To be fair, I think it’s only in relatively recent times (and even now, not everywhere in the world) that accusing someone of hating women is an act of criticism. Heck, in 1900 you could say that your neighbor Josiah thinks women are too stupid to have the vote, too frivolous to own property, too emotional to make decisions, and he’s also one of your best friends and a fine gentleman who obviously understands how the world works.
Who says I’m blaming women? It’s not like they can get pregnant on their own; and I don’t know how much abortion costs, but I’m sure it’s way less than child support.
Now I’m not saying men are scum - many of them are very nice - but some men are scum, and regarding pregnancy as an unforeseeable event gives them a legitimate basis to be like “I thought we were just having fun - it’s not my fault she decided to keep it.”
I am not saying that you blame women. My remark was made as a comment on a detail in your goldfish-analogy. In your analogy the woman “orders” the goldfish, which by analogy means she *chooses *to get pregnant. There are those who believe that having sex despite not wanting a baby already represents such a choice. From that they conclude that her getting pregnant is “her own fault”. (You’ll know what I mean, if you look up the posts made by **nate **a little further upthread).
I do not know whether this is *your *position. All I said is that the “ordering” detail in your analogy could be used to back up that posistion, which is why I do not like it.
I do not get to vote on abortion laws in the US, because I am not an American. I am German so I get to vote over here. Abortion in Germany is permitted in the first trimester upon condition of mandatory counseling, and later in pregnancy in cases of medical necessity. Personally I have my reservations about the “mandatory counseling” part, but overall I support the legislation.
When you have a criminal law, there are criminals to catch, unless no one is breaking the law. So when you say “there aren’t any to catch”, do you mean that no one would be breaking the law? If so, why?
As for your question: Doctor-patient confidentiality is a strongly protected good in my country as I am sure it is in yours. To do as you say, a doctor would have to be dammn well sure that something is amiss before he breaks that confidentiality, because as soon as he does he risks losing his license. The same is true for the police: Before they would even start an investigation they would have to be presented with compelling evidence. The picture you are painting that every woman after a late miscarriage would have to live in fear of prosecution is a fantasy. So yes: “Fuck that.”
Even In Canada the vast majority of women, who have an elective abortion, have it in the first trimester anyway, right? If we assume that women in Germany generally make the same choices, the first trimester constraint in law does not place a burden on the majority them. What the law does is to encourage them to have the abortion early, because it takes away the option to wait and have it later. Aside from the fear of prosecution you described above, what is it that makes having that option so important?
I suppose you would have to distinguish countries that restrict elective abortions from those that entirely outlaw it. In the latter driving doctors out of the business might indeed be the point.
In countries that allow elective abortions but place restrictions on them, I do not believe that the point of the restrictions is to discourage doctors from performing the procedure at all. When I compare the situation in Germany and Canada I can find no evidence that the more restrictive legislation in Germany has led to a more limited availability of safe abortions.
I’m coming in late to address the adoption issues, which I didn’t really see addressed.
The last I checked, the backlog of waiting adoptive parents would be taken care of in about two or three years if most currently aborted babies were adoptable. Then you’d end up with a glut of babies.
Not all babies born in the U.S. would be adoptable. Already, adoptive parents can be pretty picky. Alcohol use during pregnancy? Child of color? They aren’t the “preferred” baby. Some adoptive parents are holding out for athletic college attending white girls. Some adoptive parent PREFER international adoption because in many states laws can allow the bio parents to reclaim the baby months later - and always they can change their mind during the pregnancy. There is a lot of heartbreak potential that doesn’t disappear with international adoption (there are other, different heartbreaks there).
So, no. Adoption isn’t the solution. Adoption will take care of some of the children who are born to people who don’t want to parent, but immediately, and with growing numbers, other arrangements will need to be made for those children not chosen by adoptive parents. When I estimated this out a few years ago, I figured that in five years you’d be looking at needing foster care or institutional placement for about a million kids a year. And the kids who are already born with a deck stacked against them - not white, some with birth defects, born to parents with low educations and/or poor prenatal care.
