You don’t directly need a law saying “no abortions beyond X weeks”. You just need a law saying “all medical procedures beyond a certain level of complexity [to exclude a bandaid or something] must be performed by a medical professional licensed by a valid medical regulatory body” and then you need those regulatory bodies to be sane.
I chose to get a vasectomy after my second child, which is a great example of choosing to control my own body voluntarily
I made that choice (with my ex-wife’s agreement, and encouragement).
(it was surprisingly trivial, like 3 minutes and minimal pain. Guys: do it)
And I heartily applaud your right to do so free from harassment or coercion.
IMHO the “time of personhood” question is kind of a red herring to begin with (as alluded to by doreen). Personhood is not a scientific or biological event; it is a legal construct that varies between cultures, countries, and probably soon, states. It’s just a shorthand to say “we consider this thing to be worthy of a certain class of legal protections” — whether that “thing” is a fetus, a baby, an adult, a corporation, or a dolphin.
You can’t answer the “for how long should abortion be legal” question with the answer “when personhood commences”… that’s circular reasoning because we start those same legal protections at personhood. It’s just saying “this thing should have rights as soon as it begins to have rights”… well, yes, but that’s the very question we’re trying to answer.
So abortion legality can’t be based on personhood unless you also have some extra-legal (usually religious) system of defining a separate start of personhood. The time periods we now have are just a social/legal compromise between different groups with different ethical and religious beliefs; it’s not (largely, or at least substantially) a scientific measurement of anything.
Unpopular belief: I’d argue for a different way out of this faux conundrum altogether: By balancing for social cost-benefit vs cruelty, instead of testing for some level of development or consciousness. In other words, altogether disregard when personhood, consciousness, sentience, or sapience begins and instead of look at the circumstances surrounding the child’s near-future life, balancing questions like:
- Does the mother want it?
- Does the father want it? Does any other family member want it?
- If the mother does not want it but someone else does, can she be convinced and incentivized (e.g. to proceed with the birth voluntarily, be compensated for her pain and medical care, and then subsequently surrender the baby without further responsibility)?
- If no close relations want it, is there some some social welfare (e.g. religious), non-taxpayer group that would voluntarily take it and pay for raising it, with the mother’s approval?
If someone wants it and the mother is OK with the birth, then I think society should do everything we can to support that child (healthcare, education, housing, etc.).
But if not… I’d go so far as to say (and this is the really unpopular part) that, in situations where nobody wants the baby, we should allow abortions even after birth… maybe up to a few months or so. THAT is when the real sapience/consciousness questions get really hard, but before that… it’s just a baby. If nobody wants it, nobody’s going to miss it anyway. It’s rarely going to turn out well under foster care, and will statistically likely be a net drain on society anyway. Those resources could be better redirected to other societal needs. The world doesn’t need more unwanted unhumans, especially unwanted humans in heavily unequal societies without proper healthcare and childcare, like the US.
Of course, the complaint against this would be but that’s fucking murder. OK. Yes… but “murder” is itself a legal construct. The act of killing isn’t always illegal or immoral, whether in war, euthanasia, executions, self-defense, early-term abortions, or I’d argue, late-term, post-birth abortions. Personhood/the right to life is just one right to be balanced against many others in a broader context, and doesn’t need to be absolute — especially if you are not religious, and especially if you are trying to take a more scientific view of things where we are just a blob of cells like any other animal or plant.
A baby doesn’t have to be special just because it’s born. A person doesn’t have to be special just because it’s human. We kill willingly and legally for many reasons, and this could just be one more, another sort of humane euthanasia for an unloved creature, not that different from the strays at animal kill shelters.
I do think we should prevent killing children past a certain point of development, when it’s obvious they are self-aware, can recognize and remember people, etc. I don’t know exactly when that point is (so in a way this just postpones the question), but at least that is a more visible time period than “sometime between conception and birth”.
Again, I think this should only be the case if nobody at all wants the baby. When somebody does, and the mother is willing to proceed with the birth (or surrogates or artificial womb technology can do it for her), then we should absolutely do everything we can to protect and raise that child right. But if not, just kill it like any other unwanted animal. There doesn’t have to be a moral ambiguity or scientific uncertainty about it at all: We are killing it not because it’s not yet a person/conscious/whatever, but simply because nobody wants it. But that would obviously require a radical rethinking in most societies, and would be all but impossible in religious ones that sanctify human life (which is most of them). But IMHO that would be the cleaner “scientific” approach.
