How about just making it legal to kill your own baby up to the age of one year?
The harmful aspect is clear. Our population is significantly diminished from what it should be and our death rate (if you include abortions in the statistics) is soaring.
Cite please where this “barbaric practice” (late term abortions) is done merely because the mother has decided she no longer wants the baby.
I am almost positive that later term abortions (post viability) are only done for necessity…usually when the life of the mother is at stake.
I should also note it is rare among pro-choice people to favor elective abortion right up till the moment before the baby is born.
How do we know what the population “should be.” There’s no normative population level like this. There is what the population level is. There is what it would be in different situations, though we don’t really know what that is. But there isn’t what it “should be.”
My thought exactly.
How would legal infanticide harm society?
Why would you include abortions in the death rate if you’re not including them in the birth rate?
Just wondering.
What, nobody is going to comment on the paper I linked to in post 2? This paper was printed in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by the MIT press and edited by the Department of Economics at Harvard. This is (according to Wiki) the oldest publication on economics in the English language (I know, I am appealing to authority). Anyway here it is again:
THE IMPACT OF LEGALIZED ABORTION ON CRIME (warning PDF).
Here is a small quote from the conclusions:
Sounds like legalized abortion is of great benefit to our society. Anybody want to refute this or try to balance the costs of population crash against the benefits of reduced crime? :dubious:
If you honestly believe there is a God-given role for women, and that is in the home raising children, giving them control over when and if they procreate is harmful to society. I suppose that extends to contraception in general, though.
Well, for one thing, it would depress the market in pork futures.
It should be whatever it would be if it weren’t for abortion (again, if one was a pro-lifer.)
Since presumably they would have been born, you add them to the birth rate at the same time as you add them to the death rate.
I don’t disagree a bit. Legal abortion has been a great benefit to our society.
Who else ought we to kill for the benefit of society? Homeless people? Sick people?
How many is “many”, out of interest? I would have thought that the proportion of pro-choice people suggesting such a thing would be pretty low, in all honesty. Have you got numbers?
Cows? Sheep? Bacteria? Cancerous growths? Appendixes?
The trick to argument by analogy is that you have to first draw a parallel. Unless you can sell that a fetus is a “person”, analogies based on that assumption don’t fly.
And personally, I’m all in favor of allowing a woman to elect to kill any person who is stuck in their womb and cannot be removed without dying. Even if they are homeless or sick. What do you think?
The people that should pass on their genes are doing so at a decreased rate. Those that should be procreating the least are having children at an incredible rate. We’re witnessing social entropy and the winding down of a civilization.
This is the most definitive study I know of – hardly conclusive because it covers fifth month and beyond rather than the seventh. I recall reading about a study that was supposedly limited to third trimester and showed results much like this, so maybe it was this one. (this is from Wiki BTW, not too hard to find.)
In 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute collected questionnaires from 1,900 women in the United States who came to clinics to have abortions. Of the 1,900 questioned, 420 had been pregnant for 16 or more weeks. These 420 women were asked to choose among a list of reasons they had not obtained the abortions earlier in their pregnancies. The results were as follows:[3]
71% Woman didn’t recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation
48% Woman found it hard to make arrangements for abortion
33% Woman was afraid to tell her partner or parents
24% Woman took time to decide to have an abortion
8% Woman waited for her relationship to change
8% Someone pressured woman not to have abortion
6% Something changed after woman became pregnant
6% Woman didn’t know timing is important
5% Woman didn’t know she could get an abortion
2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy
11% Other
In the 25 years I’ve been hearing this line, I have yet to hear of a single example of a situation where the life of the mother can only be saved by killing the fetus rather than attempting to deliver it alive. Can anyone put a name such a medical condition? If so, i have yet to hear it.
When pro-life advocates have tried to pass a law along these lines, pro-life folks always demand that the phrase be “mother’s life or health” be used instead. Of course a woman’s health is always at risk in pregnancy, so this small change renders the point moot.
I’ll also point out that most third-trimester abortions are done at just a few clinics because many “abortionists” won’t do them. This suggests that whatever is theoretically threatening the mother’s life is not a ticking-bomb scenario where time is of the essence.
Polls show that you are correct on this score–some like 2 percent claim to approve of last-minute abortions. And yet the practice remains legal, despite several Congressional efforts to make it illegal. How is it that something so universally reviled remains the law of the land? In fact, I’ve talked with several people who insist that the right to choose is absolute right up until the last second.
And sorry to nit-pick terms, but no one “favors” abortion at any stage. You favor choice (as do I, up to a point) but I doubt that you break out the party favors when a friend gets one. Also, I’m unaware of any abortion that is not “elective,” t5that term being synonymous with “choice”. Again, apologies if this seems petty–the issue is fraught with euphemism and loaded words (‘barbaric’?) that get in the way of reasoned debate.