While millions of already born children are languishing in our hideous foster care system, couples are waiting to adopt a baby. That speaks volumes about them: Let the already born suffer in the system. So freaking what. We want a “perfect” baby.
When my sister and her wife took two teenagers and their dying mother into their home, and adopted the girls after their mother died, they were told that what they did was wrong. The battle cry of the anti-lesbian crowd was “Let them be raised in a real family.” Like families are lining up to adopt older children?
In countries like Chile, where abortions are completely illegal regardless of circumstances, you have women throwing themselves in front of cars, or engaging in other very dangerous strategies, to try to induce an abortion:
They're going to try to get abortions no matter what.That’s fine. I wouldn’t support such legislation, or indeed any legislation, because the Canadian example suggests none is necessary.
Because late-term elective abortions virtually never happen, or at least I’m not aware of such, thus no-one would be breaking such a law. Granted, you and I seem to be defining “late-term” differently.
Heck, if there are five or ten mistaken police reports a year, that’s already five or ten more than the number of elective late-term abortions (as far as I know). This is simply not a matter I see as needing even the potential of a police investigation, and I don’t like legislation that has no value and can cause harm. Fuck that, repeated.
As far as I’m concerned, the onus is on you to prove why the option should be denied. But if I had to give a line of reasoning:
A. The thing you are trying to prevent (a woman having a late-term elective abortion) is rare to nonexistent, so the ban serves no purpose.
B. If the ban is enforced at all, I believe it will catch false positives, i.e. women who have late-term NON-elective abortions (or the doctors who perform them, for that matter). My concern is to avoid punishing real people who are innocent, just for the satisfaction of pursuing imaginary people who are guilty.
And I wonder how total-ban countries rate in female and infant mortality, i.e. in the name of driving doctors away from abortion, are they also driving doctors away from obstetrics/gynecology in general?
Well, by way of research, I checked the CIA factbook website. The page on “Maternal Mortality Rate” is open on my other monitor. I have not yet checked for Germany’s and Canada’s positions on the chart (I suspect the rates are both similar and low) and even if Canada’s is higher, I will still give the data. Checking now…
Table subtitle: “The Maternal mortality rate (MMR) is the annual number of female deaths per 100,000 live births from any cause related to or aggravated by pregnancy or its management (excluding accidental or incidental causes).” I added the first and last countries for comparison.
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South Sudan: 2054 (as of 2006)
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Canada: 12 (as of 2010)
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Germany: 7 (as of 2010)
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Estonia: 2 (as of 2010)
Interesting. And the United States is #136, at 21, as of 2010. I’m happy to say provisionally that my concerns that abortion regulation will lead to increased maternal mortality are probably specious. That still doesn’t mean regulation is necessary.
For some reason, your post puts me in mind of one of the Heritage Minutes (a series of Canadian-made public-service announcements that dramatize some particular moment or movement in Canadian history): Orphans.
There are dozens of Heritage Minutes, most of them very good, some of rather-questionable accuracy. Superman is pretty painful.
Wrong as in morally wrong? no, of course not. Wrong as in probably the dumbest form of birth control you could use? yeah, of course.
This would certainly pose quite a dilemma for the rabid, hyperconservative pro-birthers who want every fetus carried to term and delivered but sure as shit wouldn’t want government assistance of any kind for it (taxes!!!) and the mother (or any other kind of gov’t assistance whatsoever).
Well, specifically for American “hyperconservative pro-birthers”, that could be a conflict, but in most other (practically all other, really) liberal democracies, the social safety nets are more generous, aren’t they? A German who was far more pro-life than Hiker, for example, might easily be in favour of that nation’s relatively generous (by American standards) parental leave policies (to name just one possible metric) even if he or she wants abortion banned outright.
