But will such laws continue to exist if the children abandoned are overwhelmingly severely disabled? Current Safe Haven laws are really about keeping the babies of teenagers out of dumpsters, those infants are easily placed - the VERY FEW that enter the system. The disabled infants who enter the system now are a different story - much harder to place. And if that number increases dramatically because late term abortions aren’t available, will we still have the stomach for it? And are we willing to create a quality environment for the kids we do have in the system (I’d like to see that first before we tax the system with more kids).
In other words, are there unattended consequences to your proposal.
Even most anti-abortionists agree that abortion is necessary in some circumstances. If a woman is carrying a dead fetus, or will give birth to a child that will die shortly after birth, then “partial-birth” should be a legal option.
From conception to “fully realized human” is a continuum. Drawing a line and saying “that” is where this creature is a full human being will always be arbitrary. It seems reasonable to me to define that as the point where the fetus can be removed from internal life support in its mother and survive. In short, the woman can be rid of it (via C-Section or induced labor) if she chooses but she cannot kill it without very good cause (e.g. the fetus is killing her and she will die or be severely injured if it is delivered).
We make choices and we have to live with them even when those choices become inconvenient. We could extend your “dumb slut” example to someone with teenage children. Perhaps the situation has changed for the mother such that caring for her kids becomes very difficult (happens all the time…parents were dumping their teenage kids in Nebraska recently). Should the “dumb slut” then be able to kill those kids so as not to be “stuck with it”? It is an absurd position and we rightly hold the children’s guardian responsible for their care whether the guardian likes it or not.
The woman has ample time to assess her situation and get an abortion. It is HER choice but one she SHOULD be responsible for. Too bad if it turns out to be a bad decision for her to carry to term. Living with your decisions, good or bad, is part of life. Once the fetus has a right to claim “human” status its rights need to be considered as well. Perhaps the “fully realized human” mother deserves more consideration than the fetus but since “death” is a rather steep and irrevocable penalty to the fetus after viability I’d say that trumps “I do not want it” consideration.
I do not know about the unintended consequences of such laws. It would require a fair bit of research. It should be noted that (after a very quick Google so take it with a grain of salt) 48 states and Puerto Rico have Safe Haven laws. Nebraska is just the most recent. Not sure how long other states have had these but I would presume they have existed for years in some places. To date I have not heard of issues in those states about the unintended consequences you worry about.
But that is neither here nor there. The Safe Haven laws exist and a mother can take advantage of them most places. If you think Safe Haven laws are a bad idea you can lobby to remove/rewrite them. For our purposes here though the option is on the table for the mother to dump her kid and leave it to the State if she wants.
The point is not whether or not it’s more moral to let the baby die of its own accord or kill it in some way. The point is that it’s equally moral to kill it in utero or kill it on the way out or kill it after it’s out. Killing it in utero is not more moral than the other possibilities. If you are concerned about the mother bonds and want to throw the practical considerations of that into the mix, you can deliver the baby unseen to the mother and kill it in the next room. As a practical matter it’s easier to kill it in utero. In general, consideration of feelings over killing a life does not rise to the level of a moral decision. The overwhelming burden of morality is whether or not it’s appropriate to take the life; not how someone else is going to feel about it. That’s a practical concern but it is not enough of a concern to rise to the level of affecting the moral decision of whether or not to kill the fetus.
As for letting the baby die of its own accord: in the particular case you give, I see no reason to wait for nature to take its course if the baby’s death is certain. Actively euthanizing it seems to me to be more humane. The practical dilemma here, of course, is that there is a very broad zone of gray between a live and healthy intact baby and a neurologic vegetable.
As an aside, if proponents of late-term abortion rights limited their proposal to severely deficient babies, there would be less objection. As it is, many proponents want unrestricted rights. While in practice this would seldom be exercised on healthy term fetuses, the demand that in principle this should be allowed contributes to the polarization.
I can see the point you are making on the morality of it. As a practical matter I think (correct me if I am wrong of course) that the law distinguishes differently between a born baby and one that is still in the mother. While the difference may only be a matter of minutes between the two once born you cannot euthanize it but must let it live and get on of its own accord.
Therein I think lies another moral consideration. If euthanasia is the moral choice but once born you cannot euthanize it then aborting it seems to be the appropriate choice rather than letting it suffer and add trauma to the mother.
Perhaps such things are difficult to write into laws. I certainly agree there is a large gray area but then I suspect for most doctors they “know it when they see it” and can discern where euthanasia is appropriate. When the gray area has become black & white. (I would hope, if such decisions were ever allowed, that it would require the consensus of at least three doctors just to be sure everyone is crystal clear and there really is no gray area.)
