It’s difficult to get the facts about this issue when two camps rally around it with the drive that only politics and religion can possibly generate.
(U.S. issue, btw)
First, is “partial birth abortion” legal - the abortion in the last trimester ?
If the partial birth abortion is legal, are the gruesome descriptions of how the “brain is sucked out” accurate?
I’ll qualify my innocence by saying that I am actually in tune with debunking rumors, and scare tactics, but trying to learn anything from searching on this topic is futile. Every group hollering their point of view might as well be named something like “biased liberals for choice”, or “biased viewpoint of religious lunatic fringe”.
Set aside feelings about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and give me the dope on this topic.
I just want facts so that I can form my own opinions.
Yes, partial borth abortions are gruesome. Then again, IMHO, most medical procedures are gruesome.
The deal with a partial birth abortion is that the fetus/infant/pick your term cannot be born alive. If it is born and then killed after the fact that is basically murder by most definitions of murder I can think of. So, the ‘simplest’ way to kill the unborn is the brain sucking method (it also makes it 100% certain the unborn is truly dead).
What gets lost in the cries of horror over this is that it is not done lightly or often. Such a procedure is an extreme measure in extreme circumstances that usually involve the life of the mother (i.e. she will die if the procedure isn’t performed). PBA’s are not done merely because a woman decides to have an abortion late in the game.
So…Partial Birth Abortion (PBA)- the gist of it is this:
sucking the brains out of the unborn
it is legal
the intended result is the termination of a pregnancy that would jeopardize the life of the woman, if she were to carry the unborn to term.
So, to keep in the legal spirit of things, I’m avoiding the use of the words such as “mother”, “baby” and “child” (that’s not where I was going with this thread, but we might as well stick with the ‘facts’).
Is this account accurate, based on the posts so far? Anyone else have knowledge on what happens and when in this procedure (PBA facts).
This thread has the potential to turn ugly, so as a preventive measure I will say now let’s all be extra careful about sticking to the facts. Just the medical and legal facts.
Guys, please. All abortive procedures can be gruesomely detailed. It’s an issue that raises a lot of passions, but try to save the passions for GD.
To pass Constitutional muster, a law concerning abortion cant’ place an undue burden on a woman’s right to have an abortion before fetal viability, and must have a provision allowing for abortion to protect the health of the mother after fetal viability. Usually, in the second trimester, this is performed by a method called Dilation & Extraction,(D&E) involving diltaion, removal of fetal tissue using non-vacuum surgical instruments and (after the 15th week) potential dismemberment of the fetus or collapse of fetal parts to facilitate evacuaton from the uterus. This is the standard abortion procedure.
A variation of D&E, Intact D&E, is used after 17 weeks. It involves removing the fetus “intact” from the uterus in one “pass”, rather than several passes. This is accomplished either one of two ways: head first or feet first. The feet first method is known as "Dialation & Extraction (D&E). D&E is what we commonly think of as partial-birth abortion. D&X is superior to and safer for the mother afetr a certain period.
All this is from a SCOTUS opinion, Carhart v. Nebraska, that struck down a Nebraska statute for lacking the all-important “health of the mother” provision. Nebraska argued that this provision was uneccessary, as safe alternatives to D&X were available. The lower court founds, and SCOTUS upheld, that because D&X was safer to the mother during certain pre-viability periods of gestation than D&E, Nebraska could not ban it altogether. What’s more, the law was overbroad, and could be read as criminalizing certain D&E procedures that were clearly Constitutional. I’m massively oversimplifying a very long opinion and technical opinion here, but you get the general idea.
I would love - really love - to find a cite for this from a source that could - as much as is possible when dealing with abortion - be called impartial and honest. Anyone have one?
I`ve wondered this too. How can this procedure be “safer than a C section”? Or what health problems can a mother have that would not allow her to deliver naturally or otherwise? Is the passing of the head through the birth canal sometimes lethal?
JAMA and ACOG have both stated that Intact D&X is indefensible as a medical procedure. Most such procedures are performed for the purpose of ending a healthy, viable pregancy, and in the rare event that a high-risk pregancy is carried into the third trimester, there are no circumstances in which IDX is the safest method. The technique involves reaching into the uterus and turning the fetus feet-first, which exposes the mother to great risk of uterine rupture, amniotic fluid embolism, etc. The surgeon then blindly forces scissors into the skull while it’s in the birth canal, risking cervical laceration or other trauma. The manipulation of the fetus in the uterus is for the sole purpose of classifying the procedure as abortion instead of infanticide, which, as a fervent, perhaps even rabid, supporter of abortion rights, I nevertheless find an appalling sophistry.
Yes, but that issue is very hotly debated. Supporters of D&X say that after bones begin to calcify, intact removal is far safer because it reduces both the risk of laceration and complications from not completely removing the fetus which can happen with D&E in late term abortions. In D&X, the fetus is removed from the wonb as a whole instead except the skull, which is collapsed via cervical incision and suction. With a D&E it would have to be crushed with forceps, ordinarily not a problem except that once the skull has begun to calcify you’re now dealing with bone fragments which could remain in the womb and/or lacerate. Supporters say it lessens uterine perforation, significantly reduces the number of times a potentially damaging instrument must be introduced into the uterus, and is a shorter procedure.
Without getting too philisophical, if the fetus is healthy then the procedure is for the benefit of the mother only. When the procedure is performed, they are assuming that the mother may develop complications from a natural child birth. How would any one know for certain? Seems if the mother had some grave medical condition, she would have known about it earlier in the pregnancy, making this procedure unnecessary. H.O.
The trouble I’ve always had with this procedure and the explanation that it is only used when the life of the mother is in danger is this:
If the baby (including the shoulders – which is the widest part) is already out and the doctors are more or less holding the head in to do the procedure, under what circumstances can simply letting the mother make the last push be more lethal than holding the head in? I would think that holding it in so that the procedure can be done would be more painful and dangerous to the mother (since the head is in the birth canal) than simply allowing her to make the final push and get the kid out.