birthday.