If we’re not sure there are any late-term abortions triggered by a change of heart, why regulate it? Why regulate a thing that we’re not even sure happens?
And the answer is that your visceral reaction to the idea of a “baby” being killed has been hijacked by activists whose goal is to create a permission structure where “change of heart” can be eradicated from every phase of pregnancy.
If it’s something we don’t even know is happening, then we don’t need to regulate it. When we open the door to doing that, then we likewise open the door to regulating other nonfactuals. i.e. If we establish revulsion as a basis for prohibiting abortion in month 8, we also have to listen to why people feel uncomfortable about month 7, and thus back all the way to conception. It’s the golden road to capitulation, as well as the roadmap for how the reproductive slavery movement is eliminating abortion. That’s not imaginary; it’s what they did and are continuing to do.
The « no criminal restrictions » is what we’ve got in Canada, and also in Oz and NZ, I understand. The decision for late term abortions is left to the woman and her doctor. Doctors are subject to medical-ethical rules, the same as for any other medical procedure, but don’t run the risk of going to jail.
Late-term abortions are very rare.
As I understand it, the provincial health systems normally don’t provide abortions after about 24 weeks, because the medical procedure after that time is different and more risky ie a medical judgment is made as to the health benefits and risks. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get late-term abortions.
All abortions are covered by the Medicare system, just like other medical/surgical procedures.
Responding to your second question: the criminal offence governing abortions was struck down in 1988. PM Mulroney tried to implement a new compromise approach, but it got defeated in the Senate – I think around 1992? Since then, none of the federal parties that have elected members to the Commons have proposed any new federal laws restricting abortions.
Obviously, that’s why God has made huge chunks of Canada a frozen wasteland. And, huge chunks of Oz a barren desert. And, whatever is bad about NZ – I don’t know it at all. Probably something about sheep.
Watching this thread is a perfect demonstration of my point.
Tragedy comes from loss of something you want. If you’ve been trying to get pregnant and have a miscarriage, especially a mid to late term one, that’s a real loss. If that miscarriage requires medical intervention to aid the process for the safety of the mother, or becomes an abortion.
Having a pregnancy where the fetus is diagnosed with some horrific, life- limiting, perhaps even always fatal within hours after birth is tragic.
If you find out your birth control let one through while in college/ starting your career/ facing cancer (whatever), choosing an abortion isn’t tragic.
People who assert all abortions are tragic are typically extreme pro-lifers who believe conception is the sacred boundary for life. It’s the “a baby is dying” attitude that thinks every abortion is a tragedy.
“A blastocyst is being flushed from the system” doesn’t seem nearly so tragic.
What seems totally incongruent to me is that the people most likely to be staunch anti-abortionists that put the strongest limits on women are also most likely to be anti- government and staunchly individualistic. They simultaneously rant against government control of health care limiting their rights to access while demanding government limit women’s self-autonomy.
This statement is flawed. You seem to be assuming women are lasting 7 to 8 months, through morning sickness and swollen ankles and weight gain and all the associated stresses, and then suddenly decide, “hey, this is too tough, maybe I’ll just get a puppy instead.”
You seem to be assuming a healthy pregnancy, a healthy fetus. You are completely ignoring the reality that a late term abortion is almost always due to medical complications - either the fetus or the mother or both.
Like the very real situations where the fetus has died, but the woman cannot get an abortion until she goes septic and needs emergency surgery.
Or the child has some horrific disorder that is universally fatal within hours of birth.
What about if the mother finds out shortly after getting pregnant that she has cancer, a type that with rapid treatment has a high survival rate, but a delay of even a couple of months drastically decreases the survival rate? And treatment is either chemo or radiation, neither of which is recommended during pregnancy.
I don’t understand this statement at all. What do you mean, balance the obligation? How does that work? What does that even mean?
Also, a really late-term abortion is no easier than any delivery at that stage. An 8-month fetus is not much smaller than a 9-month one, and it’s not even considered pre-term after 37 weeks.
A few years ago I might have called this hyperbole and dismissed it as overreach, but I’ve become convinced you are correct.
It worked for a pretty long time. It’s only been by a long-term strategy of conservatives to create an alternative legal philosophy with schools dedicated to teaching that premise, and court packing by Republicans who stonewalled and obstructed legitimate Democratic judge appointments, not just the Supreme Court but federal judge positions back through Obama at all levels, followed by the astounding bad judgement of the President who happened to be lucky enough to appoint 3 justices and a willing Republican leadership who sided with politics over legal qualifications and experience that we find ourselves in a retrograde backswing on abortion rights.
There’s probably a lesson in here about sitting on the complacency of Roe instead of trying to keep pushing at the underlying premise, but that’s probably because Roe seemed so solid, coupled with a focus on “choice” that to me seems to understate the ethics in collision - self autonomy. Too much focus on the “My choice” and not enough on the “My body.” Or maybe that’s just me.
I have a theory that this current anti abortion push is part of the larger cultural backswing going on. First their came women’s lib and abortion access, then the push for gay acceptance. We get wide spread availability of video cameras that illuminate the racial mistreatment of Blacks, followed by Me Too, and finally the mainstreaming of trans acceptance. It’s too much for the holders of “traditional values” as they see their political and social power dwindling. This whole right wing political turn is [hopefully] the last dying breath of that source of what makes morality, as the new generations move toward more inclusive morality that prioritizes diversity and acceptance over condemnation.