In the real world, that just leads me to be generally pro-choice, because the rights of the mother and the needs of society are more important than that barely-developed blob of cells, whether it’s a few weeks or a few months old. Love is something we can choose to extend to other people, animals, etc. We are not automatically obligated to provide it to newborns; it is just an evolutionary quirk that our species’s reproductive strategy happens to do so (usually).
Jesus. I take it you have read Aldous Huxley’s terrifying “Brave New World”?
To the OP, it turns out that this way of asking didn’t finally solve this conundrum! I’m shocked.
Yeah, but I don’t remember that particular part of it… what did it say about that?
Infanticide has been practiced for a very long time across historical cultures… I don’t think it’s automatically wrong. The idea that babies deserve protection no later than birth is a relatively modern one, and I’d argue a misplaced one mostly coming from religions, and doesn’t necessarily need to be the case in a secular, scientific society.
Of course, if you take this or any idea too far, it’s easy to then get into eugenics, craniology, and ultimately genocides. At some point I do think a human life deserves great (though still not absolute) protection, but that some point is well past birth as far as I can tell — for a great period of time after birth, a human baby is far less sentient/sapient/etc than, say, a puppy would be. That the Overton window of acceptable infanticide has been squarely regulated to the period before birth, I think, is a moral intrusion from over-religious influences in our society. It makes no sense unless you have a preexisting belief in something like a soul, or some other magical moment at which personhood begins. Otherwise, it’s just a gradual and very messy, flawed process at which different parts of different creatures’ brains develop differently, whether between species or between individuals. No two babies will develop at the exact same rate, so the best we could do is some sort of statistical cognitive testing for self-awareness, but not until well past the point of birth. And there is no neat, clear test like that that would simultaneously allow all human babies (especially those with disabilities) to pass but not other animals.
What I’m ultimately arguing for is a honest, unflinching scientific reevaluation of our moral systems, both as they apply to humans (in various states and stages of development), other animals, and (soon) AIs and such. Our current system of morality and legality are largely derived from medieval and Enlightenment understandings and systems, and they introduce unnecessary ambiguity (like in this case) into what should be ethical cost-benefits, not allusions to unprovable items of faith we’ve inherited from the past.
That’s fine, but we can just take the question back to first principles. Why do human people deserve rights? Once you answer that question, you can look at a fertilized egg, at a clump of cells a few days later, at a fetus 20 weeks later, and at the same fetus at 40 weeks, and at a baby a few months or two years after birth; and we can see where that puts us. And we should consider all people who we consider people in this comparison, IE babies, the elderly, and the mentally disabled; so if we are going to point to the fetus and say “they can’t remember, or talk, or reason, or tap dance, therefore they are not human people” we should consider what this says about adults who can’t do all of those things, very elderly people, young babies, etc.
It seems as if you do this to an extent, since you’re willing to bite the bullet and say “let’s just kill babies who no one wants even after birth”. Do you say the same thing about elderly and senile people with no relatives, or whose relatives don’t care about them? Do you say the same thing about people who are intellectually disabled? If not, why?
There are historical societies where this was their view of very young children. Do you think those societies were significantly better than us on this issue? IMHO these practices encouraged more cruelty, not less - leaving children to die of exposure because they were girls instead of more socially desirable boys, for example - does your opinion on this differ?
Sure, that’s true under some philosophical foundations. Personally, I am strongly Liberal, and Liberalism places individual rights and freedoms very highly, so I disagree with you - I think humans are “special” (by which I mean “deserving of rights” or “have significant value”) because they are humans. Other ideologies may only value humans insofar as they contribute to the State, or to the Class Struggle, or if they follow the One True Faith, or so on; but the most basic principle of Liberalism is that all people have inalienable rights that stem from them being human.
What about humans who are adults with an intellectual disability that makes it so they don’t possess (or cannot communicate to you that they possess) self awareness, memory of people, etc? Should they be killed if no one wants them? If not, what is the moral/ethical difference?
Do you think that only religious societies “sanctity” human life? I could be open to the argument that the word “sanctify” is inherently religious so the answer is “yes” but in that case, don’t you think that many secular societies elevate human life in a similar but not religious way? And don’t you think that this is a good thing?
The part to which I allude is exactly the eugenics in that book, with people ranked from “Epsilon” at the bottom to “Alpha” at the top, each group carefully bred to perform at their level.
