I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Is it anything besides ‘your cite shows something I don’t like so it doesn’t count’?
Late term abortions are not usually performed for reasons relating to fetal or maternal health. That’s what the data show.
Congratulations on your ability to do arithmetic. Somewhat muted congratulations, since you appear to think there are three cites in my post while there were only two.
Regards,
Shodan
How do pro-choicers usually respond? I have no idea, it’s not a usual situation to be in. I have never been in that situation.
But if someone were to tell me that he was the survivor of a botched abortion attempt, I might, depending on how it came up:
Express sympathy
Inquire for more details
Inquire as to his take on abortion (surely he has a unique perspective)
Change the subject
Probably there are some other ways I might respond.
fwiw, while I am “pro-choice” I oppose any abortion after viability unless the mother’s life is at risk and the fetus can’t be safely removed, or the fetus has a horrible congenital problem and isn’t expected to survive much after delivery. So I can’t imagine I would approve of whatever situation led to this person’s story.
Also, fwiw, I am the result of birth-control failure, but I am in favor of birth control.
I think he was trying to get at the distinction between late term abortions and extremely late term abortions. Only the latter yield survivors. And my understanding was that abortion providers generally won’t do extremely late term abortions unless there is a serious medical problem. If the mother says “I just found out” or “I changed my mind”, she will generally be turned away. Or so I have heard.
*"Physical abuse or rape by a partner increased the likelihood of later abortion, with 13.7 percent of abortion patients who’d experienced second-trimester procedures (compared with 10 percent of women who hadn’t). Other disruptive life events — loss of a job or a partner, for example — were likewise linked to later abortions. Of abortion patients who’d experienced three disruptive events in the last year, 14.8 percent got later-term abortions.
Experiencing disruptive events may prevent women from noticing their pregnancy early enough to get a first-trimester abortion, the researchers wrote in their report. Life chaos may also prevent women from accessing an abortion early. Alternatively, some women may have planned to continue their pregnancies until their circumstances changed, forcing them to seek an abortion later rather than earlier."*
*"My son’s condition could not have been detected earlier in the pregnancy. Far from lazy, I was conscientious about prenatal care. I received excellent medical attention from my obstetrician, one of the District’s best. Only at our 20-week sonogram were there warning signs, and only with a high-powered MRI did we discover the devastating truth of our son’s condition. He was missing the corpus callosum, the central connecting structure of the brain, and essentially one side of his brain.
If he survived the pregnancy and birth, the doctors told us, he would have been born into a life of continuous seizures and near-constant pain. He might never have left the hospital. To help control the seizures, he would have needed surgery to remove more of what little brain matter he had. That was the reality for me and for my family.
Meet, too, the many real women I know who belong to one of the saddest groups in the world: those carrying babies for whom there was no real hope and who made the heartbreaking decision to end their pregnancies for medical reasons. Meet the women among this group who had gotten, they thought, safely to the middle of pregnancy, who had been planning nurseries and filling baby registries, only to find they would need to plan a memorial service and to build, somehow, a life in aftermath."*
Frankly, I myself might respond by saying that if it wouldn’t have been for the Nazis and their rabid anti-Semitism, then I myself might never have been born. (Literally–after all, the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 caused my paternal grandfather and his family to flee hundreds of miles, if not more, eastwards to the interior of the Soviet Union, which in turn is where my paternal grandfather later met my paternal grandmother.) However, this certainly doesn’t mean that Nazism or anti-Semitism is acceptable by any means.
Anyway, my point here is that the fact that something either directly or indirectly caused someone to exist does not necessarily mean that this thing itself was good by any means.
Is there some problem with this part?
When i first read the question for a few seconds I thought “survivors” meant babies the some how survived being aborted— what would their response be? haha
Yet another abortion debate where the father of the unborn child is held completely blameless.
Most pro-choice people don’t “blame” women for choosing an abortion when birth control fails. So why wouldn’t the father be “blameless” as well, unless he raped the mother?
A bit late in my response…
The doctor referenced in my post #8 was Dr. Abu Hayat, a duly licensed physician. He had his office at 9 Avenue A in the East Village in New York City. This was not a back alley procedure by a unlicensed abortionist.
He was, however, grossly negligent by the standards of medical practice. One patient died of infection and perforated uterus reportedly attributed to use of dirty surgical instruments by Dr Hayat.
If calling him a quack makes you feel better, so be it. But Ana Rodriguez survived an illegal late term abortion performed by a licensed physician in a real medical clinic.
How real was his clinic? Must not have been a properly run clinic? Actually his clinic was a member of the National Abortion Federation.
At least his license was revoked. Checked the website on the NY State Department of Health and search the name of Abu Hayat for results.
Whether or not he was a “quack” he was not practicing medicine appropriately. He seems to have racked up a lot of killed/damaged patients due to his failure to do the job properly. (Which includes both sterilizing instruments and making reasonably sure of the age of the fetus before attempting to abort it.) I am pretty pro-choice, but I have no problems with a guy like that being shut down.
The simple answer is, there is no simple answer. Being pro-choice doesn’t mean one necessarily agrees with all of the decisions to abort any more than being pro-legalization means that one necessarily approves of all the decisions people make about where and when to smoke pot. Personally, I’m pro-choice precisely BECAUSE I’m not in a place to be able to make a complicated decision without the information that the mother and doctor have, nor do I have to bear the moral, ethical, economic, or social consequences of those decisions.