ETA: Is there no psychological difference to the mother to deliver a baby and know it is being carried into the next room to be killed than to have it aborted in-utero? There may be little practical difference but feelings are not always on the side of logic.
Indeed it will be arbitrary. I’d probably put that line several months after birth, as I’ve stated. For a completely different set of reasons unrelated to the “continuum of personhood” I’d grant a newborn more protection that a fetus.
That would give you a demarcation line of around 38 weeks in practice. Several months after your previous standard of “viability”.
The point I’d make is that it’s not up to me what is “good cause” for someone else. If someone would have “good cause” to have an immediate abortion in one set of circumstances, but didn’t end up in that set of circumstances until several months into their pregnancy, they’ve still got “good cause”. They might choose that a “viable” fetus is worth carrying to term in ways a less developed fetus is not, they might not. Their reasons are their own.
Is it necessary for the parents to kill a born child to avoid the practical burden of caring for it? No. It is not. This is why your position is absurd, as you rightly observe. The relative ease with which teenagers (or newborns) can be transferred to the care of someone else removes killing them as an available solution.
It’s not like you or I will be getting the abortion for her, whether it’s at 3 weeks or 30. She bears the responsibility, whatever the choice.
I wouldn’t agree that there’s any point where a fetus “has a right to claim ‘human’ status”. That might be the case some point after birth, but past that point (birth), “personhood” is no longer a necessary condition, so the exact dividing line isn’t important.
Death is a pretty steep and irrevocable penalty for a cow. Yet many people say “I Can Has Cheezburger?” trumps that consideration. A cow is viable, though, right? “Viability” isn’t sufficient because a cow is not a person. Arguably, neither is a fetus.
Avoid contorting that into “Oh, so we could eat a fetus?”, please.
Thankfully we do not live in your world. If you want to run a hypothetical where your house is on fire and your 5 year-old and 1 month-old are in the house and you can only save one so, which should you choose, that is one thing. However, that is different than your 5 year-old offing your 1 month-old because the infant is inconveniently impacting the 5 year-old’s life and the 5 year-old is more “fully realized” as a human and thus deserving greater rights to a life free of inconveniences.
Down your road lies all sorts of potential for heinous discrimination. Person-A is a scientist who invents the cure for some disease. Person-B is a high school dropout with sub-standard intelligence. Person-A is a more “fully realized” person therefore he/she should be able to trump Person-B’s rights, even to life itself, since they are more valuable somehow.
Fortunately our society values life. Period. We do not go down the road of drawing arbitrary lines to the point of denying someone of their life without exceptional reason to do so.
Also, as I noted above I have personally seen a baby alive and out of its mother at 25 weeks. While not a good position for the baby to be in they can live outside the mother at 24 weeks or so. Dunno where you get 38 weeks from.
Presumably you have some reason that it’s necessary for the 5 year old to “off” the 1-month old? I certainly can’t find one.
You are the one that introduced the idea of the continuum of personhood, not me. I do find the arbitrary-line-on-a-continuum argument vulnerable to abuse (in either direction), which is one reason I do not favor it.
With that in mind, the idea should be to minimize situations where we have to make decisions about whether one life is more valuable than another, based on you “continuum of realization” or what-have-you.
The best way to minimize the # of abortions is to minimize unwanted pregnancy → sex education and contraceptives. The second best way is to make it as easy as possible to “choose life” → robust social programs.
Way, way down on the list ordered by valuing life is this “your actual life, hopes, and dreams are worth less than the potentiality of your fetus. You had sex in your bed, now lay in it.” quasi-retributive system you seem to support.
In my experience, scheduled induction/C-section will not be conducted prior to 38 weeks due to unacceptable risk of death. Now, if you disregard the well-being of the newborn and mother (not really in keeping with your “value life” initiative) a higher risk of death may be acceptable to you…
If I ever start, remind me of this, and I’ll stop.
No, I think Safe Haven is a great idea…but its very seldom used. Since 2000, its only been used less than 20 times in Minnesota - two or three babies a year. The system can easily handle two or three babies a year.
If, however, you outlaw abortion, you have more unwanted children - and if some of those children are severely disabled, you are going to outstrip the capacity of the adoption and foster care systems. Even if they aren’t severely disabled, you are going to outstrip the capacity of the system.
There are about 2.3 million people waiting to adopt. The vast majority of them are looking for healthy newborns, and they will wait an average of three years. There are approximately 2.5 million abortions each year in this country. After you fill the needs of adoptive couples, what do you do?
I don’t have an answer to this, but outlawing abortion comes with a social price tag…a fairly large one. And its the sort of social price tag we’ve always not been happy about paying - fundamentally, we need more welfare programs if we are going to do this.
