We are talking about a viable third trimester fetus here right? Read back to the arguments surrounding the 60 year old man. If disconnecting him won’t kill him, can you kill him just because he is connected to you?
And I would distinguish viable fetuses from those that are not viable. I’m not resting my case on dreams and pain I was trying to figure oput what the heck is going through Diana Gs head.
How has the 60-year-old man analogy been undercut, again?
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In the case of a 60 year old man that no longer needed to be hooked up to you. Can you kill that 60 year old man for being hooked up to you or do you have to unhook him without killing him?
No, you are not talking about viable third-trimester fetuses. You are talking about all third trimester fetuses, viable or not. They are not the same thing.
And what definition of “viable” are you using, anyway? Many premature babies that can be saved require extensive medical care to ensure it. Who has to pay for that? The government? The mother? The doctor?
And what kind of medical procedures are you going to require the woman to undergo, to get the thing out? Yes, the abortion itself might be quite invasive, but the woman chose that - it’s a voluntary procedure that she signed up for. I am extremely resistent to the law stepping in and saying, “No, you have to undergo this surgery, because we say so - now get under that knife!”
Let’s be pretty clear - if your argument was “I think that in cases where the fetus can be easily and safely induced to a live birth, requiring no additional effort or expense from the mother, the doctor should do that instead of an abortion”, then I could consider getting behind that. The thing is, I don’t think there are all that many abortions that are literally the week before natural birth. And certainly not all of them in the third trimester qualify.
Yes and that is part of what makes it hard to figure out what is going on. You don’t get any argument from me.
I hear you. It can be tough. We shouldn’t make it so tough but once she hits her third trimester, I place the life of the fetus above her right to choose.
I don’t think anyone does this on purpose and I think you have to be in a pretty tight spot to even think about doing this but at this stage of the game, the choice is gone.
I think its the lesser of two evils. You really think the Oklahoma law is an attempt to rape a woman with a sonogram probe?
I never meant to give the impression that abortions were like icecream. I know how traumatic they can be and for the first 6 months of the pregnancy I think we should give women the right to choose for herself whether or not she has one. Its a shitty situation and I don’t think anyone looks forward to it but once youa re in your third trimester I think the state should be able to take that choice away from you. I don’t know how to be more blunt. I think the state should be able to force women in their third trimester to carry their healthy pregnancies to term, I think the fetus develops rights.
But the burden of proof IS on you. Current law only allows for third-trimester abortion if the abortion is necessary to preserve the woman’s health. Where’s your proof that any change in the law is needed?
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A couple of points.
People made an assertion that third trimester abortions NEVER happen then demanded that I provide a cite that they do in fact happen if I wanted to contradict that assertion. The burden of proof is usually on those that make the assertion.
I’m not the one arguing for a change in the current law. In fact I would expand third trimester abortions to severely disabled fetuses. I do think we can tighten up the definition of “health” but otherwise I am satisfied with the current state of the law. So if anything, the other side should bear the burden of proof.
Finally we are talking policy and not the law. We are discussing what the law should be and not what the law is.
I’ll do this thread a favor - I rescind the claim that third-trimester abortions never happen on demand. I still don’t think they’re particularly frequent - but guess what? Their frequency doesn’t matter to the strict woman’s rights-over-her-own-organs argument. If they’re too frequent the thing to do would be to campaing to put measures to streamline access to abortions, not to decide that women don’t own their organs anymore.
Or they can carry the baby to term. I am not forcing the woman to have a c section or anything. But if she is going to have a medical procedure, i am limiting the procedures she can have to things taht will produce a live birth.
Before shooting, maybe. (I’m not willing to actually agree without a cite, though - I’ve gotten the impression that castle doctorine gives the homeowner pretty broad justifications.) However you certainly can grab the intruder and heave them off your property, right?
Even if they’ve been drinking from your garden hose and will die without it.
Bzzt! You just turned into a full-fledged pro-life anti-choice person. Viability is apparently no longer important - there is no longer a rational cutoff. And we can force all women to carry the fetus to term by the same exact argument you just presented.
The pro-choice argument in question is that the woman has a right to say to the fetus “get off my lawn!” And she doesn’t have to wait for it to grow old enough to learn english and understand the command and obey on its own first. By hook or crook, the woman has a right to get that baby out, now, by whatever means necessary.
