# Texas women are inducing their own abortions **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 18, 2015, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843 "2015-11-18T00:15:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/81 "2015-11-19T18:55:14Z")
> [@Nars\_Glinley](#): > > Because no one believes that every death involves murder. Intentions matter to people and the law. What I’m saying has nothing to do with any false assumption that “every death involves murder”. The point is that many abortion opponents claim to believe that abortion is murder because fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are. Yet they ignore, or simply haven’t thought through, the fact that if we really accepted that a fertilized ovum is just as much a fully human person as a born baby, we would have to make major (and in many cases, frankly impossible) changes to our legal and social structures, in order to consistently treat fertilized ova like other fully human persons. If we actually consistently implemented in our society a belief that fertilized ova are fully human persons, we would have to change a hell of a lot more than just making abortion illegal. If somebody’s not advocating making those sweeping fundamental changes in accordance with the principle of fetal full personhood, then they’re not being consistent when they claim to oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses are fully persons. ---
**Author:** ![Nars\_Glinley](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nars_glinley/32/8177_2.png) [@Nars\_Glinley](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nars_Glinley)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/82 "2015-11-19T19:05:34Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > What I’m saying has nothing to do with any false assumption that “every death involves murder”. > > The point is that many abortion opponents claim to believe that abortion is murder because fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are. > > Yet they ignore, or simply haven’t thought through, the fact that if we really accepted that a fertilized ovum is just as much a fully human person as a born baby, we would have to make major (and in many cases, frankly impossible) changes to our legal and social structures, in order to consistently treat fertilized ova like other fully human persons. > > If we actually consistently implemented in our society a belief that fertilized ova are fully human persons, we would have to change a hell of a lot more than just making abortion illegal. > > If somebody’s not advocating making those sweeping fundamental changes in accordance with the principle of fetal full personhood, then they’re not being consistent when they claim to oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses are fully persons. I believe that you might be putting words in their mouths. I have never heard one claim that “fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are.” I have heard them claim that life begins at conception and that the unborn deserve (at least some degree) of legal protection. Would you consider a pro-choice supporter hypocritical (or confused) if they didn’t believe that a mother should have the option of aborting their unborn child 5 minutes before its birth? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/83 "2015-11-19T19:49:58Z")
> [@Nars\_Glinley](#): > > I have never heard one claim that “fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are.” I have heard them claim that life begins at conception and that the unborn deserve (at least some degree) of legal protection. If they’re claiming that “abortion is murder”, and especially if they use that belief to justify their opposition to, e.g., the morning-after pill and various forms of birth control as well as to surgical abortion, then yes, they are claiming that those pre-born lives are fully human. Murder is the deliberate killing of a living human person—not just human tissue or human genetic material, but a human _person_. If you claim to believe that abortion is murder, then you are asserting that the aborted are fully human persons. Mind you, as I said previously, it’s perfectly possible to make a logically consistent argument against abortion **without** professing the belief that abortion is murder. But if you think that abortion **is** murder, then that implies that its victims are fully human persons. And that obligates you to think through and accept the full consequences of treating pre-born lives as fully human persons, in all circumstances. I do not know what the phrase “life begins at conception” means unless it means “full human personhood begins at conception”. If it means something else to those who use it, then presumably they don’t consider that abortion is murder. [QUOTE=Nars Glinley] Would you consider a pro-choice supporter hypocritical (or confused) if they didn’t believe that a mother should have the option of aborting their unborn child 5 minutes before its birth? [/QUOTE] If the pro-choice supporter claims to believe that an embryo/fetus is not a distinct human person but just an optional part of the pregnant woman’s body right up to the moment of birth, then yes, they’d be hypocritical or confused if they sought to restrict the woman’s right to destroy her fetus at any time before the moment of birth. But of course, there are plenty of logically consistent arguments to be made in favor of some degree of abortion rights **without** professing the belief that the unborn are nothing but parts of a woman’s body. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/84 "2015-11-19T19:56:41Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > I don’t think you quite understand the concept of “parental abuse and neglect”. No, I understand it just fine. > [@](#): > > What’s considered an act of parental abuse or neglect is defined not only by the specific action of the _parent_, but also (and primarily) by the level of harm or risk that action poses for the _child_. **Naturally, that means that whether a specific act is neglectful/abusive depends partly on the child’s age and competence.