Consider a situation where a doctor has good reason to think a child has a low chance of survival (say 10%) and it risks the health of the mother significantly (say, less than 50% if they terminate, but nearly 100% if they do), so they attempt to terminate the pregnancy but the child ends up defying the odds. Given 10% odds, on average 1 in 10 of those kids in that sort of situation will survive. It’s a crappy situation to be in and it sucks if that kid grows up with injuries as a result, but in that situation, if I were the husband or family member charged with making that choice, I’d do the same thing.
And even for the vast majority of pro-choice supporter, I’m sure they could fabricate some situation they’d find morally reprehensible to abort but the child survived anyway, but they’re willing to accept those rare situations to protect it for the much more likely situations that it needs to remain as a real option on the table and having legislation just muddies those decisions even more in what is already likely a difficult situation.
And, really, this is how rights are. It really, really sucks when people misuse their rights and someone gets hurt. For instance, we protect free speech, and it’s one of the most sacred tenants of Western Representative Democracies, but part of that comes with the fact that some assholes are going to use it to spread hatred, racism, falsehoods, etc. Sometimes free speech can lead to some pretty horrible things, like bringing together hate groups, unintentionally (or maybe not so unintentionally) leading to violence. I will absolutely express my sympathy to people who have had to deal with hate and it’s consequences, but if their response is to argue that we need to put limits of free speech, even understanding their pain, I just cannot agree with that conclusion.
Abortion survival stories are fundamentally an appeal to emotion. Yes, abortions sometimes lead to injuries to child and/or mother. Sometimes, even when all medically goes well, it can have long term emotional, social, or economic consequences leading to serious depression, fracture families, etc. But, as with all rights, it comes with an onus to use it responsibly, carefully thinking over whether that’s really the right decision for a given situation, and the ownership of whatever consequences, foreseen or not, may result. So, yeah, it sucks that sometimes it leads to suffering, and it’s impossible to have an objective law, so we have to trust people to use their own moral judgment.
It looks like this thread is cooling down, but I would like to disagree with the apparent suggestion that there’s something illogical about valuing the lives of P’s first and third babies when J and A clearly benefitted from their deaths.
Wikipedia’s page on organ trafficking raises concerns about criminal networks kidnapping and murdering people for their organs. Figures aren’t given - they only say that it’s “increasingly” common - but presumably, there are at least a handful of people who are alive because of ill-gotten organs. I think I could reasonably be glad that such people are alive but still think that killing people for their organs is wrong and ought to carry some sort of legal penalty.
Agree. Pro-choice means people get to make their own choices. You don’t like abortion, don’t have one. I really doubt any testimony about a so-called “abortion survivor” is going to stop any woman from seeking a first-trimester abortion.
Abortion is a complicated issue and many people find the issue difficult to reconcile with other views. No matter how you discuss it something dies in an abortion.
However that doesnt mean a person is totally against somone’s ability to chose. If anything it’s a wakeup call for couples to slow down and take better precautions with birth control. It’s easy to be horny, hot, and drunk and things get out of hand. Life isnt like the movies where anything goes.
Personally I wish their were more movies like “[Knocked Up](Dale Eldred)” where a miscommunication about birth control after a drunken one night stand leads to a pregnancy.
There are several countries in Europe that have reduced the abortion rate to pretty close to zero. None of these countries have bans or restrictions on abortion. What they have is excellent programs of readily available, affordable contraception and comprehensive sex education in schools.
Re: the topic of the thread, abortion survivors, these are only going to be from abortions performed in the third trimester (24+ weeks), which aren’t very common.
Making abortion more widely available would almost certainly increase the rate of first-trimester abortions vs. later abortions. If there was a free clinic on every corner women wouldn’t have to try to scrape up funds and arrange for travel to the only clinic in the state and they could get it done as soon as possible.
If schools taught better sex education, women wouldn’t be wondering if they were pregnant for months; they’d know. Or perhaps they’d know how to prevent it in the first place. Too bad the GOP is hell-bent on blocking access to contraception and early abortions by defunding Planned Parenthood.
How does the number of abortion survivors compare with the number of newborns found in dumpsters?
Yeah, I’m not terribly impressed with the bit of trickery reported in the OP, but I’m even less impressed with the prochoice motto of “Againt abortion? Then don’t have one!” like “Against murder? Then don’t kill anyone… or get upset if Planned Parenthood wants to use public funding for that purpose.”
What? As soon as you compare abortion with “murder”, you accept an artificially fabricated premise as fact and now you’re firmly in the anti-abortion camp. That no such equivalence exists is the whole crux of the argument. And Planned Parenthood, just like everyone else, is supposed to get public funding on the basis that they support a rational public interest, not on the basis of adherence to some theocratic crackpot dogmatism.
The entire OP is ridiculous. What would be a pro-choice response to someone who exists because a condom broke? What would be a pro-choice response to someone who exists only because his mom got drunk and decided to have sex with that sailor at the bar that night? “Yay liquor!” “Yay for promiscuous sluts – they gave me life!” :rolleyes:
And if babies get damaged by incompetent abortion procedures then maybe we need better medical practices, and maybe one way to achieve that is to quit allowing theocratic lunatics to push abortion off into the fringes of medical practice.
The whole premise of the OP is categorically absurd.
Maybe some of us want those services offered, especially at tax payer support, to be offered by someone other than an abortion clinic.