I TOTALLY agree that we need to increase access to abortions and I think that we should have unrestricted access to first trimester abortions. Heck I could get behind federal funding of first trimester abortions on demand. High school teenager gets knocked up, see the school nurse, she will ask you if you want the prenatal vitamins or if you want her to set up an appointment for an abortion and make it clear that you can change your mind and have an abortion right up until the 6th month but then no further. I think there are all sorts of things we can do to make abortions more rare and I think there are all sorts of things we can do to make abortions more accessible. But I would impose that 6 month limit.
I don’t think you can shoot them unless they are threatening you (some states allow you to presuem that anyone that has illegally broken into your home is going to kill you). A lot of states require you to be reasonable.
WOW!!! Its like you’ve been waiting for some sign that I don’t mean what I say. I am giving the woman a choice between delivering a live baby or carrying to term. I didn’t realize I had to qualigfy this statement by repeating, once again, that I am talking about cases where the fetus is capable of live delivery.
The woman has the right to get the baby out NOW but not by “whatever means necessary”. If the fetus is viable I am limiting her means to live birth.
Why is it so hard to believe that someone could be against third trimester abortions but still support the right to an abortion during the first two trimesters.
I agree with your second statement, except in extreme circumstances. However, you’re not providing any evidence or arguments to assert your first statement that ‘outside/inside’ is not a bright line.
(Emphasis mine - but then, it’s my own quote to modify as I see fit)
I want to expand on this slightly - the “easily and safely” there matters. And it’s why I don’t think even this mild of a restriction on abortions is morally justifiable.
The proposed restriction on abortions by Damuri Ajashi is, as best I can tell, “If we think there’s some tiny chance that the fetus could be kept alive through the expenditure of a hundred thousand dollars worth of unpaid medical attention, then the woman is forbidden to attempt any method of removing the fetus that does not guarantee a the resulting baby will live afterwards”. (I may be paraphrasing slightly. :D)
So in other words, it is a restriction on operations that are available to the woman. So…how do we determine what subset of possible operations are permitted? Does it matter if some options are less safe for the woman? More expensive? More arduous? Greater chance of complications?
What if the woman is already having medical complications? Damuri Ajashi has stated that he is perfectly okay with abortions being done in this case. But what if the best procedure to save the woman is on the list of ones banned to healthy women? The doctor could legitimately fear that he would be accused of inventing or overestimating the condition in order to slip an elective abortion under the radar. From the cite with the traumatized abortion clinic receptionist:
Seriously, what the hey? If I’m reading this right the baby was born intact, but wasn’t breathing, and couldn’t be started, and the mother was bleeding profusely, and suddenly tending to the mother instead of the dead baby is an abortion? Apparently in the minds of some people who know better than the doctor, maybe. And this didn’t even involve anybody doing any procedure on an explicitly banned list.
So yeah - I think that any law requiring the doctors to pussyfoot around the risk of getting arrested for illegal fetal termination could in theory put the woman at risk. And prevent her from getting proper medical care, since it limits the tools in the doctor’s toolbox. NOT GOOD. And given that the woman should damn well have the full right to choose what medical procedures she undergoes anyway, I don’t think this passes muster from a making-law perspective.
So I repeat: “I think that in cases where the fetus can be easily and safely induced to a live birth, requiring no additional effort or expense from the mother, the doctor should do that instead of an abortion.” However, that is something the doctor (and woman) should decide to do if they can and it’s medically prudent; I don’t think it’s a good idea to make blanket laws about it.
So you agree that generally women aren’t intentionally getting third-trimester abortions just for the hell of it, but only when (for whatever reason) they really, really feel they have to, yes? That’s quite a bit different from the image you’ve projected, which is that you think gazillions of women are having 3T abortions just for fun and lack of anything better to do.
What else would you call it? The law requires women trying to obtain an abortion to have a phallic object inserted into their vaginas against their will. In any other circumstance this would be considered rape. What makes it different in this case?
And as far as the “informed consent” bullshit, before you go there - the very same legislature, in the very same session, made it legal for a doctor to LIE TO HIS PATIENT without any repercussions if he doesn’t want to tell her that the fetus has birth defects so that she won’t even consider getting an abortion.
So, no, neither they nor you can claim that these laws have anything to do with helping or protecting women.