** Correct, and on other circumstances as well. > [@](#): > > So if you claim to believe that the pre-born are fully human persons who deserve the same protections from harm as born children, then to be consistent, you should support punishing parental actions that cause them harm or serious risk of harm, just as the law punishes parental actions that cause harm or serious risk to born children. Correct. Now all you need to do is point to pro-lifers supporting rights (_ceteris paribus_) for fetuses that they don’t support for babies. I don’t think your notion of “death certificates as a human right” is particularly appropriate, and not on practical grounds either. You keep claiming that pro-lifers aren’t being consistent. Could you please come up with some examples of this? Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/85 "2015-11-19T20:52:48Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > Fascinating. I hope you submitted this information to the Washington Post to correct their article, and to the relevant medical journals where researchers have been working on this problem for years and for some reason reached the opposite conclusion of the one that you apparently got from Fox News. :rolleyes: > > This is a great example of spinning a kernel of truth into a hugely distorted and incorrect claim. Black mothers are not “twice as likely” to have these issues, they are only at a [moderately elevated risk of infant mortality from preterm-related causes](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db09.htm), 45.9% for blacks compared to 36.5% for the general population. And the issue itself is likely related to factors caused or exacerbated by poverty – socioeconomic factors that then put even normal babies at substantially increased risk, such that black babies really are twice as likely to die in their first year than those of the general population: > Each of the three variables that predict much of the differences between groups—maternal marital status, education, and age— **is strongly related to income and poverty**. If whites had the distribution of these three characteristics found among the groups with the highest infant mortality rates, then the white infant mortality rate would increase by nearly 2 deaths per 1,000. This estimate represents a substantial fraction of the infant mortality rate for whites and the infant mortality rate gap for blacks, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans. An additional analysis that compared the unpredicted gaps in infant mortality to the unpredicted deep poverty gaps suggests that an even larger role for socioeconomic status might be uncovered if more comprehensive measures were available on birth certificates. > [http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc311f.pdf](http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc311f.pdf) > > The most important conclusion to be drawn from the data is that in spite of some very remarkable declines in infant mortality at all class levels since 1960, **there continues to be a very clear and pronounced inverse association between income status and infant mortality. Indeed, the evidence indicates that the relationship has become stronger over the years.** These observations are applicable for both sexes, for whites and nonwhites, for neonatal and postneonatal deaths, and for both major cause of death groups. > [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.3086&rep=rep1&type=pdf](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.3086&rep=rep1&type=pdf) > > So the question again is, why don’t the anti-abortionists put any effort at all into dealing with a real problem that affects real babies and real human lives? I would submit it to the Washington Post if I thought they were interested in the truth. As for the medical journals, they are already aware because they are looking at the data and not just MSNBC. In [2013](http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=low-and-very-low-birthweight-infants)13% of black babies were born underweight and 2.9% were born extremely underweight. Hispanics which have roughly similar average incomes had 7.1% and 1.2%. Indians and Eskimos have lower average incomes than black but they had 7.5% and 1.3%. That is for the whole country not just for one city in Ohio. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/86 "2015-11-19T21:01:37Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > . . . Yet they ignore, or simply haven’t thought through, the fact that if we really accepted that a fertilized ovum is just as much a fully human person as a born baby, we would have to make major (and in many cases, frankly impossible) changes to our legal and social structures, in order to consistently treat fertilized ova like other fully human persons. . . . As an example, they would have to press hard for laws forbidding pregnant women from engaging in strenuous physical activity, and for laws forbidding pregnant women from drinking alcohol, etc. etc. (They’ve actually toyed a little with that latter…) ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2015, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/87 "2015-11-19T23:49:39Z")
