Then you shouldn’t be using anti-choice rhetoric to defend the actions of the anti-choice movement.
Your child will be born alive, but with a serious defect. He will never be able to communicate, and his health will deteriorate rapidly: he may live for two years or two months but more likely six or seven months. You will watch him gradually get worse until he dies. Of course, there was that case back in '86 where one lived 11 years, but that was one out of ten thousand.
“Convenience”: where do you draw the line?
In my mind, the line is at birth. Before then, abortion should be legal for any reason or no reason at all. There doesn’t even need to be a medical reason. After birth, it should be handled like we do for people. If someone was on life support with no chance of recovery, we may decide to pull the plug have have them die. But if they can live without life support, we don’t euthanize them unless they express that desire. I feel that we should treat newborns the same way. If they have a birth defect that means they have a lifespan of a couple of years, we have a duty to ensure they get to live out those years as best as possible. But before birth, the pregnant person should be able to decide to terminate.
However, I should say that I don’t think it’s politically stable to have unrestricted abortion at any time. That kind of policy would produce a very strong emotional reaction in pro-life people. It would greatly motivate them to get people into government who put restrictions on abortion. I think from a political perspective, a more nuanced policy is needed in order for the laws to be able to stand. So along those lines, I think it makes political sense for late term abortions to only be for situations where there is potential for great harm or loss of life to the pregnant person. Even though that’s not my preference, I think that those limitations are needed to prevent the pro-lifers from packing the courts and government with extreme pro-life people that ultimately take away all rights to abortion.
Where are you getting the idea that (and let’s call it what you seem to be suggesting) post birth abortion is a thing?
I didn’t mean to imply anything about post birth abortion. I’m not seeing how you got that from what I wrote. Post birth, the newborn should be treated medically the same way we do with people. If they are hooked up to life support and have no chance of recovery, the parents may decide to take them off. That’s similar to what we do with adults. That’s the only situation where I could see that the parents could cause the death of the newborn. But if the life support will allow the newborn to recover and live without it, then the parents can’t make an arbitrary decision to stop life support.
Nobody but you brings that up in this thread about abortion, because it has nothing to do with abortion.
I haven’t. I stated the legal issue.
Many of them assume nothing of the sort. The fact that you persistently don’t answer them may raise questions.
In addition, your child will be in pain, and is almost certainly in pain within the womb.
That’s what Canada does. It’s even funded. Last I looked, they don’t seem to be politically unstable over it.
You have. You used the terminology “pro-abortion” and “pro-life”.
In addition, you’ve been talking about pregnancies not risking the life of the mother; and about late-term abortions for other than medical reasons; as if the first were not a serious concern, and as if the second were a significant cause of late-term abortions. Although, admittedly, as you’ve been refusing to say what you mean by “late-term”, we don’t know whether you mean by that 13 weeks or 8 1/2 months.
What works in other countries works because they have a population that support that policy. Or at least, don’t have enough opposition to change it. The US has a significant segment of the population which did the work over decades to lay the groundwork to reverse RvW. The policies can’t just be viewed in a vacuum. They have to be viewed against the population that they will affect. You could look at gun rights the same way. Other countries ban guns, but that would be just about impossible to pull off in the US.
Significant in loudness, but I am not sure about number. It appears that they are a pretty small minority.
“I don’t know why you assume I am in favor of the purification of the land by the extermination of heretics. I assure you that I am not. I’m merely pointing out that the Purification is not incompatible with the constitution of the Holy Republic.”
Perhaps, but they managed to get strongly pro-life people into all levels of the government and the legal system, including at the highest levels. It seems pretty clear that Judge Barrett was put on the Supreme Court primarily because of her pro-life views. Regardless of the size of the pro-life group, their influence is very significant and they are able have major influence over the laws of this country.
That, exactly.
And I strongly suspect that a lot of the people who did that work over decades don’t believe a word of it, but did it for political advantage.
Well, yes. That’s what so many people are complaining about.
But I note that, in order to try to keep that influence over such laws state by state, they’re trying their damndest to keep abortion rights laws off the ballot, and/or to improperly describe them, and/or to hamper voting on them. Because they know that they’ll lose if such laws get a fair vote – even in red states.
(And you’re still using the terminology “pro-life”.)
