Marie Fleming, a woman in Ireland, has been denied the right to have her partner assist her in dying without him ending up in jail. So she has to remain alive and suffering while her body deteriorates:
Some say prayer would be the best thing for her… :dubious: :
Life, in the above case, means little more than pain.
In the meantime, a woman in El Salvador has gone into renal failure as the result of a complicated pregnancy (and the fetus is anencephalic to boot), but no abortion are allowed in that country for any reason. So she’ll die, the fetus will be born dead or die shortly after birth, and her older child will have no mother. If the doctors help her have an abortion, they’ll go to jail along with her:
In that case, a therapeutic abortion would be the best thing for her. But it probably won’t happen.
This should serve as a reminder that life isn’t always desirable and an abortion isn’t always a tragedy. (I’d put that on a bumper sticker, but someone would probably run me off the road and kill me in their outrage over such “anti-life” views.)
Needless to say, in both countries you cited, the Catholic church has had a strong influence on the legal system.
There are other factors in their judicial histories, and certain other religious sects have similar tenets and power in some other places, but that is the common thread of the OP’s examples.
I believe life, whatever that is, begins at conception. I don’t like abortion. But I’m in favor of women having safe and legal access to an abortion, if it’s needed. Better that than having two people die, and my beliefs should not rule the decisions of someone else, since they are religion based.
An abortion, in the case of that woman, is something that would be acceptable to any person with an ounce of human compassion.
In 1992 I voted for the Perot/Stockdale ticket, based on something the latter said in the vice Presidential debate. Ret. Adm. Stockdale, when asked about his position on abortion said “I believe that what a woman does with her own body is her business, period.”
These are the same fucking assholes who think a woman with an ectopic pregnancy should be forced to undergo surgery and loss of a tube rather than have a simple methotrexate shot. I hate the Catholic church’s stance on women’s reproductive issues. They’re just evil. A baby without a brain to them is the same thing as a full grown woman.
Sick celibate sociopaths who should stick to their own damned gender and stop attempting to dictate to women what we can and cannot do with our bodies.
This is exactly one of the kinds of problems I have with Christianity. What really gets under my skin is those idiotic “bad” Christians. An example would be…that troll, name redacted, who kept saying, “God bless you always!!!:):):)” Mild, normal Christians, I don’t have a problem with. It is those type of people, like name redacted.
To the contrary, I think it’s precisely the value of life that makes these tragic cases and exactly why she should be allowed to die and that particular abortion needs to occur.
I’m not a Catholic, but from my own upbringing as a Protestant and from my Jewish friends, there are specific instructions that some laws hold greater precedence. Particularly, the preservation of life is the big one, so even an Orthodox Jew who is a doctor would violate the rule against working on the Sabbath to save a life.
It might technically be an abortion in the second case, but if that really seems to misrepresent that reality of it. It’s not like the child will live a normal life, or even have some kind of disability if the pregnancy goes to term, which is what I think most people think about when debating abortion. Hell, it’s not even a case where it’s a trade-off of abort and the mother lives, don’t and the mother dies but the child lives. This is a case of saving the mother’s life or letting them both die. The child has a low chance of even surviving birth, and there’s only been a few recorded surviving more than a few days.
Either way, these are the sorts of stories, and there’s ones at the opposite extremes too, that just go to show us that these sorts of complicated issues can’t be decided with black and white world views.
I can see that you’re reasonable about this, but I do think it is black and white. People should have full autonomy over their body. If they choose to kill themselves, that option should be available, and if they choose to have an abortion, that should be available as well. End of story.
Ew, I just read about the El Salvador abortion case yesterday in theNYT.
American hospitals have offered to perform the abortion, so I hope it’s not too late. I am suspicious of the woman’s lawyer who may be using her to change the law at great risk to her health. Now at 26 weeks, the termination is more invasive and risky than it was months ago when the story first broke.
Um yes, the woman’s rights are always privileged over the fetus. Particularly a fetus without a brain and no chance of survival. Some anencephalic fetuses can’t even be delivered vaginally because the lack of skull bones needed to put pressure on the cervix, enabling passage into the birth canal. It is barbaric to force this woman to undergo a caesarean section for fetus with a lethal prognosis.
More like, El Salvador is an example of theocratic institutionalized misogyny. Truly disturbing.