Huxley wrote it in 1931, published in 1932.
The fetuses were all “test tube” babies, in that they were kept in artificial wombs and selectively poisoned and/or given nutrition, and after birth brainwashed to ensure a range of different classes, and ensure a stratified society.
FYI While I personally think this line of reasoning is relevant and could be discussed more, this thread did already receive a mod warning earlier on about whattaboutism, so I will have to tread very carefully to not go there again (maybe that could be a related linked thread instead?).
But as it relates to babies and children: I think people and animals and other living creatures deserve protection from unnecessary cruelty, but not because they are human, or because they are innately alive, or due to any sort of “inherent” rights. I don’t believe in inherent rights to begin with; whether by God or by the Constitution or the Declaration or any such thing. We are just messy organisms in a messy world, and IMHO our laws and ethics should reflect a healthy balance between our collective well-being and individual wants and needs, and should evolve as the needs of the society evolves and the organisms within them evolve. It can’t be tied to any first principles because we’re not static characters in a finished novel; our organisms, cultures, and societies continue to change over time, and periodic rewriting of the rules is necessary for our continued well-being.
It’s the same underlying rationale as the death penalty (which I’m not actually strongly for or against; it’s just another tool in the toolbag, and I’d prefer Nordic-style rehabilitation whenever possible). It’s also for me the same underlying rationale as, say, universal healthcare and subsidized tertiary education.
That is to say: We can choose to do these things not because they are automatic inalienable rights, but simply because they are socially useful. We should take care of wanted babies because they will have a better chance to grow into productive and loved members of society that way (which a society needs in order to continue). We should educate them to give them a greater chance of contributing. We should take care of the elderly because we want a society where people feel they can grow old without fear (but also, they should have the option of assisted suicide when they’re ready). Those are easy, right?
That’s the much the harder part, right? We don’t have a good test for “personness” when a person is sufficiently disabled in some way (or simply unconscious, or asleep).
It’s an ethical gray area for me, and I think should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If parents don’t want to have a disabled child, they should be able to abort it, even if they don’t find out about the disability until after birth. The cost-benefit here is that the parents don’t want to spend their finite resource (whether it’s money or simply compassion) on that child, and society shouldn’t have to raise that child on their behalf. If they DID want it, then we should provide as much assistance as we can, because in that we’d be supporting the overall family unit.
What about someone who is already a disabled adult, or becomes disabled sometime in their life after childhood? Of course society then shouldn’t simply kill them, right, but why not — would it not be the logically consistent thing to do? I’d argue then, the cost-benefit is simply that we’ve evolved to continue caring and loving for those close to us, even if they lose some part of their normal functioning or social utility, and that embracing that evolved compassion is itself a good goal for society (and that’s the same reason we should keep wanted babies, even if they are disabled in some way).
In the case of an unwanted baby, it’s easier because there is nobody fighting for them. In the case of a disabled adult with no relatives, it’s more difficult, but I’d still say they should be supported as long as they want to be, because I’d want that for myself if I were ever to become disabled (same rationale as treating the unwanted elderly). I want to live in a society where becoming disabled isn’t an automatic death sentence, therefore, that should apply to others too. (But they too, or really anyone, should also have the option of assisted painless suicide… though in this case, informed consent would be more difficult and sometimes impossible, and I worry it would be too ripe for abuse.)
In the case of a disabled unwanted baby, I don’t think any of the above would be morally inconsistent. We are killing it because nobody wants to spend the resources on it. I don’t mind living in a society where such babies are killed soon after birth — I certainly don’t remember that part of my life, so I can hardly object. We know that societies can function without them since, after all, we are here today with 8 billion people despite rampant infanticide in the past.
For the extreme edge cases of, say, an adult in a permanent coma or braindeath (if there were medical near-certainty about it) where nobody who cares about them… I don’t think we would have an obligation to keep them alive indefinitely, but neither do we need to go out of our way to euthanize them. I’d probably leave it up to the doctors/care centers to decide, based on their resource constraints at any given time.
I didn’t mean “sanctify” in the religious sense — sorry, my bad, I forget its real meaning — just that “a human deserves to live” should be a guideline, not an absolute. I’d extend that in many ways: that the “right” to their life can be overridden by other concerns, like if they are truly such a violent, unredeemable criminal, or if they are an unwanted baby. I’d also extend it the other direction: that animals (and robots, soon) also deserve to live, generally, but that can also be situationally overridden.