Speaking as an actuary, a 2% chance that a 30 year old will die in the next year is an enormous number. I’m not sure you pulled up those stats to point out how common ectopic pregnancies are, or if you were thinking of it as a small number. But i think it’s huge.
You mean if the laws were magically written in a way that actually protected maternal health, instead of how they have actually been written? I don’t actually care, both because that’s a fantasy world we don’t live in, and also because women who will actually die from lack of access to abortions are the tip of the iceberg.
The larger issue that every person who is forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy is effectively in involuntary servitude to a thing that isn’t even yet a person. It’s worth bringing up that women are routinely in risk of their life from pregnancy, because it’s common for abortion foes to minimize the impact of pregnancy, for instance, comparing it to another person on your desert island for a month. Treating it as if it’s no big deal.
It is a big deal. Pregnancy affects the very body of the host. It messes up the metabolism (gestational diabetes is common and often become permanent diabetes, for instance). It restricts what the person can do, where they can go, what they can eat. It moves around the internal organs. It interferes with sleep. Everyone has different impacts, but i had trouble peeing for months and my hips were so loose it was hard to walk to my train station in the snow. I was so depressed from my second pregnancy that my husband grabbed the first kid and fled our home, because he couldn’t cope with me . I couldn’t, either, but had no place to go l. (I’ve had hormonal-related depression since puberty, but it was vastly worse when i was pregnant, and no one will treat it.) My MIL lost a tooth and gained a shoe size with each child. Those are normal, healthy, uncomplicated pregnancies.
Okay, so to get back to the topic of the thread, why do they want to outlaw abortion.
And please note that outlawing abortion is not the same as preventing abortion. The best data that we have indicates that number of abortions in the US is increasing, after many years of decline.
New findings from the Monthly Abortion Provision Study show that an estimated 1,037,000 abortions occurred in the formal health care system in 2023, the first full calendar year after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade . This represents a rate of 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age,* and is a 11% increase since 2020, the last year for which comprehensive estimates are available. It is also the highest number and rate measured in the United States in over a decade.
(The Guttmacher institute supports abortion rights, but it’s widely considered to accurately report on the number of abortions, and recorded details about actions, such as when in pregnancy they occur.)
It’s either extremely stupid or extremely disingenuous to believe that laws against abortion are being authored by people even knowledgeable about human reproductive biology, maternal and child health or statistics.
They are written by the kind of people who believe that women can’t get pregnant if they aren’t willingly participating in sex and enjoying it.
I had the same thought, and I have basically no background in statistics. Spanners was throwing around these one-in-ten-thousand type figures and then pops up with that figure, 200 in 10,000. If true, that is pretty scary.
You mention the physical issues, but what about the psychological effects. I can imagine a woman forced into that position becoming suicidally depressed. Or, perhaps, homicidal. The anti-choicers are known for claiming that abortion is emotionally traumatic, but having that choice withheld must be at least as bad.
If you read my overly-long post, i became severely depressed from a planned, wanted pregnancy due to hormone disruptions. I’m sure it would have been far worse if I’d been forced to keep an unwanted pregnancy. I might well have hurt myself or others. I mean, more than i did, which wasn’t zero, but was somewhat controlled by the basically positive situation.
Yeah, i knew that i know a few women who have had them (at least 3) but i had no idea it was that common.
You are not taking a side. It is just a complete coincidence that you and others use the far right’s terminology and argument.
You mean because I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of all anti-abortion people are evil oppressors of women? I’m sure that their view on abortion is complex just like mine is. When I see anti-abortion protestors and hear what they say, their motivations seem more around feelings about when life begins and that an abortion is ending a life. It doesn’t seem like their motivations are around oppressing women. For instance, consider this anti-abortion protest:
The women in the picture look like typical, college-age and young professional women. I have trouble believing they are protesting abortion because their underlying motivation is to oppress women like them. If that was the case, I would expect to see them protesting colleges that admit women like them and companies which hire women like them. Their words and actions seem more in line with people who are motivated by feeling like abortion is the unfair ending of life. I know that doesn’t conveniently align with the view that abortion protestors are all about oppressing women, but that’s that reality of the situation. I feel that if people want abortion to be more accessible, they need to have a realistic view of what drives the anti-abortion people. If you went up to the young women in the protest and said they were just trying to oppress and control women, they would just be pushed farther away from changing their mind. If you have the position that all anti-abortion people are trying to suppress women, then you’d need to be able to explain why women like these are part of that movement.