I ask this in GD because, well… abortion. I figure it’s going to be a debate, anyway. But really, my question is more of a GQ.
Has New York’s new law regarding abortion changed anything in any substantive way? From what I can tell, all it does is codify current practice. The concern, as I understand it, is that SCOTUS could overturn Roe v. Wade which would reactivate abortion restrictions in the State of New York. This would occur because the laws are still on the books, but are not enforced due to Roe. Remove Roe and those laws would come back into play. The New York Assembly wanted to retain the current practice regardless of what SCOTUS does, so they crafted a law to do just that.
However, to hear the anti-choice crowd tell it, New York has just legalized everything up to and including straight-up infanticide. Somehow, I doubt that. One Facebook friend said that a viable pregnancy can be terminated the day before expected delivery. She says that a doctor can go in [to the mother, I presume] and kill the child, then deliver the now dead infant. This seems a bit far-fetched to me.
So, what is the real deal here? Has anything really changed regarding abortion in New York?
There’s another thread on this, but the crux is that Yes, a doctor who is presumably concerned about the health of the mother can abort a fetus up to the moment of birth. It is not clear where exactly a fetus becomes a person during the birthing process, but one would assume that if the fetus isn’t yet in the birthing canal, it’s fair game.
Does this change things? Yes. New York previously had a ‘life’ exception for those late term abortions and required a second physician to attend. Basically it was Mom is dying another doctor has to be here to make sure I’m not lying, so we can abort the baby. The new legislation is ‘life or health’ of the mother and requires no other physician and actually no physician at all to perform the procedure, simply a licensed healthcare provider practicing within their scope (so a midwife or nurse practitioner or other related practitioner.)
Does this practically change things? Perhaps a small bit. Realistically, about .2% of abortions are late term, so roughly 2000 or so a year in the US. New York is the highest per capita abortion state in the country, so about 1 out of 3 pregnancies is aborted. In the US, 45% of pregnancies are unplanned (18% unwanted and 27% wanted later) If New York is eliminating 75% or so of unplanned pregnancies, there’s really not much legislation they can do to up that number. They’re a pretty efficient fetus eliminating state as is, so this legislation may bump that number by a few hundred on the outside, but they’re already aborting 120 thousand pregnancies a year, the few hundred that this might tack on is a drop in the bucket for them.
We had a threadabout this already. The gist seems to be, “Yes, technically a physician could abort late-term all the way until before birth, but that would be rare.”
Also, now that we are in GD and not GQ, I want to ask: What took the pro-choice side so long?
It was always a fuzzy distinction as to at what point a fetus becomes a person, and since the mother ought to decide what is done with her body, why* didn’t* the pro-choice side sooner come to the view that “regardless of what stage the pregnancy is at, as long as the fetus isn’t in the birth canal yet, it can be terminated?”
This isn’t really the pro-choice position (at least not mine, and I’m about as stridently pro-choice as one gets). The pro-choice position is “decisions about reproductive health, including pregnancy, pre-natal care, and abortion, must be left to women and their doctors, without government involvement or interference, barring instances of medical malpractice”.
As far as the politics, many Democratic politicians have tolerated (or supported) late-term restrictions for political reasons. Maybe some of them had moral reasons as well. But most of the politics of abortion is about (not surprisingly) politics – how a specific Senator or Congressperson evaluates their constitutents’ opinion on an issue.
Perhaps not yet majority viewpoint, but with this NY law, I think others will follow, and eventually it will be the mainstream.
Because defining when a fetus is a person and isn’t a person was and is always a maddeningly inconsistent logical game. It’s in the uterus for 9 months but somehow at some point it’s supposed to be considered un-abortable, because…(arbitrariness.) It was always far more logically consistent for a pro-choicer to say “It is abortable at any point prior to birth” and also logically consistent for a pro-lifer to say “It is not abortable at any point.”
That would have been the far tidier and more succinct mindset for both.
I’m not a member of the pro-choice board of directors, so this is my opinion and I don’t have a cite, but my guess is that it’s not a winner politically. Similarly, pro-lifers don’t typically advocate for punishment of the mother, and typically have exceptions for life and health, since those are much more politically palatable to the general public than absolute bans and punishment for all involved.
My preference would be for a Canada-style lack of abortion law entirely, so it goes back to a decision between the woman and her doctor.
So the answer is no, that is NOT their current viewpoint…but making an absurd projection that it eventually will be gives you something to hang your argument on, right?
BTW, if your are going to talk about fetuses that are aborted when they are in the birth canal, the least you can do is give us stats that show how often something like that happens. I am always suspicious of those that cry about abortions performed right before birth…then cite “late term abortion” statistics that include everything from the 21st week on(and sometimes the number cited is for multiple years just to deceptively make it look like it happens much more than it actually does).