How are we supposed to take pro-choice proponents seriously when they make claims like “[According to estimates, as many as 100,000 women in Texas have tried to end a pregnancy without help from a doctor and that number is expected to rise as a result of restrictive laws](http://www.dbtechno.com/health/2015/11/19/home-abortions-rise-clinics/)”? That’s 1/10 of all the abortions performed each year in the US. > [@wolfpup](#): > > And the only reason that the self-styled “pro-lifers” offer for their position is their belief that the various stages of fetal development constitute “human life” from the moment of conception and therefore abortion is “murder”. This is a position that is not – and cannot be – objectively supported by medical science since there is obviously no sentience in early stages of development and science cannot rule on when, if ever, during fetal development a fetus can be deemed a “human being” because it’s fundamentally a moral and philosophical and not a scientific question. If your grandpa had been in a vegetative state for years, and a cadre of doctors thought there was no hope of him ever regaining meaningful brain activity, I’d still be tried for murder if I decided his continued existence was a waste of resources and took it upon myself to dismember him. Okay, sure, grandpa was once a sentient being, but if he’s not now it’s just sentimentality to grant him continued personhood based on his past while at the same time making no consideration of a fetus’s potential for sentience. The present is all the matters, right? ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2015, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/88 "2015-11-20T00:10:40Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > How are we supposed to take pro-choice proponents seriously when they make claims like “[According to estimates, as many as 100,000 women in Texas have tried to end a pregnancy without help from a doctor and that number is expected to rise as a result of restrictive laws](http://www.dbtechno.com/health/2015/11/19/home-abortions-rise-clinics/)”? That’s 1/10 of all the abortions performed each year in the US. Frankly, this makes me inclined to take _you_ less seriously, if you want to cherry-pick like this. Even if the study is complete nonsense… so? ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2015, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/89 "2015-11-20T17:21:54Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > I would submit it to the Washington Post if I thought they were interested in the truth. As for the medical journals, they are already aware because they are looking at the data and not just MSNBC. In [2013](http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=low-and-very-low-birthweight-infants)13% of black babies were born underweight and 2.9% were born extremely underweight. Hispanics which have roughly similar average incomes had 7.1% and 1.2%. Indians and Eskimos have lower average incomes than black but they had 7.5% and 1.3%. > That is for the whole country not just for one city in Ohio. I hope you realize – though you evidently don’t – that when you start claiming the _Washington Post_ has no interest in the truth, you have entered into all-out conspiracy theory territory. Which I suppose is all you can do when the facts just don’t support your story. Nothing you have quoted supports your position, and does nothing to refute what I said about the socioeconomic causes of infant mortality in the US, which if you look closely are scholarly studies and not “MSNBC” and are typical of a wide range of such studies (and not “just one city in Ohio”). I have no quarrel with the numbers you posted – the problem is that they don’t even remotely mean what you claim they mean. Black moms may indeed have nearly twice the rate of low birth weight babies as the average, but your own cite states at the very beginning that the mortality from low birth weight is only about 1%. This is so low that all kinds of major socioeconomic factors affecting the health of mother and child are far more dominant, and that’s why the studies I cited reach the conclusions they do. > [@elfkin477](#): > > If your grandpa had been in a vegetative state for years, and a cadre of doctors thought there was no hope of him ever regaining meaningful brain activity, I’d still be tried for murder if I decided his continued existence was a waste of resources and took it upon myself to dismember him. > > Okay, sure, grandpa was once a sentient being, but if he’s not now it’s just sentimentality to grant him continued personhood based on his past while at the same time making no consideration of a fetus’s potential for sentience. The present is all the matters, right? I don’t think you really want to go there, as it’s very damaging to your cause. You might recall that during the Terry Schiavo fiasco, where Republicans managed to turn a family tragedy into a political circus, it was almost exactly the same bunch of pro-life right-wing ideologues and religious zealots who claimed that Schiavo was aware and sentient, communicating with her mother, and you could “see in her eyes” how aware she was. I’m just surprised that these fools didn’t bring in a Ouija board to talk to her (or maybe they did). And of course the autopsy eventually revealed that her brain had died long ago, at just the time that medical science said it had, every single major brain function had been permanently and irrepairably damaged, and the brain itself had atrophied to half its normal size. But Republicans and pro-life zealots knew better. And it’s utterly facile to dredge up the old “fetus potential” canard. Of course a fetus has potential. So does the female egg at the moment of conception. So does any female egg _before_ conception. So does a couple out on the first date, or any hypothetical pairing of any man or woman on the planet. By that logic, every woman on earth _ **must** _ be impregnated monthly, or an angel somewhere sheds a tear. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2015, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/90 "2015-11-20T18:03:19Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Frankly, this makes me inclined to take _you_ less seriously, if you want to cherry-pick like this. Even if the study is complete nonsense… so? It doesn’t matter when my side lies. It only matters when the other side lies. Because we cannot give an inch. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2015, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/91 "2015-11-20T20:34:33Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > It’s funny that the people who argue that _Roe v Wade_ can’t tell states what they can/can’t do often also argue that marijuana is illegal on a federal level regardless of what the state’s think. It’s not especially funny or even inconsistent, if one seeks to maximize individual freedom. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2015, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/92 "2015-11-20T20:37:39Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > It doesn’t matter when my side lies. It only matters when the other side lies. Because we cannot give an inch. No, one’s argument doesn’t matter if it hinges on a cherry picked extreme case, else it would be valid to accuse all pro-lifers of complicity in murder when a doctor gets shot. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2015, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/93 "2015-11-21T01:22:57Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Frankly, this makes me inclined to take _you_ less seriously, if you want to cherry-pick like this. Even if the study is complete nonsense… so? It was one of the headline articles on Bing yesterday, so tons of people saw it; it’s not as though it’s hard-to-find nonsense. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2015, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/94 "2015-11-21T10:15:00Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > NNow all you need to do is point to pro-lifers supporting rights (_ceteris paribus_) for fetuses that they don’t support for babies. You’re **still** misunderstanding the argument. The particular subset of pro-lifers who claim to believe that “abortion is murder”, because an ovum/embryo/fetus is just as fully human as a baby, are being inconsistent: - **not** because they’re supporting **more** rights/personhood for ova/embryos/fetuses than for babies, which they’re not, - but because they avoid addressing what it would really require for a society to actually **treat** ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human on a par with babies, **except** in the particular case of abortion. In other words, these pro-lifers in practice are supporting **less** rights/personhood for ova/embryos/fetuses than for babies. This is inconsistent with their claim to regard ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human persons just as much as babies are. **There are many significant ways (some of which I’ve pointed out above) in which we as a society acknowledge and protect the full human personhood of babies but do _not_ do the same for the pre-born.** (In fact, most of those acknowledgements and protections would be pragmatically impossible and/or tyrannically invasive if we tried to extend them to the pre-born. Which is one of the reasons that our society overall **doesn’t** regard the pre-born as fully human persons.) **But the only recognition/protection of the alleged full human personhood of ova/embryos/fetuses that the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers are apparently willing to seriously address is abortion. When it comes to the harder questions of how we could possibly implement a _consistent_ approach to treating ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human persons, these pro-lifers’ substantive contribution to the discourse is jack shit.** **Tacitly accepting the default societal assumption that the pre-born are _not_ fully human persons in situations where treating them as fully human persons would be unworkably impractical or unethical, and then insisting that the pre-born _are_ fully human persons in the one specific situation of abortion, is not a logically consistent approach to the issue of fetal personhood. And that’s what the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers are doing.** **Shodan** , pretty much every time I’ve tried to explain this to you, you come back with a new misunderstanding of what I’m actually saying: e.g., you imagine that I’m claiming that pro-lifers say fetuses should be able to vote, or that there’s an individual right to a death certificate, or that consistency requires considering the same specific actions neglectful in the case of both fetuses and children, or that pro-lifers are supporting **more** rights/personhood for fetuses than for babies, or something equally nonsensical. You’re evidently somewhat in over your head with the logic of this argument, and I don’t know how to explain it to you any more clearly. Most other posters seem to have grasped it okay. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2015, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/95 "2015-11-21T21:54:38Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > . . . But the only recognition/protection of the alleged full human personhood of ova/embryos/fetuses that the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers are apparently willing to seriously address is abortion. . . . I agree with your major premise, but want to nitpick that fetal homicide laws are another way in which society – not just the pro-life community, but certainly spearheaded by them – gives “civil rights” to fetuses. You’re very right that there is a significant disconnect in the pro-life philosophy. The standard thought-experiment is whether one would rescue one six-week-old baby from a burning building, or sixty frozen fertilized ova. ---
**Author:** ![Futurist110](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a88e4f/32.png) [@Futurist110](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futurist110)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2015, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/96 "2015-11-23T07:57:08Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > In a move that anyone with a brain could have predicted, it turns out that when abortion clinics are regulated to the point of not being able to operate in most of the state, tons of women and girls try to [abort their pregnancies by themselves](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/texas-self-abort/416229/). > > Bad and completely unsurprising move, Texas. Some women will decide that their pregnancies must end, and they will take action to do this, whatever the law is. This will always be so. There are many reasons that abortion must remain legal, but this is one of the most important, in my view – women and doctors must be able to perform this procedure when they deem it necessary, without interference from government. Out of curiosity–if