My response to the if person X’s mother had had an abortion they wouldn’t be alive today, is the following.
“At age 17 my Niece got pregnant, she was still in high school and was worried about how this would affect her life, but with the loving support of my brother and sister in law she raised him to a wonderful 14 year old. Back then she had a difficult decision to make and if she chose differently I wouldn’t have had my great nephew. Fortunately she made the right decision and had unprotected teenage sex. Perhaps we should make it mandatory.”
If you don’t understand why we are talking about medically necessary abortions in this discussion, and think that no laws would oppose the abortion of a nonviable fetus, then you are clearly missing a lot of, um, nuisance in the US abortion discussion.
Yes, and hyperemesis gravida (sp?) is sometimes the reason for an abortion, as it can absolutely be life-threatening. Scholars believe it’s what killed Charlotte Bronte. My sister knew a nurse who had an abortion for this reason.
Very roughly speaking, that’s my position. Very roughly speaking, that’s the position of the authors of Roe v Wade. Here’s one summary, emphasis added:
State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother’s behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a “compelling” point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term. Pp. 147-164.
So yeah, Roe assumes a tradeoff. In the US, 3rd trimester abortions could be regulated before Roe was overturned. Generally speaking, 3rd trimester abortions occurred with patients who experienced medical complications but wanted to have the child.
Roe was a reasonable attempt at policy, but it gave short shrift to those who claimed that personhood began at conception. I say “Claim”, because while abortion clinics were routinely protested, IVF clinics were not, despite the fact that IVF kills far more embryos than US abortions kill fetuses.
There actually is a good deal of nuance, as well as a good deal of discussion of medical necessity, over here on this side of the pond. It may not be coming through in the news where you are. It certainly isn’t coming through in the language of some of the vehement anti-abortion people; but they’re not the only ones in the discussions.
Oh. If you don’t recognize what’s been going on in this thread as a civilized discussion, then maybe it isn’t us who are incapable of nuance.
Well, seeing as it’s now in the pit, I’ll just say I am so unimpressed with the OP that I won’t be reading any other comments by this particular poster in the future. This is the first time they have popped up on my radar, and their conduct in this thread leads me to believe they aren’t worth the effort of engaging with.
You are correct that there is little discussion of developmental stages, at least from the anti-abortion side of the aisle. Carl Sagan considered abortion in that context and came up with a dividing line at about 30 weeks. Here’s his 1990 essay, written with Ann Druyan.
Other animals have advantages over us—in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought—characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.
Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain—principally in the top layers of the convoluted “gray matter” called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn’t begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy—the sixth month.
By placing harmless electrodes on a subject’s head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy—near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this—however alive and active they may be—lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.
At week 20-22, it is sometimes possible to keep a preemie alive, though probably severely disabled, with the help of advanced medical technology. If we’re talking about when a fetus has a reasonable chance of surviving outside the womb without extraordinary measures being taken, it’s more like 26-28 weeks. You are really not in a position to be lecturing anyone about “fundamental biological facts”!
Ovia’s reproductive health app requires users to input their country and state. Yeah, no way Republicans are going to subpoena private data about their users from them.
(A FB friend is advising users to delete the app and warn other women.)
A baby born before 21 to 22 weeks CANNOT survive, because the lungs do not function.
During my last semester of pharmacy school, I had a preceptor who in the mid 1970s worked at a hospital that did indeed do third-trimester abortions. They were not done on dying women with fatally deformed babies, that kind of thing; most of them were performed on teenage girls from middle- or upper-class families whose parents had just discovered they were pregnant, and were making them get rid of it, presumably to spare themselves the embarrassment. That hospital had to stop doing them because of people like her, who refused to dispense the meds. These girls would go through a full labor, that often lasted several days because their bodies hadn’t done any of its normal pre-labor preparations, only to give birth to a dead baby. They could have carried it just a few more weeks and placed it for adoption, if they couldn’t keep them.
She had always considered herself pro-life, but she did dispense meds for earlier abortions because they were in a sanitary place that had a competent practitioner, and if they were going to do that, better they have it there than at a filthy storefront clinic (and there were some known such places in the Kansas City area, where she had lived at the time).