I looked but couldn’t find any. This is an article about a woman who had one at 32 weeks because the fetus wasn’t viable:
I was hoping for stats there, but no luck. It did say that almost 99% of abortions happen before 20 weeks, so that can be an upper limit. It also suggests that it costs $10,000-$25,000 (depending on how much you get done at the clinic where she went) to have the abortion at that late stage, so that’s going to severely restrict who can get one. In the woman’s case from the article, she went to a clinic in Colorado to get an injection to stop the fetus’s heart (since the fetus wouldn’t have survived anyway) and that cost $10k. Then, she went back to NY to do a regular delivery, which was also quite an ordeal, and likely costly.
I think it’s fair to say that 30+ week abortions are vanishingly rare, but I’m willing to be corrected if someone can provide a cite.
I’m not sure the statistics are completely relevant when discussing the legislation. We’re talking about what the law does or does not allow and thus whether the law is or is not just. If there were a law passed that allowed CEOs to randomly beat their employees, pointing to statistics that say CEOs almost never take advantage of this employee-assault law does not mean that the law is not flawed and unjust. Even if no CEO ever beat their employee, I still think it’s valid for us to criticize the law itself.
If we were to decide that it is unjust to kill a child just before entering the birth canal, then shouldn’t the law reflect that? It would only take a single person to take advantage of that law for an injustice to occur and occur legally. It’s the whole ‘only .2% of abortions are late term.’ Somehow the rarity is supposed to make it morally wholesome? It’s like making a claim that almost no one is murdered by being beheaded; therefore a law that makes murder by decapitation legal should be OK since it impacts so few people. I’m not sure that’s a particularly good argument.
Well, this is why I’d rather have Canada’s no law at all. I don’t even know why we need a law for a medical decision – there aren’t ones for various cancer treatments and when it’s OK to use them. Does the law say when certain heart operations are allowed and then they aren’t? Why should this medical decision be different? Why aren’t people concerned about doctors performing open-heart surgery willy-nilly? Don’t we need a law that says that arteries must be at least x% closed off and these other treatments must first be tried, and the doctor has to show the patient pictures of other heart surgeries, and the patient must make a visit, have a waiting period, make another visit, etc.?
To directly answer your question, the situation where a doctor and mother would decide to terminate a pregnancy while the fetus is in the birth canal is pretty much by definition a dire decision. I’m confident that there are zero doctors who would agree to a mother’s decision to terminate her pregnancy on a whim while she’s in labor. So, by not addressing that situation in the law, the law leaves the medical decision where it belongs, between the people involved in it.
For example, if my wife were in labor and started dying and the only way to save her would be to kill the fetus, then I would opt to kill the fetus (assuming the decision is mine) – I know and love my wife, and I don’t know the fetus.
Frequency of occurrence figures into whether to change the law, otherwise there would be laws on the books specifically banning the use of silly string instead of wires in high wire acts, which would be really, really horrible if it was ever tried, you have to admit.
We do have those laws. In New York it’s authorized under Labor Law, §§27-a, 27, 29, 200, 202-a that gives safety authority to the New York Department of Labor specifically to regulate high-wire acts. https://labor.ny.gov/workerprotection/safetyhealth/sh41.shtm
That’s not true at all. We do have legislation dealing specifically with legal medical treatments. The most famous is ‘gay conversion therapy’ laws. We also have laws dealing with what drugs are able to be used for what purposes. A doctor and I can’t agree that the best cure for my headaches would be heroin injections. Certain jurisdictions have outlawed specific procedures such as lobotomies. We have procedures such as electroconvulsive therapy that require court orders in some states and are extremely restrictive as to when they can be used. There are entire boards in every state that dictate appropriate use of techniques and licensures. Medicine is certainly not a wild west where doctors and patients have to answer to no one for the medical decisions they make. Fortunately, most doctors aren’t doing things that are beyond the pale, but when they do, even with patient consent, there are legal guidelines in place that can address those issues.
I guess your definition of “specifically” is radically different from the one I use, because I can’t find the words “silly string” anywhere in your link.
Yes, we do. But, they don’t get into specifics like, what to do when the arteries are 95% blocked vs. 98% blocked, just like this law doesn’t get into specifics about what to do for each day/week/moment of a pregnancy. As you say, most doctors aren’t doing things that are beyond the pale, and when they do, there are legal guidelines in place.
I thought your objection was that the law doesn’t say what to do when the patient asks for an abortion extremely late in the pregnancy. Did I read that wrong? If that is your objection, it seems like those situations are well handled by existing rules and regulations, just like they are for other medical procedures that don’t get into day-by-day rules. I totally agree that medicine is not a wild west where doctors and patients have no one to answer to – that’s why you don’t need those very late-term specifics in this law. You’re making my case for me.