There is a thread in GD where someone says they are against 7/8/9 month abortions. I have also seen pro life propaganda where it claims such late term abortions as long as the spinal cord is cut in the uterus and the fetus never takes a breath it is legal.
Is this a thing anywhere on earth? An otherwise viable could survive fine outside the womb fetus counts as an abortion as long as it is killed inside the uterus?
Some info here: Late termination of pregnancy - Wikipedia
Britain and Singapore allow abortions up to 24 weeks (6 months), the Netherlands and in certain cases the US prohibit if the fetus is viable, which is subject to determination by the physician.
Viable is one of the open questions. Is a fetus viable if it would die minutes after it was born?
Yeah, viable if you do what? If you move the fetus to another womb, an artificial womb, or give it full liquid ventilation? Admittedly, those things haven’t been developed yet, but they are plausible.
As I recall, a major trick used is there is a synthetic surfactant you can spray into the fetuses lungs that will let it breath much sooner than normal. And there’s the incubators, the drugs, the increased oxygen you can feed it…a lot of things that push viability back in time.
It’s a messy problem all around. Other things that make the problem messy : the fetus isn’t as smart as a pet animal, nor does it form declarative memories that are retrievable later. If it’s ok to kill animals, what’s the difference between killing a fetus or even a young infant?
If there is a difference, why? People say the fetus has the “potential” to become a full human. What if I had a hypothetical, but technically possible machine that can program a cell and grow into into an adult animal, including a human? I stick a thumb drive containing a copy of a human genome along with some other data needed to setup various mitochondrial RNAs and the initial incubation conditions into the machine. The machine has it’s own power source. I then smash the machine with a hammer instead of pressing the start button. Or I smash after the start button.
I just destroyed something that had the potential to become a full human.
Anyways, the thing that separates pro-lifers and pro-choices is usually religion. If you reason it out, the differentiating factor is that ultimately most pro-lifers believe that some higher power makes a fetus different than a mass of human cells. There’s no physical difference - early abortions, the brain is tiny, most systems are barely developed, and so on. Sure, that mass has the programing to become a human…but so did the sperm and egg before they joined…
Meh, all newborn full term infants aren’t viable without human intervention to keep them alive.
There’s also the problem that as medical technology advances, viability will become earlier and earlier, to some point in the future where fetuses may be extracted and hooked up to an artificial womb until term. Until the laws acknowledge that the fetus belongs to the woman, I’m uncomfortable ceding personal choice
Right. That’s why some advocate killing children within seven weeks of birth.:dubious:
That would be great for most women who want to be pregnant, but can’t for health reasons, actually.
While I’m pro-choice, I have to confess that the idea of abortions after the point of viability disturbs me somewhat. (I feel that if you want an abortion or whatever, you shouldn’t wait that long to decide if you want one or not.) I do believe late-term abortions when the fetus is still viable should generally be reserved for medical reasons, if the health of the mother is in danger.
(And yes, viability is getting earlier and earlier everyday. I guess I’m talking about, able to be delivered via C-section and survive outside the womb, viability-state. Forgive me, I am so not a medical expert.)
Yes to your question. It’s a thing. PBS did a report on the doctors in the US who performed late term abortions and they showed at least one woman who chose to abort her perfectly healthy baby. She just didn’t want to deal with it. The doctor performed the abortion.
The show is called “After Tiller”.
Yes, it happens, but it’s vanishingly rare in the US as literally only a handful of doctors will do it. I know of four in the entire nation, the youngest of whom is over 50. We’re at real risk of running out of people who know how to do it.
One issue with c-sections instead of abortions is that “viable” doesn’t mean “healthy”, nor does it mean, “bottle, burp and bed.” Very premature infants are at a greatly increased risk of a whole lot of disabilities and developmental problems, and have an increased risk of premature death even into adolescence (which is as late as I’ve seen studies done.) Plus, preemie care is staggeringly expensive, even without major complications. I stopped opening the bills around a quarter of a million dollars for WhyBaby, because I just couldn’t deal with that many zeroes. Luckily, we had great insurance, and only paid something around $5000 out of pocket - but we *all *paid for her care as policyholders.