You and 1010011010 above seem to think I am anti-choice. I am far from it. Re-read my posts. I absolutely support a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Where I stop supporting her right, or rather think her “right” to choose an abortion disappears is after the second trimester and viability is possible outside of the mother.
With this in mind consider that in 1992 (yeah…old I know but best stat I could find on a quick Google here) 0.4% of all abortions were done after 23 weeks.
That is 6,110 in absolute numbers. I think the State can handle it.
Earlier you said that outlawing late-term abortions might have this effect. I doubt it, since my understanding is that elective late-term abortions are not very common. Maybe outlawing all abortions would do this.
Regardless, I am going to try to go back to the start of my train of thought and state things more clearly:
I say that a person does not, in general, have the right to terminate the life of another human being without his or her consent. Certain circumstances (such as self-defense against attack) may give certain people this right, but these circumstances do not include the likelihood of physical or financial hardship, or concern for the suffering of the other human being.
I believe that one is a human being if (but not necessarily only if) one has completed the course of fetal development that normally takes place in the womb. I include in that course only the changes that take place in the body of the fetus–not the birth.
I believe that if one has not begun this course of fetal development, one is not a human being.
The course of fetal development, therefore, transforms a biological entity that is not a human being into a human being. I do not think the status “human being” should depend on where the entity in question is located with respect to the mother. This seems a trivial matter compared with the physical form of the entity itself.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter if the fetus has been removed from the womb deliberately as in an intact dilation & extraction procedure, or has left the womb prematurely due to a miscarriage or other medical problem. All that matters is its degree of development. If a three-day-old embryo is not considered a human being, it doesn’t become one just because the mother’s body expels it at that point. And if a fetus has reached the point where no significant further development is normally expected prior to birth, it is a human being whether or not it has been born.
Based on my previous post, I would propose this test to determine if a fetus is sufficiently developed to be considered a human being: if it were born prematurely at that stage, would it be inhumane to make no effort to keep it alive? I would say that if so, it is also inhumane to kill it, even inside the womb.
Yeah, and I’ve run into people who claim to support “gun rights” but seem to think the second amendment is about hunting.
The point of pushing for “viability” as the standard is not to reduce the number of abortions. As you’ve already pointed out, the number of abortions conducted on viable fetuses is relatively tiny. When you factor out the usual exceptions (e.g., health reasons, rape, incest, etc.) and consider only elective abortion after 23 weeks, picking viability has no effect on the number of abortions performed.
As a practical matter “viability” and “birth” would make almost no difference in the number of abortions performed. The reason for favoring “viability” is to establish a beachhead or wedge issue. Opposition is weak, because it has so little practical effect. Once the concept of “fetal rights” is established, it’s merely a matter of expanding the conditions under which a woman can be enslaved to a fetus.
Perhaps one day it can be argued that because technology exists to transplant a fetus, no woman shall be allowed an abortion. Gloss over the fact that the transfer is prohibitively expensive and generally unavailable to most women even if they can afford it.
Or push back the dividing line. If viability, why not quickening? If quickening, why not cardiac contraction? At that point, you’ve outlawed abortion before many women even figure out they’re pregnant.
There is no good pragmatic reason for choosing “viability” other than to erode women’s rights. Which brings us back to claiming to be in favor of the right to choose, and thinking it’s about abortion.
Well…what stats I could find do not seem to bear your assertions out. Late term abortions are a drop in the bucket overall but the reasons they happen late term are not dominated by health concerns.
(Note I am unable to ascertain if that cite is reliably cited…take it FWIW)
So I am some sort of stealth anti-choice person? :rolleyes:
I’ve been posting to the SDMB for many years now. Feel free to go back and research anything I have ever posted on this subject. I think you will see I am firmly and unwaveringly pro-choice.
This is the SDMB and not Congress. We are not here to set policy. If you want to argue tactics/strategies of why this is a wedge point and must be resisted at every turn start a new thread (actually would be interesting).
Personally I find your stance of can’t give an inch or they’ll take a mile as repugnant as when the NRA does it. Perhaps it is necessary in this day to avoid losing it all but it kills compromise and eschews any kind of willingness to suppose the other side might have a point. As with many things the answer usually lies somewhere in the middle and not the fringes.
There is a very reasonable and principled argument to be made about when “life” begins and derives the protections and considerations we extend to any living human. I have been making it above and it does not rely on God or mysticism or hocus pocus or wishful thinking. It is rooted in common sense and the evidence available.
If you want to be a frothing at the mouth pro choice freak to the point you actually suggest a life is not worth protecting till a few months after birth that is your right. Just do me a favor and stay FAR away from any policy makers or the media with that dreck. If your goal is to support pro choice such a fanatical viewpoint will do more to undermine the cause than anything the anti-choice side does.
Truly a case of, “with friends like you who needs enemies?”