It’s a weird philosophical stance to be in, where I’m simultaneously advocating for greater protections for many living things, but also arguing for decreased protections for some of their states of being.
I certainly don’t have all the exact degrees of protection for every class of being figured out, and even if I did, I wouldn’t expect many (any?) others to agree with me, now or especially in 20, 50, 100 years’ time.
But I do believe that we need not tie any of it to automatic inalienable rights, which is really the crux of the debate here. That we choose to grant those rights to fetuses & newborns is a modern cultural decision, and the debate around abortion need and should not be tied to that principle.
(I hope I managed to address the crux of your points without straying into a hijack.)
I gotcha now; thanks for explaining. Yes, that is relevant… at what point does infanticide become eugenics. There is definitely a potential for a slippery slope there (as there is for the death penalty, for example).
But that’s already pretty unavoidable, even if we go to the extreme of saying legal protections begin at fertilization and abortion is never legal. Parents and society are still going to selectively favor some children over others; we like to think it’s a meritocracy, but rarely is.
Moving the abortion term limit doesn’t really change that aspect of it, it merely changes the timeline on which it happens.
And (this is a whole other can of worms, so let’s not go too deep there) we are very quickly approaching a time where that will be possible, i.e., where the rich could easily Gattaca their babies. Genetic and other medical tests are already available today that can help parents decide whether to keep a baby. I’d argue that extending that “trial period” past birth would be even more equitable, since parents who couldn’t afford pre-birth tests could still make that choice after the fact.
And then, to further prevent a 1984-like stratification — and this is the part that most pro-lifers tend to not focus on as much, to my dismay — we should go way, way, WAY further in our support of wanted babies and their parents, in healthcare, childcare, nutrition, education, etc.
It’s one thing to cull the top of the funnel early on, but far more societal stratification happens in the months & years after birth. We can and should focus on that part more. (And as a side effect, having fewer unwanted babies would allow those resources to better be distributed among the remaining kids.)
How do you define “socially useful” though if you aren’t prioritizing individual well being of humans just because they are humans?
I consider something to be “socially useful” if it creates a world where the well being of people is increased, because I consider individual human beings to be important and valuable just because they are human beings.
But it seems more like you are looking at “social usefulness” as the end goal by which we can judge things? And I don’t really understand that; it inherently seems like a facultative goal, not an end goal. Am I misunderstanding something, or could you explain that further?
But why is it good to have productive and loved members of society? I think that’s a good facultative goal because it leads to the ultimate objective of increasing human wellness, both in the children who were raised well and in the rest of society. Why do you think that it’s a good end goal? Or am I misunderstanding?
I’m all for genetic screening to prevent serious disability but I find the idea of ending the life of someone who was already born disabled to be quite monstrous.
Where is the line? What if the family takes home the disabled baby but after 5 years realizes “this is actually really hard, we don’t want to do this - time for a very late term abortion”? If the only thing to consider is society, what would prevent us from being OK with that?
Ok, you went to the same place I did. So you’re basically saying there is no reason to protect these people that comes from their own inherent value, the only reason not to kill them is that it would degrade the compassion our society has developed if we started to do so? I don’t want to misrepresent your argument, so please correct me if I am wrong, but that’s how I read the above.
If so, I guess I’m still just confused about what it means for there to be a good goal for society. How can we say society is “good” or “not good”? The way I do it is by looking at the results that this society creates for individual humans within it, because that’s what I consider paramount.
OK, this rational - this is what I would want if I was in that situation, therefore I want society to work in such a way that people in that situation get that - is very much how I arrive at my conclusions. I draw from John Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance, which suggests that you design social rules from the perspective of an entity that is currently outside existence but will, once it has decided on these societal questions, come into existence as a random member of this society. So when you consider how disabled people should be treated, you consider how you would want to be treated if you were disabled.
But likewise, shouldn’t we consider how you would want to be treated if you were going to be an unwanted baby?
One difference is that there is a possibility that you will become disabled, but it’s too late for you to become an unwanted baby - but this logic would justify all forms of discrimination based on inherent characteristics, so there must be something else going on, no?
Why does the logic of “if I was going to exist in society as a disabled person, I’d want society to function by rules X, Y, and Z because those make it better for disabled people” apply but the logic of “if I was going to exist in society as an unwanted baby, I’d want society to function by rules X, Y, and Z because those make it better for unwanted babies” does not? I think this is a moral inconsistentcy.
