I’m here to help. 
Wouldn’t that be considered an elective c-section? It’s done all the time.
It is difficult to make a good ‘bright line’ rule for this.
It is obviously wrong for a woman to have an abortion at birth minus one day because the baby would be born a girl.
It is obviously wrong to forbid an abortion at one month that would save the life of the mother.
Further the best solution would be to raise our children so they do know get pregnant or cause pregnancy without reflection. (But of course what fun is arguing that?)
It is a messy moral problem that shows yet again who medical technology outruns our moral underpinnings.
Women (heck men) have rights. The unborn may have rights. Society has a role in protecting both. What exactly that role ought to be? I am not sure.
OK, no snark this time (although, in my defense, you’re the one who used the rolleyes smiley).
Bryan’s point (I think) was, why ban abortion at all at any point? You proved his point – at some point, you won’t find a doctor willing to perform it. No doctor is going to perform an abortion on a healthy fetus with a healthy mother one day, one week, or even one month before it’s due.
Then, you went and proved his point again – why assume no medical condition in your example above? If a (due date-x days) fetus is unabortable in your mind, then it’s unabortable, regardless of the health effects on the mother. If it’s so clearly a person to you that you would have the government step in between a woman and her doctor, then it shouldn’t be killable in any case.
Are you making some sort of self-defense argument or something?
When my kids were being born, while my wife was in labor, if there were some outlandish situation that had me choose between saving the baby while it’s halfway out and saving my wife, I’d opt to save the wife.
Me neither. I’d say let the woman choose, because no one will be more familiar with her specific situation than she is.
Hey, some of us men are arguing that it should be a woman’s choice. I don’t think Bryan Ekers has made any comments about viability and I know I haven’t.
I grew up with two sisters and my mother – I can have some small amount of understanding.
Here’s a radical notion: Let’s start with the woman’s rights at 100%. We have the potential to lose a few babies, but let’s think long term. If the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, perhaps think about it from a different direction, why is it that there are unwanted pregnancies?
Why is it that people are still so unfamiliar with the physiology of conception? There are still people that think you can’t get pregnant while you’re breast feeding. People are embarrassed to buy condoms. Some health insurers won’t cover birth control, let’s make it federally funded.
Why not make the morning after pill and the abortion pill much more readily available? Hell, include one in a pack of condoms, with every pack of birth control, and give out samples with Teen Cosmo.
Abortion is the last stage in preventing birth. If you don’t want it used, strengthen the 100 or so stages that happen before it. Let’s get an effective male birth control and make it required in grade 10.
What if the mother is a homicidal nutcase? Ought we to let her decide on having an abortion? It is a big world out there, lots of strange and horrible things happen every single day.
What if the mother is actually an alien from outer space? Or a robot from the future? Or not really a woman, or even pregnant!
Out of morbid curiosity, let’s say she is a homicidal nutcase, are there any other medical situations you feel you should be in control of? Boil lanced? Root canal? Pap smear?
Well, she’s still have to find a doctor to perform the abortion, right? And, if she’s a homicidal nutcase, that baby is probably not going to last long after birth anyway.
How about we worry about keeping the 99% of early, mid-, and late-term abortions safe, for those cases that we all agree make sense, and not worry about the vanishingly small number of homicidal nutcases that can get pregnant so they can stay pregnant until 8.5 months, then find a similarly nutty doctor willing to perform a c-section and kill the baby?
You know what? My previous answer was not enough. You’re suggesting that we should legislate in order to prevent some hypothetical lunatic and a hypothetical doctor to conspire to abort some healthy 8.9 month old baby. Meanwhile, that very same legislation will cause the other 1,000 or 10,000 women who just found out that their fetus has a debilitating disease, or that carrying the fetus to term may kill them (the mothers) to not only make the heart-wrenching decision about whether to go forward and have a baby or not, but then to have to figure out whether the situation is dire enough to avoid prosecution, or travel to some other state or country in order to have a medically necessary procedure.
It’s really ridiculous. Ugh. Disgusting.
What if the mother is Squeaky Fromme and the father is Darth Vader and the fetus is the reincarnation of Pol Pot? What then, huh? :eek:
I suppose the conclusions to which you jump would be correct if I proposed some sort of legislation. I have not done so.
Do you (RitterSport) mean you reject any interest society has in the decision a mother makes? That seems pretty extreme.
As emacknight said upstream, it is critical we take steps to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
What exactly DO you propose? Other than some mysterious “we” being “careful”?
Also, a pregnant woman is not the same thing as a mother.
Unless there is some reason to believe that she is being coerced or is incompetent to make decisions, I don’t see what interest society has in the decision a pregnant woman makes about her own body.
Now, society does have an interest in the decisions a *mother *makes and can take children away from abusive mothers, for example. I thought we were talking about pregnant women and fetuses, not mothers and their children.
ETA: DianaG is too quick for me.
I propose we think about this very important issue and come to consensus.
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Really? RitterSport you would have no issue with thousands of Chinese couples deciding to abort daughters in order to have sons? Surely society has some role in that, don’t you think?
==eta==
Excuse me, I have to run my weekend errands.
I require no consensus to decide what to do with my own body. Neither does any other woman. Or man, for that matter.
And the the last time I checked, Chinese women aborting daughters was because of a societal devaluation of daughters. Society sucks as an arbiter of reproductive decisions.
May I suggest you re-read my post #219? The questions there were serious, I thought, and worthy of answer.
I used to, circa 2003. Gave up on it when the dead-end-ness became undeniable.
Anyway, I’ll ask Paul the question: why is a “line” needed (let alone the open-ended amount of time you claim we have to think about it)? What are the Very Bad Things you believe would happen if there were no abortion restrictions at all?
While I appreciate the desire for a simple answer, it seems to me you are taking an absolute position because you are unwilling to face the moral issues at hand. Further, by rejecting agreement with others, you ensure endless conflict.
So Chinese women sometimes make unwise and immoral decisions but all other women must be allowed to do as they choose? How remarkably … well let me not resort to name-calling.