OK, I’ll grant you this. I’m not going to claim that it NEVER EVER EVER happens that a healthy fetus of a healthy woman is aborted in the 7th month. But I don’t think anyone else was claiming that, either (and please show me where if I’m wrong). What they were claiming is that women aren’t aborting healthy fetuses in the 39th week of pregnancy, which is where you started. They are also saying that the number of 3T abortions of healthy fetuses by perfectly healthy women with no problems is so miniscule that it doesn’t warrant your claims.
But what you have kept saying is that you think that “elective third-trimester” abortions should be illegal. And that would mean that you’re making abortions illegal for women with serious health issues and for women with essentially dead fetuses, in order to stop one or two abortions that you think aren’t justified.
IOW, you’ve really been arguing a fairly extreme position, and I’m not sure that’s what you really meant.
On the other hand…
OK, explain this to me. Who are you to have a better understanding of what would adversely affect a woman’s health than she and her doctor do? Why do you think that legislators, who are easily influenced by screaming fanatics, have a better understanding of a woman’s health than she and her doctor do?
I’m serious about this. Below are questions I’ve asked people before when they’ve said similar things. Generally they can’t answer them - can you?
What qualifies as a serious enough health condition to warrant a 3T abortion?
Can a woman be required to undergo 3 months of bed rest? Who’s going to pay to support her while she’s doing that? If she doesn’t follow orders, is she a criminal? If she can’t afford to stay in bed, then shouldn’t she be able to have a safe surgical abortion rather than waiting for a life-risking spontaneous abortion?
Would a woman have to wait until she actually had physical damage to qualify, or would “probable” damage be enough? What probability is required? 95% 85% 75% 50% 25%? Where do you draw the line at how much risk to her life and health a woman is required to assume?
What if a woman has a recurrence of serious depression or other mental illness? Can she be required to carry the pregnancy to term, even though it’s making her suicidal? After all, she’s not physically at risk from the pregnancy.
These are the kinds of questions that you’re claiming you and/or the legislature have enough knowledge to decide, in advance, without any understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual case. That’s what it means when you “tighten up” the law. And that’s why pro-choice people have problems when you say these things.
No you’re not, not until you go back and respond to the points about how you never defined “viable”, never stated how to detect viability, and never stated how you’re going handle the costs of keeping this supposedly-viable baby alive until it’s actually viable. Seven-month premees do not exactly leap from their cribs and start crawling, you know. Until you address these issues, “viable” is just a magic word that means “third trimester”, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the ability to be delivered live in any meaningful sense.
Heck, suppose it’s the first day of the seventh month. The doctor does his level best to deliver the fetus alive, incubators and all, but it dies within the hour anyway. No wait - he must have let it die on purpose! Abortionist! Murderer! Jail for life!
And if you don’t want to compared to a pro-life person, don’t make their arguments. They’d love to restrict a woman from conception on to procedures that produce a live and viable fetus. What, there aren’t any that early? Fine with them!
Oh, it’s not hard to believe; I’ve held that position myself. But the position is not argumentively defensible in the face of the woman’s rights argument, not without using the stick-fingers-in-ears-and-repeat-no-no-no! approach.
Thank you for bringing this up, especially mental illness. A friend of mine got pregnant while recovering from anorexia. She hadn’t had a period in forever, so didn’t think she could get pregnant, and she didn’t know she was pregnant until about five months in. Sorry, dudes, it was not going to happen. It was abortion or, well, suicide.
And that really is the case here. If Damuri Ajashi has so little grasp on the complexities of pregnancy that he/she honestly thinks there are women trotting into abortion clinics in the third trimester (well, the two that currently exist in the US and perform this procedure) – not because of restrictions and roadblocks like getting time off work without being fired, finding someone to care for the kids they already have, getting parental permission, finding a doctor who can fit them in to their schedule, traveling across several states (and going through a waiting period), raising money (a bit of a catch-22 as it gets more expensive the longer you need to raise the money), discovering a physical abnormality in the fetus or a physical problem in themselves, severe obesity, mental illness or retardation – but because they are simply lazy or negligent, then what on earth would keep them from performing the procedure themselves? Too concerned with their girlish figures?
Exactly. It doesn’t even matter if the person is your child.
Yup.
As for Castle Doctrine, I’m not in the mood to look up 30 individual state laws, but wikipedia notes that one must generally “reasonably believe” that the intruder is a threat.
Why do the interests of the person who is definitely sentient take a back seat to the interests of the future person who at the time might have some measure of sentience? What is the state’s compelling interest in making women have children they don’t want to have?