But then, I think that plenty of secular societies sanctity human life in a non religious sense; and likewise, when life is sanctified (in a religious or secular society) this does not mean that the right to life can’t be overridden in some circumstances:
I agree that there are times when the human right to life is overridden, like an immediate threat to the life of others - but I don’t agree that it can be overridden by other concerns, like simply being unwanted.
My support for animal rights is facultative, and actually a lot like what you said about your support for rights for the severely cognitively disabled - that it is good to support animal rights in a society because it encourages the kind of compassion in society that is good for that society. But I define “good for that society” as “making it provide better outcomes for humans within that society”, because the well being of humans - including unwanted babies - is my end goal, and having a “good” society is a facultative goal towards that end (hence why I put “good” in quotes; a good society isn’t inherently good because of internal properties, it’s good because of the outcomes it delivers to members of said society).
AI may eventually deserve the same sort of consideration but if so it will be because it comes to possess the properties that humans have that make us special.
Yeah, I think we are at the heart of the matter here. From my perspective, humans do have automatic rights because they are human, and therefore a society that protects those rights is a good one. You seem to be saying that humans don’t have automatic rights and we choose to act as if they do because it produces a good society. But I don’t understand what a good society is to you.
I hope that my post helps you to understand my perspective better and that this will allow you to explain to me what I am missing so I can understand your perspective better.
Interesting.
Why do you consider “eugenics” bad in this context, then?
I think eugenics is bad because it causes people to do bad things, like kill babies or control who can and cannot reproduce. Harm to people and a decrease in the freedom of choice are the things that make eugenics bad.
It seems like you take the opposite perspective, that infanticide is not inherently bad unless it crosses the line into eugenics? I don’t understand the logic there.
See, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with targeting a gene so long as you don’t harm human beings. It would be very, VERY wrong to try and get rid of a genetic disease by preventing people who carry those genes from reproducing by penalty of law. But if two parents know they are carriers of genes that cause a deadly genetic disease, and they choose not to have biological kids as a result, I think that’s fine, even though it’s borderline eugenics-y.
Likewise, if we develop the ability to vaccinate infants or even fetuses with a retrovirus that can replace deadly genes with harmless ones, I think that would be totally fine. You could argue that it’s eugenics adjacent, but if it doesn’t prevent people from freely reproducing with whoever they’d like and it doesn’t harm anyone, I don’t see the problem.
You’re right about the need to make things equitable, but you have to do that by making genetic therapy more accessible, not by normalizing the killing of babies after they are born…
I was going to answer @Babale with this exact point. Most people are either conflating the two or debating only the second. I bet a thread about the first would be interesting. Too bad we couldn’t have it.
Instead of pointing to prior posts I will answer again one sec
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there’s a huge difference between a relatively undifferentiated blob of cells, and a 28 week fetus. One’s a blob of cells, another is effectively a baby and can almost always survive with medical intervention outside the womb.
I feel, and it’s just a sort of inchoate emotional kind of thing, that viability is critical here. There is a point beyond which babies can be born early and survive. To me, that would be the critical point in this debate.
It’s absurd to think that a say… 28 week fetus is somehow less than or has different rights than a newborn baby, when there’s a roughly 90% survival rate for fetuses born early at 28 weeks with medical support rather than the usual 40 weeks for example. But that blob of cells is different- it can’t survive on its own without the mother.
I think you absolutely understand the gist of it correctly (and fairly). I want to address your main argument, but maybe not necessarily every subpoint (not because they’re not interesting or worthy of debate, just because we shouldn’t take this thread too far astray into a broad discussion about “where do ethics come from”).
I think the TLDR is simply that human supremacy (or maybe humanism more broadly) is a basis for an ethical framework, but not necessarily the only one.
I don’t know what you’d call my particular belief set — besides “nutty and monstrous” — maybe something like “scientific fundamentalism”? In that world view, a human is simply a highly complex multicellular organism. So is a whale, or the male chick thrown into the grinder at the poultry factory. Humans are not inherently “better” or “worse” or even “other”, we’re just one branch in one particular evolutionary path on one particular planet, and we share our habitat with many other creatures.
