There’s no need to make a law against things that don’t happen. No woman goes through 9 months of pregnancy in order to terminate it.
However what does every so often happen is that the doctor says, “On no! it’s all gone wrong! There is no chance of the baby being viable and if we don’t terminate this now, the mother will die.”
When this happens, both the woman and the doctor need to be able to act in the best interests of all concerned without worrying about legal ramifications.
I agree with all of that.
Which is why people (maybe?) suggesting that the mother can terminate up until the last moment is really unhelpful and only hands anti-choice activists more ammunition.
In cases where the woman wants an abortion during labor, she is probably dealing with a non-viable baby and a very high risk of serious or life-threatening complications during delivery. Today, doctors will probably perform an emergency C-section (which is not fun and carries its own risks), or possibly an instrumental delivery (forcepts and/or vacuum). The baby will die because it is nonviable, but doctors provide/facilitate palliative care such as holding the baby, providing warmth, and attempting to manage outward signs of distress (potentially including assisted feeding).
Before the federal partial-birth abortion ban, doctors could perform a second-trimester abortion procedure which involved dilating (widening) the cervix, maneuvering the fetus into a breech position (feet-first), pulling it partway into the vaginal canal, then collapsing the skull so that the head can be pulled through the cervix.
Today, the federal partial-birth abortion ban prohibits procedures which terminate the fetus after it has been delivered past the navel and into the vaginal canal. Doctors perform a slightly modified second-trimester abortion procedure which involves either the administration of lethal medications before proceeding as above or, less commonly, physically collapsing the skull and pulling off limbs before removing the fetus from the uterus.
~Max
I get all of that. I really do. I used to work for Planned Parenthood. A member of my family worked for them for 25+ years until somewhat recently. I wholly support a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. But there are still limits.
So, how do you parse this?
Recent news has suggested to me that it is difficult to make an anti-abortion law that doesn’t criminalize that scenario as, “Late term abortion.”
Which is why maternal death rates are rising in red states.
I agree with you that no doctor would do that. I’m pretty sure that we are in agreement that leaving it to the judgement of parents and ethical doctors is a better idea than trying to outlaw abortion.
“…as long as the woman has absolute inviolate sovereignty over it [the fetus] and her [own] body until it [the fetus] exits her body.” I don’t think it is implied that her sovereignty extends to the doctor’s body.
~Max
Or she’s bleeding to death.
The wife of a co-worker had her uterus rupture during delivery. (It was supposed to be a vbac.) They lost the baby while saving her life. My guess is they could have given up on her and saved the baby, if that has been the priority, as it was full term and everything has seemed normal. But everything went to hell, and they could only save one.
My co-worker didn’t show up for a week. The wife was hospitalized for most of that time. It was a tragedy. At least it wasn’t also a crime.
In that situation, because it happened during delivery, it would be classified as a stillbirth or (if the baby lived for some time after delivery) neonatal death rather than an abortion. But to the personhood question, I would guess your coworker was issued a birth certificate for stillbirth, or a certificate of death. And funeral homes would likely perform a funeral, if the family so wished.
~Max
Yeah, and I’m even more sure that no woman would ever do that either, which is why I’m comfortable saying that the fetus should be treated as the woman’s property to do as she pleases, until it’s living separate from her body.
There are all kinds of little lines and what-if’s you could draw that make abortion sound like a choice too ghastly for a woman to be trusted with. I say that women won’t make ghastly choices unless the woman feels her life or future is threatened. Say that she learns while in labor that the father is a serial killer who killed a hundred women! Should she be forced to deliver? I say no, until that fetus is alive outside her body, it’s her property to dispose with absolutely as she pleases, without question.
Yes, I am saying that the law should allow prosecution and jail time for a doctor who fails to perform a partial-birth abortion when directed to do so by the patient. I am supremely confident that no woman will elect to terminate a fetus that’s halfway out the birth canal saying “mama”, and if she does, then the law must assume she’s got a supremely good reason for doing that. The idea is not “kill a baby at convenience”, the idea is “mother knows what’s best, always.”
But if labor has ended 5 seconds ago and she learns exactly the same thing the morality of the situation has changed? I don’t buy that.
It’s a good thing that few if any people in this thread seem to be saying that. What we seem to be saying instead is that there is a certain point beyond which an elective abortion is deeply immoral but this doesn’t mean that we think the law should prevent women from making that choice because of other unintended consequences like doctors hesitating to perform life saving procedures, and because doctors and medical ethics already take that option off the table regardless of the law.