So while, theoretically, it would seem to make sense to say, “have a c-section instead of an abortion, and we’ll just raise your viable fetus outside the womb,” the practical matter is that someone’s gotta pay for that, and we’ll have a lot more suffering disabled kids to deal with - kids without parents who want to raise and support them.
Conservative estimates of preemie care in the US top $26 billion annually…and that’s just for very much *wanted *babies. How much are we willing to pay to care for unwanted babies? How much can we afford to pay? I know it sounds harsh to put a dollar value on life, but that’s what happens every single day.
There are those who opt for abortion after 24 weeks if some horrific medical condition rears its ugly head, but this is rare:
http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/24Weeks/After24Weeks.aspx
Well, yeah, I guess that too. But would that count as “viable”? (That’s the main reason I didn’t list medical problems with the fetus itself)
In some of the cases on that site, the fetuses might have been viable but they would have suffered during what was left of their short lives.
A normal fetus would probably live at 7 months - even in the days before incubators, a child born at 7 months had a good chance of surviving. I recall some story about Charlie Chaplin, who liked himself the younger ones - ended up having to marry a 16-year-old girl and then claim the baby was born at 6 months, so even a 6-month term was something people would believe as relatively survivable 100 years ago. It’s the 20 week to 24 week that has lately become survivable sometimes.
So what would be the purpose of an elective abortion at 7 months? Presumably by then adoption is an equal option; it’s not like the mother’s body and life have not already been seriously disrupted by an obvious pregnancy. A doctor performing the operation runs a serious risk that the child is born alive, and so a subsequent death becomes murder.
(I’ve known fairly well three women who had abortions. In once case, the kidneys were failing and the doctors said she’d never survive her fourth and then fifth pregnancies at over 40. In the other, the twins between them had about half a brain so the mother opted for abortion. The third was saddest - she’d been abandoned by her mother at about age 10, came home to find the house empty and her and her sister sat crying on the steps until the neighbours took them in and found her father and stepmother. When she found herself pregnant at 19 with a druggie boyfriend, her fear that she would not cope as a mother made her have an abortion. She eventually got her tubes tied and never did have any kids. Only the twins case was beyond the first trimester; usually women know what they want pretty soon, even though it’s a very very difficult choice.)
7 months, yes. Even before artificial surfactant, almost half of 7 month fetuses would have survived. 6 months? 24 weeks? No way. Now, it was reported, and it was believed as a polite fiction, so that you could look the mother in the eye at church. But it’s right up there with 8 pound “preemies” born 7 months after the wedding for white lies.
Also, some confusion is likely in older reports due to different methods of calculating pregnancy duration (last menstrual period, date of conception, even first missed menstrual period).
Fixed that for you.
Moderator Note
While “fixed that for you” is pretty common on message boards, you’ve been around long enough to know that we don’t allow the editing of quotes here. Please don’t do this again.
I think the OP’s example of the “right to life” people saying “Currently if the murder the baby is in utero, its not murder to abort it”, is basically a straw man, they are trying to get say the law has to be changed merely because they can make a straw man argument to say it must be changed… They are saying that there could be an abortion clinic that says “We murder your full term baby, come here for late term abortions”. No the laws do not allow that, and it does not occur. The right for lifers are using what MUST occur in cases where the mothers life is at risk, to say what the law must be at the abortion clinic… they are conflating different topics… they making a straw man argument.
What happens in emergency (required, life saving) surgery is a different topic to elective abortion. Do not conflate the two topics…
But yes abortion clinics do ensure that the fetus is dead in utero so as to keep it clear… avoid technically breaking laws or regulation… perhaps just the expensive of having more paperwork such as “certificate for still born child”… Hey , you need to have a funeral for that… ?
Noted. Actually, I didn’t know.