Germany
Maternity leave (weeks): 14
Maternity leave (% of pay): 100%
Paternity leave (weeks): 0
Paternity leave (% of pay): N/A
Parental leave (for EITHER parent, weeks): 156
Parental leave (% of pay): 67% for 52 weeks, unpaid remainder
Source of payment: Mixed - social security and employer liability
United States
Maternity leave (weeks): 0
Maternity leave (% of pay): N/A
Paternity leave (weeks): 0
Paternity leave (% of pay): N/A
Parental leave (for EITHER parent, weeks): 12, each
Parental leave (% of pay): unpaid
Source of payment: Social security
Canada’s roughly between these two.
Without getting into morality at all, it seems like an inefficient use of resources. When a surgical procedure can be eliminated by a generally well-tolerated and safe medication, we celebrate that as an advance in medical technology. Abortion can also have far reaching emotional impacts for some people, so ideally it would be a last resort and not a first option.
I realize I’m in the minority here, but for such a scientifically-leaning place I would think there would be more condemnation of abortion. I almost get the feeling that just because you guys don’t like the solutions or consequences, you guys try to deny there is anything wrong with abortion though semantics of what you consider to be a human being. It reminds me of global warming deniers… they don’t like the thought of paying more for energy or changing the way they live, so they really want the science to be wrong and won’t accept consensus. Pro-choices think of the consequences of limiting abortions (loss of women’s rights, orphanage, etc.) so they deny that we are actually killing human beings. I know it’s human nature to do this and I’m not above that, but I’ve tried really hard over the last couple of years to convince myself that my previous position of being pro-choice was correct and moral and I just can’t do it. Any argument from the pro-choice side in this thread boils down to fear of consequence or how they are unsure when a fetus should have human rights, so therefore they shouldn’t have human rights, and that’s just not convincing.
nate: Your rebuttal is reasonable enough, on its face, but it doesn’t appear that you really comprehend the reasoning behind the pro-choice stance.
Just because you don’t agree with our viewpoint, don’t make the mistake of thinking that our viewpoint is poorly reasoned, or hypocritical, or based on denial.
The absolute key, for me, is: I don’t want the government to have the power to compel a woman to have a baby she doesn’t want. I don’t want anyone to have that kind of power over our individual freedoms. A pregnancy occurs within the woman’s body, and that kind of involuntary intrusion is, to me (and most of the pro-choice side) intolerable.
You disagree? Well, that’s the way it goes. But don’t make the blunder of thinking that our views are badly reasoned, because they really aren’t. They’re differently reasoned than yours are, as is obvious by the fact that our conclusions differ. But you cannot point to any actual error in our reasoning.
It’s funny that some posters have said that they became anti-abortion. If anything my (very wanted) pregnancy made me even surer that abortion rights are very important.
Insert “after having kids” before the last period.
nate: I don’t believe that a fetus isn’t human. It is a human, in an early, parasitic stage.
I believe the mother’s right to bodily autonomy outweighs the fetus/baby/human/person’s right to life. No one should be forced to be an unwilling host to a parasitic life, and I don’t make any distinctions based on circumstance - whether the mother was raped and therefore was entirely “innocent” of causing conception to happen, or if she had safe sex and her birth control failed, or if she recklessly had unsafe sex and the inevitable happened, or if she deliberately conceived and changed her mind after the fact. The only abortions that I have a problem with are the ones performed after viability, where the mother’s bodily autonomy could be maintained through induction/elective cesarean, but they occur so vanishingly rarely that it’s a waste of time to even discuss them.
Pun intended?
Well, I still think the “it just happened” thing is a bit disingenuous, but I’ll concede that consent is irrelevant.
Now, what if instead of a statue it was your comatose brother who was expected to regain consciousness in three months and then need six months of convalescent care. I assume it’s not ok to kill him, but I’d like to hear your reasons.