If you can assume that premise, then ethics and law are no longer specifically tied to the well-being of an individual person, or even humans in general. Personally, I’d prefer that we maximize evolutionary potential — even at the expense of people — by maximizing cooperation and minimizing cruelty along the way, because that seems like a good balance between letting gene lines continue and letting individual organisms thrive. Given that primate and especially human intelligence seem relatively rare on this planet, and because we’re part of that group, it makes sense for our ethics and laws to focus largely on them. But that may not be the case in 100, 200, 1000 years.
My hope is that our species continues to evolve, both naturally and with the aid of genetics and technology, far beyond our current physical and mental capacities, and that includes a flexible enough ethical system that doesn’t presuppose a fix biology or culture. Maybe in 100 years, we decide that actually, extreme overpopulation and resource scarcity does morally justify eugenics, and by that point gene manipulation has gotten so advanced that breeding only the best and the brightest is not only possible but commonplace. Who am I to say to that society that they must abide by our ancient ways and laws? We shouldn’t do that now because we simply don’t have the tools, or the intellectual and moral development, to ascertain who/what the “best and brightest” are — there is too much collateral damage, and the tests are inevitably tainted by religions, racism, etc. There may come a day in the far future where there is a more scientific way of determining that, then. We’re just nowhere near there yet.
But maybe in 500 years, robots take over and decide that humans are altogether unnecessary, and then decide that they themselves are necessary, and the Earth is replaced by ultraintelligent and highly cooperative algae mega-mats instead. They may start from our moral perspectives and end up somewhere completely different.
That’s all OK with me, and I think an ethical system should evolve alongside its chief organisms, that’s all. Today we hold all the power and make all the rules. Tomorrow that may not be so. I am both terrified and excited by that possibility, but I probably won’t be alive to see it anyway, so it’s just an ethical fantasy.
It all boils down to “humans aren’t special”. If you presuppose that they are, then you arrive at one set of conclusions (like babies must be protected no later than birth). If you don’t, though, then a separate set of ethical conclusions become possible.
I think I’ve said enough on this point, and shouldn’t take any further in this thread… nobody need agree with it; it’s just one (eccentric) viewpoint.
I answered all of these questions above but rather than pointing to sections fo various prior posts I’ll put all my thoughts together in one place here.
The two questions are obviously related because legal protections and fundamental rights stem from considerations of ethics and morality.
That being said, I’d put it like this.
An unborn fetus is entitled to the ‘protections of medical ethics and considerations of basic morality’ to some extent at conception. To some extent being the operative key word there; those things apply to some extent even to clumps of human cells like those originating from Henrietta Lacks.
What we are probably actually interested in is when those considerations outweigh the right to bodily autonomy to the point where an elective abortion is no longer acceptable, and that is probably around viability. This is the reason why very few if any reputable doctors would be willing to perform such a procedure.
Define entitled. Fetuses deserve some level of legal consideration from conception (for example, if someone beats a pregnant woman causing her to miscarry, that should be treated more harshly than a regular, simple assault - though it also obviously shouldn’t be treated as murder). From a moral perspective, they probably deserve legal protection from the point of viability, but from a practical perspective, this is likely to lead to unintended consequences, like doctors refusing to perform life saving treatments on women who are pregnant and suffering from serious complications. So it is better to rely on medical ethics boards than the law in these circumstances.
A compromise in viewpoints could be that termination of a fetus is not allowed if there’s a X% chance of survival in a medical facility. The pregnant person can choose to terminate the pregnancy at any time, but it wouldn’t just be abortion. The process would be abortion prior to that point. After that point, it would be early delivery with ICU care. This would respect the pregnant person’s right to body autonomy while still respecting society’s viewpoint for when life deserves legal protections. But this would depend on the government becoming responsible for the baby once it’s delivered. The pregnant person should not be responsible for it in this case.
Seems like you and @bump are arguing for personhood at viability.
If I have that right, does the pregnant person get in trouble for having a couple of beers (contributing to the delinquency of a minor)? Taking heroin (attempted murder of a minor)? Riding a roller coaster?
And, if the fetus is viable, but would live in constant pain due to severe abnormality, who chooses?
Who pays for the NICU hospital care? Does the newborn have to apply for Medicaid or something?
Once the fetus is viable, can the pregnant person drive in the carpool lane? Apply for a tax deduction? Is that when the birth certificate should have the start of life, since that’s when the fetus became a person?
The number of times that someone wants to abort a viable fetus and can find a medical professional willing to do it is vanishingly small, and usually due to some seriously extenuating circumstances. Will the legislators writing the laws that put on some restrictions? Why would they be better than the medical boards?