That’s why I go for the concept of “standing” rather than “fully vested with rights”.
ETA - even in teh US, 18 year olds differ from 21 year olds, e.g. in drinking rights, and others I suppose. Even 34 year olds can only aspire to run for President IIRC.
ETA: hit Enter too soon. mentally join this next sentence to the end of the last paragraph of my prior post.
And therefore that’s the last point where it’s logically (if not morally) sensible to talk about whether the mother’s interests outweight the offspring’s interest to the degree that abortion ought to be allowed.
My actual opinion on the correct cutoff, you ask? High school is a bit late, and birth is the only other bright line available, so birth it is. Practically speaking, doing the deed earlier is better, and avoiding unwanted pregnancy is best. But regulating trimesters is just a way to split the political baby with the anti-abortion (read religious) people.
I am OK with that!
Wait, you’re saying it’s jerkish to be a father to a child? I don’t understand–I thought you said that was a good thing?
Same here. There are enough women miscarrying children they want, suicidal and self-mutilating with kids they don’t, abusing kids or watching their kids abused, putting kids through the foster system, being abused and raped, suffering through post-partum depression and going broke trying to pay for their preemies’ care – or for their babies’ and kids’ school, clothes food and health care. I simply cannot be convinced to fret about one lone nut job who decided to risk her life, comfort and career for nine months only to – what? Take revenge on someone? Put on a piece of performance art? Not have to breastfeed? – and start figuring out how to put unwanted babies in test tubes or punish pregnant women.
I’m not trying to make this a 'You should care less about this and more about this!" argument. I think the issues are related. Like throwing money at a problem or giving to a corrupt charity, naively caring about one element of a problem (a fetus developing and passing through a vagina or cut out of a womb, rather than funding prevention and making sure it can grow up healthy and happy) is pretty much the good intention that paves the road to hell, for me.
The idea of forcing a person to be an unwilling incubator, horrifies and disgusts me, so I always end up falling on the “as long as it’s inside her body” end of the spectrum.
I recognise that the development of the fetus/embryo/baby is a continuum, and any dividing line will be arbitrary, though I can understand the desire to divide that continuum somewhere.
Realistically, nobody is going to carry a pregnancy for 8.5 months and then decide to abort for any trivial reason, or because they finally made up their mind. It just isn’t going to happen. Which means that all the most squeamish, later-term cases probably go hand-in-hand with horrific circumstances (stillbirth, horrid deformity, mother has cancer, etc), so I’m pretty happy to let people make their own decisions on an initially wanted pregnancy that is now unwanted due to a nasty twist of fate.
Basically, if it’s inside another person, it better have that persons active and ongoing consent/permission to remain!
Does anyone know if an abortion is always the safest way of terminating a pregnancy? Or does it get to a point (like my 8.5 months example), where it’s safer for the pregnant person to be induced rather than abort?
I said ‘‘any time in first trimester’’ but that’s rather misleading, because I think the ethics of such a decision is entirely dependent on the context. I am generally morally against killing things, be they bugs or fetuses, so it wouldn’t be terribly inaccurate to say that I think abortion is a moral wrong, period. But I also think the ethicity of killing something depends in part on its sentience and capacity to suffer. It’s not hard to see that there could be a substantial difference on both those points between a first and third trimester fetus. And obviously you should consider the future likelihood of suffering as well.
But I want to draw a clear distinction between what I feel should be legally permissible and where I stand personally on the issue of abortion. My feelings should have nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose what she feels is best in that situation. I can’t pretend to know the context of such a decision better than the woman facing it. Abortion should not legally be restricted in any way.
What is “ethical” depends on each individual situation, of course. I do believe there are “unethical” abortions.
But legally “ethics” have nothing to do with it. A woman has the exclusive right to make decisions about her own body.
But what if a woman decides to take drugs or abuse alcohol after finding out that she’s pregnant? She can do so if the health she’s damaging is her own, but what about the kid’s?
Bullshit.
A jello mold has ‘brainwaves’
It’s all well and good for anti-choice crowd to say a twitch on the needle is an intact mind, or that Terri Shaivo had brainwaves but that doesn’t cut any ice in actual medicine.
Before birth makes it physically inviable, basically, but… are you talking to my brain or to my gut?
My brain says if it’s ok to kill an unborn baby (I never think of them as fetuses), it’s ok, period. My gut says it’s completely different when it’s because you’ve had a row with the babydaddy, because the baby is barely-viable or because you need to get rid of it in order to get medical treatment whose prognosis will be only slightly affected if you wait two more weeks until the baby is viable.
This is a good site to see how the states weigh in on what deserves legal status. It’s state by state criminal definitions of the unborn.
I just contributed to the poll (“fourth month”), and have not read the thread.
But from glancing at the current poll results, I am surprised there wasn’t anything close to a normal bell curve with a mean somewhere within a month or so (on one side or the other) of my answer.