This on the other hand is far more extreme. You think a doctor should be forced to perform this sort of procedure against their will? What happened to bodily autonomy?
The morality of the situation is that a person should be sovereign over her own body. Once the child is born, her own bodily autonomy is no longer a factor, it’s her parental rights, and she has autonomy to surrender the child at that point. If you’re tempted to say that having this option should negate her right to choose to give birth, no it should not, nobody should be forced to remain pregnant against their will at any state of pregnancy, for any duration of time at all.
If the doctor can arrange for a different doctor to take over, that’s fine. If they can’t do that, and the patient remains under their medical care, and the patient decides they would experience life-changing harm from giving birth, and the abortion would not threaten the mother’s life, then yes, they are obligated to provide the requested care. The doctor’s choice is to provide it, or accept whatever sanctions apply to doctors who withhold medical care to the patient’s detriment. Jail time and loss of licensure would be appropriate in my view.
Nobody should be licensed as an OB-GYN if they’re not prepared to manage a pregnancy according to the patient’s wishes. If they’re hesitant about that, then their bodily autonomy can lead them toward pathology or dermatology or some other specialty where their confusion is less likely to harm patients.
And it’s not extreme at all, because again, just as we can say “no doctor would ever do that”, we can also say “no woman would ever decide that” and err in the direction of her control over her body. If you think that’s likely to lead to an epidemic of abortions with 10 minutes left on the labor clock, you have a horrendous view of women and have no place making any decisions pertaining to them.
Woman can be trusted with absolute and unchallenged autonomy over their own reproductive matters, because they will always make the right choice, and nobody else is in any position to determine what “wrong” means in that case. Certainly no man.
I agree, but when a fetus is 5 minutes from being born it deserves consideration as a person. Not legally, because of the chilling effect on the ability of doctors to perform life saving medical procedures, but certainly morally.
Where are they going to find another doctor willing to violate all established medical ethics?
Jail time under what law? And there is exactly 0 chance that any medical licensing body on the planet would censure a doctor for refusing to perform an abortion under these circumstances.
Or are you saying that this is how medical review boards should operate, not how they currently do?
Nobody should be licensed as an OB-GYN unless they are willing to follow the code of medical ethics enforced by the body issuing there license.
I agree that it’s incredibly unlikely that any woman would ask for such a procedure. Until this thread, I assumed the only place people who thought such a procedure was morally acceptable existed was in the deranged imagination of anti abortion activists.
No, I think the vast majority of women would view such an abortion as morally reprehensible and never ask for it unless it was medically necessary.
Are you saying that you believe that if a woman goes into a doctor’s office and says “I want X procedure done” then if this procedure involves reproductive matters that doctors will just perform any procedure no questions asked?
I don’t think that’s the case for men or women. It certainly hasn’t been my experience at the doctor’s.
Or is this prescriptive rather than descriptive?
Sure! And the mother can, should, and will consider it, and we must trust her make the right choice, and accept that choice. End of story.
If someone has that viewpoint, then they should also be able to say how it differs from infanticide. It’s one thing to say the pregnant person can choose to terminate the pregnancy at any time. But it’s different to say that during the process they can arbitrarily decide to terminate fetus as well. In your prior example you said:
I think most people will view that as an example of infanticide. If someone is using that as a supporting reason to allow abortion, many people will react negatively to that and it may actually end up being counter productive. There are plenty of examples of a new parent committing infanticide. Society looks on those situations as crimes and doesn’t assume the parent had a good reason for it. The person who commits infanticide will be treated as committing a crime pretty much regardless of how good of an idea they thought it was.
Infants are born. Fetuses aren’t. If you believe they’re the same, then you should be able to say why a fetus is an infant.
People do want to conflate fetus-hood and infant-hood as a bid to extend state control into the uterus. To that end, they want to pretend that a fetus is some special species of infant, but they offer only emotional logic and “everybody says” logic.
And you’re wrong that society has always condemned infanticide. Throughout history, society has been much more accepting of letting parents make such choices and not prying too deeply into it, because childbirth was in the realm of family decision-making. Not that anyone loved infanticide or hated children, but everyone understood that family decisions aren’t always easy, at least until the church started insinuating itself into it, at least until people started surrendering their care to hospital settings where many other people had opportunities to insert themselves into the decision-making process.