You know, you could approach the abortion issue from another perspective: At what point do you acquire the status as a person with the right to life? I assume it’s when you emerge fully from your mother, but is there any nuance to that question? I know, for example, that anti-abortion politicians will play “gotcha” with questions about “partial birth” abortions - if you are only partially outside your mother, have you acquired the right to life?
In some philosophy class, maybe this matters, but in real life, it doesn’t. There are countries where abortion isn’t restricted at all and they aren’t killing newborns. New York and I think another state protect abortion rights very well, and this isn’t an issue.
Discussing these hypothetical edge cases that don’t really happen is exactly how we got “partial birth abortion” bans, third trimester bans, and eventually the Dobbs decision.
OK, but to address your question directly, if my wife were having some kind of bizarre medical emergency just as one of my kids was coming out and I had to make a decision about who to save, it would be my wife without hesitation. I don’t even know if such a thing can happen medically, but there you go.
I thought the Dobbs decision was about whether the Constitution says anything about abortion at all — not in this or that hypothetical edge case, but in any case.
The anti-abortion groups were using these edge cases to pass more and more laws constraining abortion and to get people to vote for anti-abortion politicians. Years of eating away at rights and bringing in anti-abortion judges (due to those politicians) are what made Dobbs possible.
Sure, from a purely legal perspective, that’s what Dobbs claimed to be about. From a practical perspective, it wouldn’t have been possible without decades of anti-abortion hysteria about bored women deciding to kill an infant because they changed their minds.
Whip up anti-abortion hysteria using edge cases → More and more anti-abortion politicians and judges → Dobbs.
Why does that need to be your choice? It should be your wife’s choice, and you just carry out her wishes. There is no reason for you to have a say there.
There are some women that will choose the baby to live. Either way, it is her choice. You might have reason to be biased. Like, for example, if you figure out you are not the father. Yes, that does happen. It’s not your choice.
I don’t like these analogies. The best thing to talk about is autonomy and choice because that relates to other parts of our lives.
Just because I think people should have the choice does not mean I approve of their conduct. A woman who has an affair, gets pregnant, and aborts the pregnancy is a bad actor all around. Including the abortion. In my opinion. I can allow for abortions without morally approving of the individual cases.
I went through in vitro with my ex wife. In vitro is kind of an edge case. Because the end result is more children, but you need to create the embryos, then freeze some of them while others get implanted fresh. And the frozen ones have a lesser percentage of taking, so it’s a less good deal from the perspective of the frozen embryos. Then people sometimes have all the kids they want. Many people are then squeamish about discarding the rest of the embryos, which are at the 3-5 day stage, so they let them stay frozen for decades because they don’t want to make the call. But the fact that a high number of people are squeamish at that stage indicates that a fair number of people care at that point.
Many women mourn fetuses that are miscarried. It’s a hard experience for them. Some can never carry a baby to term. So they may not feel much common cause with other women who choose to abort.
So it is more about the autonomy, freedom to choose, than trying to justify every choice morally like in these sorts of examples. The former I agree with, the latter not necessarily, if you are asking for my approval. But I don’t approve of how every votes or what they say either. It’s a part of life.
Your post is kind of all over the place. I’m not sure what to really respond to, but in my hypothetical, obviously I was making the choice because my wife couldn’t, due to the medical emergency. Seemed obvious to me, but I guess it wasn’t.
Obviously, it’s her choice if she’s able to make one.
I’ve long considered an analogy anti abortion forces might use:
You’re a 35 year old conjoined twin. You and your sibling are both completely healthy and normal otherwise. By some quirk of fate, it’s possible to safely separate the two of you, but one of you would die in the process. You decide you’re tired of sharing your body and shoot your twin in the head with a .35 caliber pistol.
The issues are obvious, but I’ve idly wondered if it accurately expresses the objection the other side has on a moral level.
Plus, shooting your conjoined twin seems unrequired. Is the one that dies arbitrary? That would be the only way sitting one makes sense. But then we have to ask why does one have to die?
I suppose the objection level is similar. You don’t wish to share a body any longer so you murder one to free the other. But the analogy doesn’t make sense, so it’s a nonstarter.
I miscarried, and I think it made me more pro-choice than ever. For one thing, people started coming out of the woodwork with their pro-life bullshit under the guise of concern for me. For another thing, I was in a situation, however brief, where I was carrying a dead fetus and my life was at risk as a result. For the pregnancy I carried to term, my life and my baby’s life were also at risk when my water broke but labor did not come. And finally, my life was at risk post-birth as I descended into profound postpartum depression that included some combination of intrusive thoughts, delusions and suicidality that will forever hang over the memory of my son’s birth.
The lack of control you have over your body when you’re pregnant is profoundly unsettling. People act like it’s natural but leave out the part that women used to die from this all the time. It’s a medically precarious state. Anything can go wrong at any time, and if you’re anything like me you spend a great deal of your pregnancy acutely aware of that fact. It can be an existentially threatening experience.
It’s too high an ask for women to just do this because someone else thinks they should.
Indeed, which is why I go out of mind when I see places like The Daily Show of all programs pushing that stupid Ina Garten “natural birth” crap that points that finger at the medical establishment for creating danger rather than, you know, the actual birth process.