True, most have chosen the “whenever viable” option, but without committing to a certain month. That seems to reveal a fair degree of ignorance about fetal development and today’s average medical situation. Or, does it reveal an unwillingness to face the facts: that, even though “every situation is different”, it just makes so much more sense to have a firm, well-defined cutoff that we all agree on and are very aware of? It’s analogous to the “18 years as age of consent” (yes, I’m aware it’s lower in some states). Sure, there are specific situations where that prticular number seems ludicrous and arbitary, but the advantages of UNIVERSAL CLARITY are so great, it’s better all around to pick a number for everyone and stick with it.
(By the way, I deliberately chose what I’m pretty sure is “a month or so BEFORE general viability”.)
Once it could survive outside the womb without major medical intervention, abortion really icks me out. However, I know that abortions of such fetuses are very rare, and that most fetuses aborted at a late date have some kind of horrible problem and could never survive outside the womb for long anyway.
Everyone knows there are only two third-trimester abortion doctors, right?
Abortion in the third trimester is extremely rare. I am vehemently against having children and illegalizing abortion wouldn’t stop me necessarily from having one and even I would not have an abortion in the third trimester unless it was medically necessary.
It sounds cold, but statistically speaking, shit happens.
We work to prevent that without expecting it will never happen. And we work to make a safe society in maybe ways, without expecting accidents or otehr events will never happen.
Prohibition of any vice is a fools errand. Work to reduce it, sure, eliminate it, no. Instead, accompany the reduction with a plan to manage the babies that will be born the best as possible.
Because, you know what, not only do events like accidents happen, but birth defects happen in nature no matter the neo-natal behavior of the mother, and so separating out the reasons for them and assigning blame is to wildly miss the point, to extinguish human compassion and to replace it with blame or worse.
To implement what you imply, you would have to lock up mothers and provide them care that society deems acceptable, form the moment of conception until the moment of birth. And that isn’t going to happen. So get over it.
You’d also have to somehow make the legal case, as I noted above, that the fetus has legal standing at all, and separate from the mother, or else that the state has legal standing to compel behavior from the mother during a period of time. Neither of these legal theories will see the light of day on any kind of scale that would prevent mothers from various vices while pregnant.
I think that there’s really two points of interest in a pregnancy as far as abortion goes from a purely ethical standpoint. Those two points are when she finds out and when the child is viable outside the womb.
With regard to the first point, if abortion is ethical, then it doesn’t make any sense to limit it to some period less than when a woman may typically find out plus some period of allowing the options to be weighed. It just doesn’t make much sense to me why a woman might discover she’s pregnant then carry the child for several months and then decide she wants to abort. I can understand the process in choosing an abortion, but it seems a little irresponsible and risky to put off that sort of decision.
Moreso, it seems like a meaningful analogy to something like pest control where it’s not unethical to kill a rat, because it can be a health hazard, but it would be unethical to abuse it or cause it undue suffering. In a similar way, I can appreciate choosing an abortion, but putting off a decision to a more risky procedure, potentially with a more developed and potentially more aware child… it just seems like it crosses the same sort of line, that if that decision is made, it should be done as soon as possible, obviously with the safety of the mother taking a priority at that point.
In either case, I would say that that point is the only reasonable lower limit for when it becomes unethical within this ethical framework.
The other point I think is important is viability. I’m hardpressed to say at what survival rate that viability becomes important, so this is a more difficult point to determine, but I still think it’s meaningful. In my mind, the justification behind abortion is the weighting of the rights of the mother over the rights of the child and, as such, the only reasonable choice in an early term pregnancy is abortion because a child is unviable. But in late term, as viability becomes more of a possibility, that alternative of abortion becomes much more difficult to justify. That is, if we have a reasonable opportunity to respect the rights of both, then it doesn’t make sense to favor the rights of only one.
Now, of course, this is where survival rates come in. I can see justification for still weighting the rights of the mother higher at less than around 23-24 weeks because the child has only a 35% survival rate at best, but by 26 weeks or so, it looks like that jumps as high as 90%, so I imagine a reasonable line for a viability basis is somewhere in there.
Once you throw in higher risk for the mother, and that she’s likely had several months to consider prior to the viability point, I just can’t imagine an upper limit on the ethics being any higher than that.
Birth is a traumatic process to the woman, be it vaginally or by cesarean. An abortion is much less traumatic physically. Therefore, I think until the shoulders are out it’s up to the woman. I also think if a baby is born very premature or with serious birth defects a woman should be allowed to have it humanely euthanized, but I don’t see that getting much support from most people.
So, as I understand our legal system, a fetus does not have “rights” at all until it is born, it has no legal standing for protection before a court. Do you propose changing the status quo? How exactly would a court determine if the fetus’ representative in court actually DOES represent the fetus?
So you would impose costs and obligations of some of the most expensive medical care we have on society, plus a lifetime of medical and other problems borne by society, as the standard for when to allow an abortion?