This is what really gripes me- rabid Pro-Lifers and the Politicians Who Pander to Them act as if one in every 3 abortions is for women who decide in the 8th month “Wait, no, I’d rather have a cat”. Fox News, not exactly known for leftist propaganda, estimated that of the 1.6 million abortions performed in 2003, fewer than 100 were in the third trimester.
Some sources estimate it at lower than that in most years, all sources show that of American abortions in any given year about 90% are performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and the majority of those are in the first 2 months. All reliable sources will verify that essentially all of the “partial birth” abortions had extenuating circumstances, usually the risk to the life of the mother or a severely deformed child who would have no quality of life, not birth control. Illegalizing partial birth abortions as birth control is basically akin to illegalizing nuns tossing kittens into busy interstates in that it really wasn’t happening to begin with, while illegalizing them all is basically giving women a potential death sentence for having severe gestational problems, and illegalizing them except in case of mother’s health/severe birth defects leaving no quality of life for the baby are essentially just what’s going on already, so the politicians and activists really haven’t changed a thing.
I don’t know what would happen if we only outlawed late term abortions. I don’t know what would happen if we outlawed all abortions. I do understand from abortion stats (via Guttmacher) that the vast majority of late term abortions are done because the fetus is severely deformed and would very likely have a short, expensive, and/or painful life - not because a woman didn’t get around to deciding not to have a baby until the last minute - or because carrying to term carries huge maternal health risk.
As one who supports the reasonableness of early abortions and the unreasonableness of late-term abortions of normal babies (and as a physician I have first-hand experience with the vicissitudes of the whole thing) I agree with the spirit of this post.
I point out, however, that in additon to the “rabid Pro-Lifers” we should also comment on the “Rabid Pro-Choicers” who cling to the view that it’s perfectly acceptable for a mother to electively terminate a pregnancy minutes from birth even if the baby is normal. And that is closer to the point of the OP, I think.
It is the rabid extremist opinions on both sides that are unreasonable, particularly so since the elective behaviour of those having abortions seems to be much more in line with compromise behaviour: It’s OK to kill a fetus before it is very human but as it approaches birth it becomes increasingly unreasonable to do so unless there is an overwhelming deficiency of the baby.
The cite is >16 weeks, about two months earlier than was discussed previously. The main reasons are essentially “I didn’t realize/admit it, it took longer to get an appointment than I thought it would, I was trying to hide it from my parents/partner.” Basically, women who waited until they were showing and then got an abortion as soon as possible. I’m not sure what the average wait time is for an abortion, but it seems like another two months could have a profound effect on the results… Especially considering >16wk is 22% on that survey and >23wk was 0.4% according to your previous cite.
Probably not. Just that you’ve been taken in by stealth anti-choice arguments.
Do note I’ve agreed that it would be preferable to reduce the number of abortions performed. I think the most effective way to do this has nothing to do with restricting access to abortion, and everything to do with minimized unwanted pregnancies. For the unwanted pregnancies that remain, make it as easy as possible to “choose life”. This doesn’t seem to be the tactic chosen by anti-abortion proponents because it’s less about “valuing life” and more about (de)valuing women.
Are you talking about your elective induction at 23 weeks argument?
The argument for why it’s not justifiable to enslave a woman to a fetus remains valid in principle for a while after birth… that does not mean “not enslaving women” == “justifiable infanticide”. You’ll note I’ve explicitly stated that life is worth protecting from the moment of birth, due to the change in circumstances making it so you aren’t having to choose between the (acknowledged) rights of the adult human female and the (debatable) potential rights of a fetus.
I decided against using this line, myself. ¦¬)
Noting that the existing behaviour is already aligned with the compromise behaviour, “Extremist pro-choice” degrades to “Stop meddling and leave well enough alone.”
Any attempt reducing the minimal harm caused by last-minute “I’d rather have a cat” abortions must be balanced against “There’s been a slow-down at the factory, and we can barely feed the three kids we have now.” Well, assuming the intent is to reduce social harm. If the intent is to reduce abortions and/or control women, regardless of the harm caused, it makes perfect sense.
Well…I have worked (as in earned a salary) for a national (indeed they are international) pro choice organization*. When you think of pro-choice organizations in the US I am willing to bet they would be one of the first to come to mind. Through them I worked fairly often with some of the other bigger names in the pro-choice movement. My brother is currently an executive for that same organization and has worked for them for the past 20 or so years. I can safely say they do not support your rather extreme take on this matter and that you should not try to do them favors by pushing your opinion as it does not jibe with theirs nor does it jibe with the vast majority of America.
[sub]*I am not explicitly naming them since I no longer work for them or speak for them in any capacity and additionally because my brother does currently work for them.[/sub]
