Except that it’s very easy for women in Norway to get abortions – that’s an utterly massive difference.
It’s not controversial because it’s early and most people don’t believe that personhood begins at conception in Norway.
However, because people in Norway also have sense, and because abortion isn’t a wedge issue, they can also be sensible and realize that abortion should be restricted after the 1st trimester, a position that is quite the political football here, even though it shouldn’t be.
But maybe there’s a route to compromise here among those of us who hate abortion but aren’t on a mission from God: we agree to make abortion widely available and free, but you allow us to impose restrictions after the 1st trimester.
Talking to me? I’m not in a position to allow you anything, and I don’t think I’ve ever tried to deny you anything either.
This whole “abortion should be totally forbidden always” vs. “abortion should be totally unrestricted untill the moment of birth” debate you americans seem to find amusing has always been completely bizarre to me.
I want our system, as is. Not because it morally better than anything else, but because it seems to work. Fucking with it for ideological reasons, as oposed to medical or practical reasons, is to me a sign of nuttery. Hence, again, this pitting.
It is bizarre, but we’re bizarre. I think we’ll eventually get to where you are though.
However, I don’t agree with your pitting because I take the pro-choicers in the US seriously when they say, “Abortion is a matter to be decided between a woman and her doctor”. I don’t believe doctors should be forced to perform abortions that they do not believe to be medically necessary. If abortion is widely available, then women will have no problem finding a willing doctor. If abortion is widely available ONLY because doctors are forced to do what they consider murder, then no matter what you believe on the abortion issue your country is just plain wrong. Freedom of conscience is a basic human right, and your right to practice medicine or any other career should not depend on you agreeing with the government’s position on a particular moral issue.
And let’s think logically here. If abortions would be very hard to get because most doctors wouldn’t want to do them if they had conscience protections, then that tells you abortion is actually murder. If the public believes one thing and doctors overwhelmingly believe another, the doctors are probably right given they are going in there and doing it.
This sort of absurd, twisted logic almost deserves a Pit thread all of its own. Would you similarly claim that if the majority of people did not find the enslavement of certain sub-set of the population conflicting with their good conscience, that slavery was somehow morally defensible?
That’s a poor comparison, because whether or not abortion is murder is as much as scientific question as a philosophical one. If most doctors wouldn’t do abortions if they could, that tells you something in the same way that asking soldiers to fight a war they don’t want to does. If civilians say one thing and soldiers think another on an issue of war, the soldiers’ opinion carries more authoritative weight. Same goes for doctors and abortion.
Doctors have absolutely no right to a special opinion on health other than as pertains to whether a procedure is safe or medically sound. With regards to the morality of a given medical procedure, doctors are every bit as capable of being horrible human beings as the rest of us are.
Given that the usual objection to abortion is on the grounds of morality and not on the grounds of the procedure being unsafe, doctors are entitled to exactly no extra weight of opinion. They should be heard equally, to be sure, but their opinion carries no more weight than the local hobo’s. If a majority of doctors believed in, say, fetal personhood on strong scientific grounds, then this is of course an entirely different matter, but doctors are not somehow specially entitled to an opinion on moral dilemmas.
Doctors don’t have to perform any procedure they don’t believe to be medically necessary, at least in the US and other civilized countries. And if they can’t stand to carve up a fetus then those who support the right should go into the field and do it themselves.
Are you under the impression that US abortion law doesn’t impose restrictions later in pregnancy?
At least 43 US states outright prohibit abortion (usually excepting cases where the woman’s life or health requires it) after a certain point in pregnancy, usually somewhere in the 20-24 weeks range. (Texas, for example, sets that limit at 20 weeks, as opposed to the nearly 22 weeks of Norwegian law.)
I’m not sure why you think it would make sense to impose incremental but not prohibitive restrictions between 18 and 20 weeks, as Norwegian law apparently does.
Those laws are almost all being challenged and their fate is uncertain.
Ciiiiite?..
I think you might be mixing up these longstanding post-viability restrictions on abortion with more recent and harsher restrictions such as the hospital-admission requirements in Texas, TRAP laws, or **pre-**viability abortion bans.
Laws restricting abortion after fetal viability have been commonplace in the US since abortion’s been legal. I personally am a staunch abortion-rights supporter and I’ve never objected to such post-viability restrictions (as long as appropriate exceptions for protecting a woman’s life and health are in place), nor do I know of any mainstream organizations who object to them. Not even Planned Parenthood opposes the principle of outlawing abortions after fetal viability (again, with due life-and-health exceptions).
I’m just going to repeat myself, since some people must have missed it the first time around:
[QUOTE=Septima]
To clarify: no doctor needs to perform actual surgical abortions if he or she does not want to. Actually, you need to train for that, so you actually have to seek it out.
What is debated here is that in order to get specialist care in Norway covered by the state, you need a piece of paper signed by your doctor saying you need it. A “referral” if you will. The doctors now have the right to refuse to refer you to appropriate care, refuse to prescribe medicinal abortions, refuse to refer you to a clinic etc. There are no walk-in abortion clinics. You need that piece of paper. It’s not just abortion either, he can in principle refuse to refer for anything.
[/QUOTE]
The laws have now been changed, so you don’t need referrals for abortion services at all. The only thing doctors need to to do w.r.t. abortion is:
1)Make certain that the patient is indeed pregnant, if asked to do so.
2)Discuss with patient the medical implications of pregnancy, as well as provide accurate and up to date medical information regarding abortion if requested.
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Counsel the patient on any special circumstances regarding her* health that may impact her decision, i.e. does this particular patient have health issues that make successful gestation and delivery unlikely.
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Answer any questions to the best of his or her ability and in compliance with current standards of care.
We call that “doing your damn job” around here.
*Norway, unfortunately, does not permit transpeople to keep their fertility while pursuing legal change of gender. So a pregnant patient will be “her” always. Sorry about that, we’re working on it.
Many ignorant and stupid people vote Democrat, as many intelligent people vote Republican. There’s no correlation between education and politics, as witness the last 100 years of US elections. If your claim were true one could expect to see a consistent Republican downturn and Democrat rise as the education system improved. That’s not what is seen.
Actually, Republicans tend to win college educated voters. Democrats tend to win the non college educated plus postgraduates. If Democrats had to rely on the smart vote they’d be lucky to have a single Senate seat.
That survey has Democrats leading (by various margins) among all levels of education including a 10 point gap with high school graduates, yet obviously Democrats don’t win all (or even most) elections.
Anyways there is no shame in the fact that voters with lower education levels vote Democratic since that just suggests they are voting in line with their socioeconomic interests. The trend is more pronounced in many European countries although there has been a tendency towards Americanization due to neoliberal politics and wedge issues such as immigration and EU membership.
I see that Norway has joined the US in being a first-world country where a substantial part of the population only have one pharmacy and one doctor to go.
I such is the case, access to abortion is the least of your concerns.
Nobody said they did. I was correcting adaher’s incorrect statement that college-educated voters are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.
[QUOTE=Qin Shi Huangd]
Anyways there is no shame in the fact that voters with lower education levels vote Democratic
[/QUOTE]
Nobody said there was.
Are you suggesting we institute a “two pharmacies and doctors in every remote podunk town”-policy? Or that we forcefully move those people somewhere more central? Or that matters of principle should be waived for the people living there?
Is this hyperbole or is this really your understanding of the contours of the abortion debate in America?