Between 200 and 500/year depending on whose numbers you believe. Its not negligible.
Diana, it looks like Damuri got the numbers he was quoting above from Wikipedia. Wikipedia was itself publishing the numbers of a study published (1988) in the Guttmacher Institue research journal. Here is the citation:
Aida Torres and Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, “Why Do Women Have Abortions”, Family Planning Perspectives, 20 (4) Jul/Aug 1988, pp 169-176 (The bimonthly research journal of The Alan Guttmacher Institute): “Some 42 facilities were originally invited to participate in the study; these include six at which a relatively large number of late abortions (those at 16 or more weeks’ gestation) were performed.”
Of course there would be harm - it’s legalizing slavery. To do that would be harmful and morally corrupt even before somebody found a way to take advantage of their newfound power to control other people’s bodies.
You may not have realized this, but your entire argument here is an inverse slippery slope argument - that if we refrain from doing X, then we must therefore be willing to do Y, and thus it must be okay to require us to do Z. Slippery slope is of course a fallacy on its own - but trying to push us down the slope as you’re doing is a whole new level of wrong.
So can the woman abort her 10 year old child that she is just tired of taking care of? Of course not, because she can give it up for adoption. how much greater is the burden of an induced delivery that we say"fuck it, lets just kill it"
I can acknowledge that there are pro-life loonies, there may even be a LOT of them. I don’t know that there aren’t jsut as many pro-choice loonies and on this board it certainly seems like there are more pro-choice loonies than pro-life loonies. I have not seen a single poster arguing for prohibiting abortions in the first trimester. I have seen at least two posters arguing for unrestricted abortions and several more that seem at least sympatheic to the rationale that would underly that position.
That’s not an abortion. Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy and it has jack squat to do with 10-year-old children. Our society has long held that after birth, a person has rights of his own, no matter how dependent that person is on others because of youth or disability or other issues. So at that point the person has a right to live (unless the government decides he needs killing because there’s a war on or he might’ve killed somebody and couldn’t afford a good lawyer) and that right can’t be taken away on a whim. Before birth it’s another story.
If I can go all Spiro Agnew here, you’re trying to push this argument uphill over a slippery slope.
Are you really still taking that absurd hypothetical seriously? :rolleyes:
You’re waxing eloquent about hypothetical that amounts to a delusion - in reality-land abortions don’t happen when induced delivery is an option. Which raises the question, what are you beating this drum for? It looks like it’s the spearhead of some kind of inverse slippery slope argument so harebrained that it barely merits taking the time to scoff at. However I will give you the chance to salvage your argument from the brink of absurdity - do you have some other kind of argument here besides “you wouldn’t kill a ten year old, so obviously using a condom is bad because you wouldn’t want to be inconsistent”?
Yes, that is what this abortion debate is about and if you think its settled I think you need to take a look around.
I was thinking earlier. At the point of viability, it becomes more or less equivalent to adoption, since there is now an option to get end the situation without destroying the fetus.
However, this doesn’t mean that a woman shouldn’t have the right to change her mind, either because of new circumstances or just because. My cousin was a Ob/Gyn and a fertility specialist, and I heard of a case where a couple tried for years, very expensively to conceive and finally succeeded - only to change their minds and have an abortion. But we need to preserve the right to be stupid also. (I’m not aware of extenuating circumstances - I wasn’t told any.)
Not to pick on you, but I have to think that anyone talking about due dates has either been very prompt or has never been involved with a pregnancy. Due dates, like most deadlines, are just estimates. My first child was two weeks late. For my second, they kept slipping the due date, and she was finally induced well after the original one so that our doctor could leave for Labor Day and still get the fees for the delivery. So, in one sense my wife’s pregnancy was terminated a few days before the (revised) due date, but no one would object since a healthy baby was delivered.
BTW, labor beginning at a scheduled 8 am are a lot more civilized than ones beginning at a random 12:30 am. We actually got to use the cards packed in our labor kit.
Don’t be ridiculous. A ten year old is definitely a person, unlike a fetus. Nor is a ten year old directly attached to her, feeding off her and doing her harm.
WTF? To make an argument about 3rd trimester abortions you paste reasons for abortions past 16 weeks? I suspect you don’t realize that 16 weeks is barely into the 2nd trimester.
Movement does not require a higher brain function. Primitive responses to stimuli do not. The process of pain almost certainly does. Dreaming definitely requires higher brain function. Dreaming and pain probably can’t even begin until 28th week or so (just a guess, haven’t looked it up).
Please don’t misrepresent Der Trihs or ‘his camps’ stance on that since you clearly have a different definition of higher brain function than I do. Also, I don’t remember Der Trihs saying that newborns can be killed.
Also, please don’t assume that all pro-choice people only focus on the “my body” argument.
Your posts in this thread are becoming increasingly less useful for the discussion. You consistently misrepresent views in the debate and show no interest in learning the fundamentals of issue. The “aborting the 10 year old” post was especially strange.
Not my point. The final vote belongs to the woman whose body it is. The rest of us can kibitz all we want. The choice is that of the woman - not of her husband, father, pastor, or government committee.
You are now begging the question of personhood. Since there is no scientific way to define personhood, you can’t say that a state is protecting a person at any point during a pregnancy. I’ll make an exception for viability, since that terminates the pregnancy without killing the now viable fetus, which seems to me to be roughly equivalent to the rule that you should give your unwanted baby up for adoption, not kill it.
Yes, the right to occupy your body against your will. If you lose the mainstream left then yes you can lose that right. You think Carhart and Webster weren’t steps in that direction? You think the partial birth abortion act wasn’t a step in that direction?
The right to abortion sprang into being with Roe v. Wade based on tortured analysis and they can disappear.
Sure I do. The fetus is about as important as you are, inasmuch as you’re both people who aren’t me, and so it’s not up to either of you.
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States can pass laws that place restrictions on abortions in the second trimester and prohibit elective third trimester abortions. As a voter, it is at least in some miniscule part, up to me.
Nope I don’t get why its murder if i kill the fetus and its not murder if you do it. The fetus is either a human being or it is not. It sounds like youa re saying taht it is a human being as far as everyone else is concerned but NOT a human being as far as the expectant mother is concerned.
I don’t suppose I could convince you to join the conversation we’re having NOW, could I? It’s not really necessary to address every single post in the thread individually.
In exactly the same way that the decision whether or not to drag you off and chain you to a treadmill is, at least in some miniscule part, up to me.
Their bodies, their decisions. And I’d support them.
In fact, having two daughters of childbearing age makes me far more pro-choice. If for some reason one of them needed an abortion, any protester trying to block her access to the clinic is going to be very sorry he did. Not likely to be an issue where we live, but still. I also support my married daughter’s choice not to have kids now and will support her choice to have them if and when she is ready. It took a long time for my parents to conceive me, and my mother got a lot of “when is the baby coming” after my father got back from WW twice, so she never bugged my wife and me about it.
I don’t know how old your kid is, but we’ve found that supporting our kids’ decisions (even if we had to bite our tongues) has worked out well in the long run.
If you smash your car windshield with a baseball bat is it a crime? (No)
If I smash your car windshield with a baseball bat (without your approval) is it a crime? (Yes)
Yes but if you are making principled arguments then consistency is generally required.