a man threatens to commit suicide unless he gets a unilateral opt-out from paying child support, then should this man get a unilateral opt-out from paying child support? Also, though, I would like to point out that the “back-alley” argument can likewise be used (and more convincingly\*, I might add) in regards to things such as surgical castration as well: > **[Voluntary Genital Ablations: Contrasting the Cutters and Their Clients](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4184492/)** > > Some healthy males voluntarily seek castration without a recognized medical need. There are currently no standards of care for these individuals, which cause many of them to obtain surgery outside of a licensed medical setting. We seek to understand... \*With things such as surgical castration, unlike with abortion, there is **absolutely no** doubt that there are **no** other parties involved in this. ---
**Author:** ![Futurist110](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a88e4f/32.png) [@Futurist110](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futurist110)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2015, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/97 "2015-11-23T08:01:07Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > You’re very right that there is a significant disconnect in the pro-life philosophy. The standard thought-experiment is whether one would rescue one six-week-old baby from a burning building, or sixty frozen fertilized ova. Actually, a better question would be whether or not firefighters (who, as far as I know, are the employees of some government–please correct me if I am wrong in regards to this) should be legally required to save 60 frozen zygotes or one 6-week-old baby from a burning building (and assuming that they cannot save both). After all, this will ensure that pro-lifers would be unable to utilize the “personal value” response to this question. (To elaborate on this, a pro-lifer can say that he or she would personally save his or her mother over 100 babies if he or she could not save both; however, in this case, it would be a case of personal morals–in contrast, with firefighters, it is a matter of the law and of public policy). There–does that make sense? Also, I’m sorry if my thoughts on this are “all over the place.” ---
**Author:** ![Futurist110](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a88e4f/32.png) [@Futurist110](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futurist110)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2015, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/98 "2015-11-23T08:04:16Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > But AFAICT, most self-professed “pro-life” advocates don’t seem to give one single solitary crap about the fact that **about 50-70% of all fertilized human ova (you know, the ones that they insist are fully human persons from the very instant of conception) are estimated to die of natural causes before they have a chance to be born.** Where’s the outcry? Where are all the “pro-life” people grieving this massive ongoing humanitarian disaster and devoting huge sums of money to increased medical research to save the innocent lives of these fully human persons? How effective would such medical research actually be, though? Also, I (a **pro-choicer** ) would like to point out that **all** humans eventually die. Indeed, over 99.99% of **all** humans die before they are able to reach age 120. Thus, how about the Democrats support investing large amounts of government money in efforts to develop successful technology which will slow down and perhaps even halt or cure aging? ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2015, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/99 "2015-11-23T10:47:05Z")
> [@Futurist110](#): > > Also, though, I would like to point out that the “back-alley” argument can likewise be used (and more convincingly\*, I might add) in regards to things such as surgical castration as well: > > [Voluntary Genital Ablations: Contrasting the Cutters and Their Clients - PMC](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4184492/) > > \*With things such as surgical castration, unlike with abortion, there is **absolutely no** doubt that there are **no** other parties involved in this. Does your weird obsession have to be injected into every thread? ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2015, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843/100 "2015-11-23T11:49:44Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > What I am disputing is your assertion that pro-lifers don’t care about fetal life. As shown, they do, and they put their money where their mouth is by providing pre-natal care. So there’s no hypocrisy involved. > > Regards, > Shodan They do not provide prenatal care. Just want to clear that up, although the thread has moved on. Crisis Pregnancy Centers do NOT provide prenatal care. They exist to talk women out of abortions. They use some medical equipment, like ultrasounds, in order to more effectively do this. One of their tactics is to fool a woman into thinking they’re providing prenatal care until the pregnancy has passed the point where legal abortion is an option. Then they tell her they can’t help anymore, because they’re not qualified to deliver the baby, leaving a confused pregnant woman to find an OB in her second or third trimester, never having received proper prenatal care. And what’s the biggest factor in preterm births, maternal mortality, and sick babies? Lack of prenatal care. They put on a good facade. People that work there wear scrubs and labcoats and hang stethoscopes around their necks. But there is no doctor. No midwife. No one is there who is qualified to diagnose gestational diabetes or eclampsia, or, technically, legally, even pregnancy. Once more for the back row, because this is really important for people everywhere to know: \*\*Crisis Pregnancy Centers do NOT provide prenatal care. \*\* [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/texas-women-are-inducing-their-own-abortions/737843.md?page=6)