Oh, and one more thing: The “mother’s health” exception is usually phrased as “to save the mother’s life.” This does not apply in our situation. She wouldn’t have died, most likely. She just would have been in a wheelchair for the rest of her life with chunks of numb, useless flesh attached to her hips.
And your murder example is a ridiculous, unsupportable straw man. Kindly withdraw it before it is ripped to shreds.
I need you to reconcile this statement
With statements such as
It seems to me you’re trying to play both sides of the fence. You want to portray your wife’s condition as extremely dangerous, but not life-threatening, and hence exempt from “mother’s health” clauses. IANAD, but I do know that fucking with the spinal cord is, as you put it, a “bad, bad thing,” and can be quite lethal. Why won’t you admit that your wife very well could have qualified for an abortion under even the most stringent anti-abortion stances?
Just for the sake of argument, suppose someone who WAS an eminently qualified M.D. popped on and told you, “Yes, your wife could have gotten an abortion even under the most stringent anti-abortion stances.” Would you cease to be pro-choice? I suspect not. I don’t mean to sound like a dick here (I know, too late), but why do you try to camoflauge your most basic reason for being pro-choice, which surfaces in quotes such as
**
The most fundamental reason you seemed to be opposed to abortion is that you think it’s none of my business. I’m willing to bet you felt this way before your ordeal, which just sealed the deal. Why cloud the issue with a personal, painful story when you could just simply say, “Fuck you, abortions are the woman/couple’s prerogative”?
And fine, I’ll withdraw the murder question, because it was poorly phrased. Let me try another tact: why must an issue be simple and clean-cut to be addressable by legislation? It seems you want to hold abortion to a higher standard than… well, than any other sticky issue.
Quix
The devil, as always, is in the detail. Abortion is not a clearcut issue. And it’s going to become even less clearcut as out technological capacity improves.
If you legislate, you have to legislate for every possible circumstance - that’s pretty much undoable, so you write into your laws a certain amount of delegated discretion. In many cases it’s the exercise of that discretion which provokes controversy.
A great many pro-life people I talk to can accept that there are exceptional situations in which terminating a pregnancy is the “least worst” option. A great many pro-choice people, myself included, accept that abuses of the discretion granted to doctors sometimes occur.
I don’t believe that legislating against abortion is the way to deal with those abuses.
The defamation laws of my nation prevent me from posting a link which often shows up on pro-life pages referring to the practises of a particular doctor in our country who essentially performs 3rd trimester abortions on demand, and exploits the discretion granted to him by the law to justify doing so. He’s just as much reviled by your average pro-choice advocate as the people who bomb family planning clinics are reviled by most people who are pro-life.
This issue isn’t going to get any less complex - our technological capacity changes daily. We all need to grapple with some pretty tough issues as possibilities change.
Right now, the simplest, most basic thing we could do in Western nations which would dramatically reduce the number of abortions being sought is make effective, accessible contraception available to every woman of reproductive age and back that availability up with even more education for women about all of the reproductive choices available to them and realistic advice and support for their decisions.
There are no easy answers - for either side of this debate - but as long as we have at least one common goal, and as long as at least some of us can refrain from attacking the other side just because their beliefs are different, we have half a chance at joining forces to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place and offering the utmost compassion and support to those people who find themselves faced with making some really tough choices for what each side of the debate regards as “exceptional” reasons.
Not in any literature I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been following the abortion issue for years now.
There is a HUGE difference between “a threat to one’s health” and “a threat to one’s life.” No competent medical professional would ever confuse the two – and neither should any careful thinking individual.