The shoulders aren’t the widest part of a newborn. They sort of fold up forward. The head is the widest part.
Trinopus
Just, FYI, but abortions are only performed (in all but two, IIRC, locations) only until the 24th week- i.e.- the limit is before the end of the second trimester, not in the last trimester.
PC
ISTR congressional hearings where a bunch of doctors testified about the medical necessity of partial birth abortions. They said, essentially, that there is no medical justification. Given modern medical technology, any complications that might threaten the woman’s health can be dealt with in ways that will save both mother and baby. (Assuming the fetus is viable.)
Oh, and rsa: There is no such thing as an unbiased resource. The best you can hope for is relative impartiality. 
Could’ve fooled me. I remember when taking my EMT training for emergency childbirth the instructor specifically stating that the shoulders were the widest part of the newborn.
Zev Steinhardt
zev, although I don’t know the answer in general, in many PBA cases the head is huge. (BTW I also thought that the head was the largest part of the fetus even in an healthy birth.)
empasis mine
Sorry, I meant to say “emphasis” mine.
I was an EMT as well and I was taught that the head was the big part, shoulders can shift and twist a bit…babies move in a “typical pattern” when being delivered (the “cardinal movements” IIRC). Shoulders can get hung up at certain angles but it doesen’t take much force to snap a clavicle and let baby free…it happens sometimes in the process of even otherwise uncomplicated deliveries.
Something else to note, the medical community generally refers to any termination of pregnancy, natural, or artificial as an “abortion”. Ending a pregnancy is never pretty, then again neither is a head on collision. The vast majority of medical folk try to be open minded about things like voluntarily aborting. We all know its sometimes needed, and in many cases prudent, even if it isn’t the most “moral” thing to do. Its not really our place to judge the reasons why, just to get everyone taken care of…whatever their needs might be.
If that is the case (where hydrocephalus babies have “enormous” heads), then you have presented a case that I was unaware of where this procedure could reasonably save the life of the parent.
Zev Steinhardt
No, the head is the widest part. The shoulders do indeed fold forward and become narrower than the head. It’s why nature decided that the head should come out first. It stretches everything so all the smaller parts follow easily. After the head is delivered the baby basically falls out. OTOH, in a breech presentation, where the shoulders come out in first they cannot be properly “folded” and then they do indeed become the widest part. This is overcome by delivering the shoulders one at a time.
There are several situations where babies can threaten moms life. I will try to get my wife Cyn to check this thread in the morning. She works high risk specialized labor and delivery, all the moms with no prenatal care, multiple births, drug addicts, known birth defects, very old/young moms. They lose moms and babies there sometimes, comes with the territory. She can give you a better rundown on mom killing pregnancy problems.
Someone with more medical knowledge than I have might be able to flesh this out in more detail, but there are some bizarre and rare conditions in the fetus than can endanger the mother.
One is if the fetus has a massively growing tumor (in some case, the tumor is larger than the fetus) which, if allowed to continue to progress, may make it impossible for the mother to deliver just because it’s so big.
In another one (I think it’s called “fetal hydrops”??) the baby absorbs fluid and swells up. Almost always fatal to the baby, it can also kill the mother. I’m not entirely clear on the mechanism of how that happens.
Just because a condition is rare doesn’t mean an extreme procedure isn’t justified.
Speaking of extreme conditions - in both the above cases, there have been attempts at pre-birth surgery in an attempt to save the life of the baby. Quite controversial, certainly not always successful, and very much experimental.
PBA aren’t performed in the UK and ireland.
they cannot be an “essential” medical procedure if several countries refuse to perform them, with no increase in maternal death rates.
It bears repeating that what’s being potentailly outlawed here is the procedure being used and not the abortion itself. A woman’s Consititutional right to an abortion under Casey is simply that the state can’t place an undue burden on a woman’s right to have an abortion if the fetus is not yet viable, and must allow for abortions where the fetus is viable if the health of the mother is endangered. The test under Roe involved which trimester the fetus was in, but that’s been scrapped in favor of the test of fetal viability.
So if a woman has a right to an abortion under the Consitution and wants or needs one, she’s going to have one, and no state law can stop her. All a ban on the Dilation & Extraction procedure accomplishes is it forces the doctor to use a different procedure, typically Dialtion & Evacuation, which may or may not be the best thing for her medically. The end result is the same either way-the fetus is aborted. The doctor was just forced to use a different procedure than he might have used otherwise.
On the sophistry point (rsa explained some of the justifications): During my Ob/Gyn rotation, our director told us of the case in which a resident was doing a c-section/abortion for a woman to remove the fetus (before it was viable- I don’t remember the reason). It was alive which was not of concern to the doctor because the woman wanted it aborted. An OR nurse noticed that it was alive and called pediatrics who came and tried to keep it alive, but failed (after a few days, IIRC). The doctor was sued, of course and his rationale was that it was intended to die and would not have survived anyway, so why do anything. Of course, I don’t remember the outcome of the case, but if you are going to perform an abortion, you’d better make sure it comes out dead.
PC
-Just need to add that “alive” and “dead” are just as relavent to tissue cells, bacteria, sperm and eggs (the eggs lost during menses were just as alive before they were lost), so they do not (in my post) imply good or evil in (in themselves) in terms of the fetus.