Again, no late-term abortion is going to happen on a whim. No woman actually wants to terminate a healthy fetus about to be born, this is just a scare tactic to justify busybodies endlessly chipping away at their bodily autonomy until it’s gone.
That’s why we need bright-line determinations on this. Busybodies will come up with no end of lurid fantasies of how an irresponsible harlot might get away with having some casual sex and then tossing a live infant on a whim. We have to see these as nothing more than emotional appeals intended as a strategy to control women’s bodies. We have to dismiss them with no more response than “yes, and?” Because it’s better to risk a one in a million chance of that happening than people using that outlandish scenario to justify obstructing the far more reasonable needs to terminate that happen thousands of times a year.
At some point, people start feeling like the fetus is a baby inside the womb. Parents will typically start treating the fetus as a baby at some point and start talking to it, singing to it, asking how it’s doing, naming it, etc. They do not behave as if it’s a mass of organic matter. They behave as if it’s a baby that just happens to be inside a womb. Splitting hairs over dictionary definitions does not reflect the reality of how humans react emotionally to the fetus. Perhaps that’s truly how you feel, but you should recognize that’s not how most people feel and they may not be receptive to that kind of argument.
And even though infanticide has long been part of human culture, it’s not part of most modern cultures. Having abortion procedures which are almost indistinguishable from infanticide will generally be viewed negatively by modern societies. Certainly there’s value in saying that abortion and fetus termination should be the person’s choice at any moment before it has fully exited the person, but that position will be viewed as pretty extreme by most people and it may motivate them to demand much more restrictive abortion regulations.
Because I don’t value humans based on whether or not they have passed through a birth canal or are designated a “fetus” or a “baby” or a “toddler” or an “infant”.
A fetus at 41 weeks has a brain that’s developed enough to have a subjective experience, and that means I place equal value on the continuation of that subjective experience whether it is inside a womb or not.
I am very clear on the distinction between fetus-hood and infant-hood, I am just unclear on why that distinction should make a difference as to the moral weight placed on continuing its existence.
And the world was a worse place when the attitude towards infanticide was “it’s their baby, who cares?”. Just like it was a worse place when the attitude towards a man beating his wife was “it’s his wife, prying into the realm of family decision making is not society’s place”.
It differs from infanticide because the mother’s health and life are at stake as long as the fetus is within her. My coworkers wife had an abortion during delivery. (@Max_S tells me that legally it wouldn’t be considered one, but for purposes of this discussion, it counts.) I doubt she’s the person who actually made the call, for a lot of reasons. But her obstetrician did it on her behalf.
Now, does that mean it’s morally okay to kill a nine month fetus because the mother learns that the father is cheating on her? No, i don’t think so. There are a lot of things that aren’t morally okay but that are legal, however. And I’m confident that there won’t be enough 9 month according for that kind of reason to offset the increased risk of maternal death if we outlaw it.
I do think it’s morally okay for the woman to end that pregnancy, but at 9 months, it’s not especially challenging to end it in a way that leaves a live baby and a live mother, in almost all circumstances.
See, I’m on the same page as you, but it seems to me that some in this thread would disagree. They would argue that either it IS morally acceptable to have a nine month abortion because of a late reveal of infidelity. Or at least, that it is not morally acceptable to question the mother’s decision in that scenario even if you defend her right to make that decision while disagreeing with it.
Okay then, if you realize this, then you should understand why you can feel perfectly comfortable with letting a woman have absolute and inviolate power over this decision. You can trust that these special feelings are so strong that they’ll always guide the mother to the decision you feel is right, so you don’t need to control it at all. That is how I feel about it. I happen to think you are correct about all of those feelings, and that’s why we can trust women to make sober and prudent choices.
I will argue that I’m not interested in legislating around lurid hypotheticals that suppose a woman will end a viable, imminent birth simply due to marital infidelity (which we must note - I specified “serial killer” which you’ve downgraded to “infidelity” because it seems more controvertible).
Again, I will repeat that if you credit such a hypothetical with any realism at all, then you have a horrendous view of women, and I would suggest that’s really what’s underlying all this. The little ladies are liable to get the vapors, we can’t trust them not to kill their almost-infants on a whim. That attitude is what keeps coming up over and over.