Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL and a vehement pro-choice activist, confessed that they vastly overstated the dangers of back alley abortions. In his 1979 book, Aborting America, Dr. Nathanson said,
And on many, many occasions now, I’ve posted the following quote from Mary Calderone, the former medical director of Planned Parenthood. In a 1960 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, she said,
If abortion is banned, are women going to be hurrying into dirty back alleys to have abortions performed using rusty coat hangers? Not according to the evidence on hand.
As for infanticide… the pro-life position is that abortion IS infanticide. Ergo, while one might see an increase in post-natal infanticide, the infanticide rate itself would not increase.
Side note: Would it be legal to engage in practices that have a very strong chance of inducing a miscarriage? IANAP, but I’m pretty sure that if a pregnant woman stops eating for a while, she will spontaneously abort.
Basically, what level of care do we posit that a woman owes her unborn? One could make the case that the act of natural conception places a child at a horrible and easily avoidable risk, and that all pregnancies should involve sperm and egg cells being inspected, placed in proximity, and the resulting ovum manually implanted in the uterine wall. After all, there is a very good chance that if you have sex and fertilization occurs, implantation does not.
Why is there not more political pressure to stop the ongoing horror that is natural conception?
If we really want “justice”, then we can not punish only the doctor at the clinic. Likewise we can not only punish the woman. We have to punish ALL of those involved. The woman who wants / needs the abortion, the doctor, the nurses, the husband / boyfriend who drives her to the clinic, and any friends or family who told her where the clinic was. The charge can be conspiracy to commit murder.
In the case of sponatneous abortion and miscarriage, given the seriousness of the situation, full examinations and inquests must be held in order to determine if a crime has been committed. And, since it is so horrifically serious, all involved must be executed. This way, in order to protect life, we get to kill a whole lot of people.
We can write the laws so that there are no “medically necessary to save the life of the mother” loopholes too. After all, it’s gawd’s will if she dies, or the baby and the mother both die. To do otherwise is thwarting the will of gawd.
Oh dear god, this is the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard. Like something out of a dystopian sci fi novel. This is why women get all concerned about the “it’s my body” thing- there are people out there seriously considering strapping them down and making them play living life-support system for nine months.
I’m hoping Kanic was just being snarky and sarcastic, along the lines of my stuff. I’d hate to think there were people who would really support such a hideous atrocity.
There’s a flaw in this reasoning. The back-alley argument didn’t hold back then for the simple reason that many physicians ignored the anti-abortion laws. They weren’t prosecuted back then nearly as much as they are by some ‘pro-life’ groups even though abortion is legal today. If the judicial attitude changes to the point of that a physician has genuine reason to fear jailtime and the loss of his practice, the comparison becomes flawed.
In practice, it will probably mean that those with money will be able to get what they want anyway, while those who are poor will become teen mothers even more often than they already do right now in the U.S.
Pro-life groups prosecute those who practice legal abortion? That’s news to me. Under what judicial clause are they allowed to do so?
Can you provide any cites to demonstrate that physicians were scarcely ever prosecuted for performing abortions prior to Roe v. Wade?
All these claims about women getting dangerous back-alley abortions are purely speculative. There is not a shred of evidence to support the claim that illegal abortions were particularly dangerous prior to Roe v. Wade, nor is there any evidence that such procedures were killing thousands of women each year. I see no reason to accept the claim that thousands would die now, especially without any statistics or other evidence in support of that claim.
I don’t know if anyone is considering this, but listenign to the ‘it’s my body’ people you might beleive there are.
Back to the OP, I think it would have to depend on how the abortion was performed. Was the unborn person killed directly because of the procedure (i.e. brain sucked out or chemically burned to death), vs sepperating this person from the mother, which would result in the death.
“Those skeptical of the absolutist pro-life position should ask serious questions about this: if not a charge of first degree murder for abortion, then what? Would women and doctors be liable for criminal charges? What legal distinctions will be brought bear here? What about the use of the morning-after pill? Would that also be a criminal offense at some point? These are legitimate questions that the South Dakota bill raises.”
This is a serious question, from someone who is not crazy about Roe vs Wade. One thing leads to the next. It’s a slippery slope argument, but given the various cases where pharmacists were allowed to refuse birth control, morning after, etc pills, maybe the slope already exists(?)
He/she may have meant “persecute”, not “prosecute”, which the antiabortion people defintely do. A “pro-life” assassin certainly qualifies as persecution.
As for seriously considering it, I’ve heard that attitude being taken in other threads. Specifically strapping women down for the course of their pregnancy was offered as the answer to “In a pro-life world, what would happen to a pregnant woman who needed a birth-defect forming medicine to prevent extreme mental illness” The answer is apparently “tie her down and let her go nuts in her own mind until the pregnancy is done.”
Let’s just say that some of the more extreme members of such groups have shot and shot at physicians that performed abortions. No such thing happened before Roe vs Wade, to my knowledge.
Burden of proof is on your side as far as I am concerned. If it happened a lot, you should be able to find the counterevidence easily. My job at proving that it didn’t happen a lot is much harder, so I’m going to leave it to you for now.
I didn’t say that. I merely said that the refution of the 60s claim doesn’t provide evidence either way. The reason given in the cite you provided was that physicians were the ones doing the abortions, and that therefore real ‘back-alley’ abortions were much rarer than suggested.
That’s just what I said - we don’t know. We do know what the situation was in the 1960s, but we don’t know what will happen when physicians are blocked from taking care of the women who desperately want an abortion.
Making something legal never really works anyway. You need to motivate people to behave the way society finds acceptable. If you don’t want your children using drugs, then teach them about the dangers of drugs, just like you have to teach them about the dangers of alcohol, peer-pressure, and so on. If you don’t want your children to be hit by a car, then teach them about the dangers of traffic. If you don’t want your children to have abortions, then teach them about sex, teach them about being careful, about prevention, and so on. And, not unimportant, make sure they can grow up in an environment where they can safely learn these things. If you don’t take this responsibility, then the consequences are your own.
All this completely separate from my low opinion of people who think heavily on a bunch of brainless cells, and lightly on the impact of a pregnancy, let alone an unwanted one, on a fully grown woman. I know now from experience that most of them don’t know what they’re talking about.
I think if we’ve learned anything from the latest shakeup in abortion laws, it is this:
Girls, get a passport. Now.
Being firmly planted on the pro-choice side of the fence, I don’t feel that it’s truly my place to make up unnecessary punishments for people I don’t believe are committing crimes, but I do have to ask why it would be okay to just assume a miscarriage is as such, since “we don’t always know why they happen.”
Sometimes infants die and we don’t really know what happened to them, either. In fact, sometimes seemingly healthy grown ups keel over for one reason or another.
Do you suggest that these deaths not be investigated? If not, then isn’t that kind of like saying that a fetus isn’t quite a “real” person?
Ladies, get your passports in order, and keep them current. I hear rumors that Canada is still civilized. Meanwhile, here is a weird and creepy article to check out. Talk about a person with her head up her ass.
The same way as we allow someone to die by withholding artificial ventilation as opposed to shooting them. Perhaps there is no difference legally, but it seems like Dr’s prefer the 1st while very rarely doing the 2nd, though the 2nd might just be less painful. I suspect that there is a moral difference.
Well I think the pro-life position is why such a person chose to put herself in a situation that could lead to a pregnancy. Since it was her choice she must have accepted that she may have a child, and accepted that she might have to go off her medication for this.