No, it’s because not many people are particularly fond of abortion, any more than they of any other form of uncomfortable medical procedure.
In other words, you want women to die, be permanently injured, or be forced to give birth to dead or dying babies.
Killing a fetus isn’t a loss of life any more than removing an appendix is.
Ectopic pregnancy comes to mind; no chance of fetal survival, and it will kill the mother if not stopped.
But in some cases far more than others. You have also just admitted that you are trying to risk a woman’s health for your principles.
No, it’s because of constant legal harassment, and people like you threaten them with assassination, or actually do kill them. As we’ve just seen.
Because no one wants the blame for passing a law that cripples and kills women. Or to have women on television talking about how traumatized they were by being forced to give birth to a dead or dying baby.
Wow, Der Trihs, you think that not only is this issue black and white, but all the people involved think in a black and white way, too? Either they think babies are being killed, or they just don’t like abortions because they’re invasive medical procedures? That all abortion doctors think late-term abortions are cool, and just don’t do them because they’re scared? Seriously?
Which is not to say that the noble opposition isn’t hemorrhaging hyperbole as well, of course. Deep down everyone thinks of all fetuses as humans-in-the-making? Please.
In actual fact there is a wide spectrum of belief on many aspects of the issue. Personally I think that a fetus one minute after being conceived is no more a person than my fingernail clippings are, and that anyone who says otherwise is speaking nonsense; on the other hand I think that a fetus that will be naturally birthed at full term in one minute clearly is philosophically identical for all intents and purposes to one who was birthed at full term one minute prior, and that anyone who says otherwise is speaking nonsense. Contradictory positions? Hardly. Development into a human person from an undifferentiated clump of cells is quite demonstrably a continuous process, and there’s a wide range of different criteria that a person could use to differentiate between ‘morally a toenail’ and ‘morally a baby’ - meaning that there is a quite reasonable range of places where one could define personhood as starting (which, as I noted, I do not feel includes either extreme end).
I feel it very likely that the people involved in abortions each make their own assessment of these things. Some doctors probably decide not to do late-term abortions because they feel that those abortions would occur after the ‘personization point’, and thus would be bad, whereas early-term abortions would not. Some doctors set the moral line differently and don’t mind doing late-term abortions. (Clearly none of these doctors believes that all fetuses are ‘morally a baby’ - if they did, they wouldn’t do abortions.)
Similarly, the aversion to elective abortion, even among those would would legalize it, certainly is not solely rooted in an aversion to accululating medical bills. I strongly suspect that some people would decide that, if they couldn’t get it by a certain point, that perceived ‘personalization point’, that it shouldn’t be done - unless there was a high chance of death of the baby and/or the mother. (People who oppose abortions when that is the case are pretty cold, in my opinion - and very likely have erroneously dismissed the possibility at the abstract level in favor of ideological concerns.) This is of course not to say that all women who get abortions deep-down think they’re selfishly killing a baby - just that at some point, most people would say it’s been too long. And, conversely, many people would say that prior to that point, you’re still clipping toenails and it’s all good.
In this argument, I think anybody who argues from any biological extreme is arguing from a false premise. And as for ideological extremes? Well, I can’t see any way to argue the unilateral anti-abortion position except from a (false) biologically extreme premise. It is possible to argue for legalizing abortion from an extreme premise of personal freedom, though.
I think you must not be looking very hard. As already mentioned, ectopic pregnancy is pretty well known and has the added benefit of potentially decreasing a woman’s ability to have future babies as well. Diabetes can be one. A lady I know has type I diabetes but she really, really wanted a baby. And so did her husband. Against the advice of her doctors, she got pregnant and eventually suffered organ damage and went into a coma. Her family made her husband consent to an abortion so that she could live. She recovered and he eventually left her because she could not have children.
Congenital heart defect is another case. I had some problems with my first pregnancy that led both the obgyn and a cardiologist to think that I had a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect (especially because of my family medical history). I was told that it was rare but it does happen and, because of my symptoms, that I would have to abort very quickly and have emergency heart surgery if the tests had come back positive. They were so concerned that they were trying to set up counseling right away for me.
Meh. If you make no distinction between a first trimester embryo (which has not developed organs, including the nervous system) and a sick or homeless adult (or child for that matter), we are not going to be able to have a conversation. For the record, I am pro-choice but I find late term abortion repugnant and would be willing to limit it severely (health of the mother, fetus non-viability). I do find this whole “every sperm is sacred” crap stupid.
Who said ticking time bomb? I suppose such things may occur in some emergencies here and there but generally there is time for people to consider what is going on.
Others have pointed to real medical issues a woman may face that threatens her life by being pregnant. Add in hydrocephalus to the list as well.
As for the legality of later term abortions in the US it seems to be a bit inconsistent (50 states, 50 different ideas) but it does not look to be a case where a woman can just pull the plug on a pregnancy anytime she wants (post viability) for no reason other than she just feels like it.