In other words, if the fetus were to be born now, we would accept responsibility for millions of dollars of care at the birth, and who knows what over the lifetime, rather than allow the mother access to a one time medical procedure that counts a few hundred dollars? Maybe throw in some counseling afterwards if she asks?
That seems like an odd cost/revenue analysis to me, and an amazing shifting and growth of the costs from the family to society at large.
Lest you doubt my figures, about 20 years ago an ex-gf became pregnatn and had her baby at 26 weeks, then pretty close to the limits of viability. Being close enough to one of the top hospitals on earth, her baby survived (with fortunately few health problems that I ever heard about, out of touch since she was age 13 or so). But I did see the original hospital bill for neo-natal ICU, which covered the period roughly from what would have been 26 weeks of the pregnancy until the original due date, and that number was definitely over 1 million dollars.
Relatively few places and people have access to that kind and level of care, and even that just gets the baby home. The likelihood of a lifetime of profound health problems is very great even when you have such care available. And most people don’t have such care available.
Not only that, but if you toss enough money at it, the fetal age at which such interventions might allow the child to live, but not eliminate the risk of profound health problems keeps dropping. The cost surely goes up, in dollar terms, and risks.
So I would be curious if you have a more precise way to define your definition of “viability”, covering costs, risks of health problems over a lifetime, risk of not having access to such extraordinary care in the first place, and shifting fetal age when such interventions are feasible in some sense, when you suggest that in your view, that is to be used as a milestone for when abortion would be allowed.
Now that I think about it, if that is your milestone, then why not advocate that fetuses who may benefit from such intervention simply be birthed by c-section or whatever, and then they can receive this care and ultimately be adopted? The cost of the c-section is trivial compared to the cost of the care, and not likely all that much more than the abortion too - if the mother ends up rid of the fetus she came in with, she might be OK with that. So why not do it? The “baby” is viable, after all!
I hesitate to say “always” or “never” in conjunction with any medical question. It’s usually a sure sign that that answer selection on the test is wrong! However, there are certainly conceivable medical conditions in which inducing labor and delivering vaginally is not the safest choice for the mother or fetus. In such a case with a viable fetus that needs to be removed to save its life or its mother’s, they will do a c-section, rather than an abortion.
This was the case with my second child; she was too small to survive a vaginal birth at 23 weeks, and her cord was at the cervix anyhow, so she would have suffocated in the process of a vaginal birth. Since they needed to terminate the pregnancy (for both my health and hers) because of an infection in our placenta, they removed her by c-section and sent her to the NICU. I should add, though, that we were given the choice: c-section or vaginal delivery, with the knowledge that vaginal delivery was *effectively *an abortion. No one used that word, but we were given the information and not pressured into having a living child facing grave disability risks; if we had wanted to let her die, that would have been supported.
How so? There are many factors which determine viability and are easily measureable, including fetal gender, estimated fetal weight, medical history and gestational age, not to mention institutional equipment and training. It might seem arbitrary to laypeople, but doctors have a remarkably good handle on this.
This is why my asking for (and proposing) a definition for “viability”. I think it’s not enough to look at when is it remotely possible we can save this fetus, but rather when we have a good chance of doing so and not creating a situation where our intervention leads to disabilities. Yes, there are a few miracle micropreemies like mine, but most of them face pretty scary prognoses, and great potential for things like blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, brain hemorrhages, speech and physical impediments, learning disabilities…I don’t personally consider those high risk babies “viable” in an abortion decision, although they may live with enough medical intervention.
The stats we were given in 2005, at a hospital with the highest rated NICU capable of delivering care to the very sickest, very smallest preemies were these:
At 23 weeks and 0 days, about 30% of the babies will live. At 24 weeks and 6 days, 70% of the babies will live. At either of those points, 30% of those that survive will have serious and lifelong disabilities as a direct result of their premature births or the medical interventions required to sustain their lives. I think if they still want to terminate the pregnancy at this point, let 'em. I made my choice, but I don’t think it’s the only ethical one. In fact, knowing more now than I did then, I’m not sure my choice *was *an ethical one…I think maybe we just lucked out.
And, in some respects, the news is getting worse, not better. Not a week goes by that I don’t see another article in the med news about a heretofore undiscovered link between prematurity and another serious health risk. And it’s not just in the hospital or early on. One study in 2008 showed micropreemies have double the chance of dying between the ages of 6 and 12 than their full term peers.
We’ve been unbelievably lucky. Un-buh-lievably. I know that. My daughter can walk and talk and run and she’s starting to learn to read and write right on time. She’s been in the hospital exactly twice since being released after her birth, one for a little laser eye surgery to correct a retinopathy of prematurity and once this past February for pneumonia. She doesn’t even wear glasses! But don’t think I wasn’t thinking about that study that came out in 2008, standing there in the hospital in February. We’re not out of the woods yet, and may never be. I would never force this Sword of Damocles onto any family unwilling.
(But I still want to be a NICU nurse.)