Shadowy Man

This is a false analogy, because being plugged into the violinist was not a known consequence of an action you took willingly.

Shadowy Man

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here, and with an argument I haven't fully fleshed out. Yes, my original statement didn't have all the premises laid out.

I, personally, am pro-choice and anti-abortion. I would like to see a world in which we didn't have abortion at all. Either people didn't have sex until they were ready to bear the consequences of their actions, or we had fool-proof contraception techniques, or whatever. I currently see it as a necessary evil.

I agree with you about the early stages of a fetus' development hardly counting as a "person", but I do understand how gray the whole area is. There is no real way to delineate the creation of a "person" - though I felt your argument about personhood being at the moment of birth to be quite compelling.

Daleth

I was going to say the same thing.

Shadowy, Can you defend the argument that it would be OK to have an abortion in the case of rape because the woman didn't knowingly and willingly participate? In what other case is it OK to kill one person for the actions of another? (We don't even give this woman the opportunity to kill the rapist, and would send her to jail for doing that.) If she carried the pregnancy to term and then a DNA test proved it was ot her husband's baby but the rapist's, should she be allowed to kill the infant? If not, why? What's the difference between the life of the fetus and the life of the infant?

I understand what you're doing, and I'm in the same category. I don't think I'd even choose to have an abortion if I were raped. Nevertheless, I defend the rights of others to make that choice.

ex-xian

Well for the record, I thought the same thing the first time I read it. But what about what Daleth said. In the case of a woman who was raped or the case of forced incest, the woman didn't choose the risk. In those cases, I think the analogy stands.

Daleth

Now that I've taken Sam, one of our resident cats, to the vet and made up with him over the whole ordeal...

That is true. The analogy does largely stand in a case where the woman was an unwilling participant in the sex that created the pregnancy. There are still a lot of distinctions that could be drawn, though.

Say I knew going to concerts put me at risk for becoming a host to an ailing violinist. (I feel silly!) And I also knew that science has proven drinking 2 glasses of wine immediately before the concert gives me a 99.9% chance of making myself incapable of being that host. So, even knowing that the wine might have some ill effects on my body and although I didn't like the taste or the feeling of drinking the wine, I went ahead and did that so I could enjoy the concert. But I wake up the next morning and find I was one of that .1% of people who the wine didn't work for, maybe because my doctor didn't tell me eating anything salty with the wine was going to make the wine far less effective. Being as I took what were known to be highly effective precautions to prevent these consequences despite the precautions being unpleasant and a minor risk to me, am I morally obligated to remain attached to the violinist, letting his body use and in some ways weaken mine to keep him alive?

Like I said before the Ordeal of the Cat, I'm right with you on the necessary evil thing. Even if I do not see an early embryo as a human being in any other than an emotional sense, abortion is hard on women emotionally and surgical procedures should be avoided whenever possible. Unplanned pregnancies destroy couples. There are lots of problems. I don't think we can ever expect to see people not have sex unless they are willing to produce a child. A woman can have well over a dozen babies in her lifetime, but each pregnancy further damamges her body and increases the odds that she's going to lose her life due to the pregnancy. It's not reasonable to expect a couple who have 5 kids and can't afford or risk another to never have sex again just because there is no 100% certain method of preventing another pregnancy. (There are methods approaching 100%, but none are perfect.) Nor is it reasonable to expect a couple to be celibate for a year after the birth of a child because another pregnancy so soon is unhealthy.

What we can do is keep trying to improve upon birth control methods and what everybody says... educate. Make sure people know how get and how to use different forms of prevention. Make sure they know what might interfere with each form of birth control. Make sure they know antibiotics may make their pill or patch or injected birth control ineffective. Make sure that educators are giving kids correct information about how their bodies work. My first pregnancy was unplanned (though luckily not unwanted, just a year or two early) because I trusted the information teachers had given me about my fertility, and it was dead wrong, nearly the opposite of the truth. My mother knows even less. As some of the recent threads here have shown, people are really sadly unaware of the option of the "morning after" pill, which either prevents conception from occurring even after sex has taken place or by making it hard for the fertilized egg to implant in the uterus, which is what naturally happens to around half of them anyway (normal period, no pregnancy). If people knew about that option and had access to it, that alone could prevent a huge number of abortions.

I feel like I'm going on too long, but I don't feel like I can stop either. I have a lot of problems with the pro-life movement, part of which is based on women's rights, but the most important part to me is that I've yet to see or hear a pro-lifer explain exactly what we would do with the over 600,000 additional babies that would have been born in 1999 (as per Ronin's statistics) who were not wanted by their parents. Many of them were conceived while both or either of the parents were on drugs. Many of them would have had severe disabilities, requiring constant and permanent attention. Many of them weren't the nice pink babies people want to adopt (gag). Some had HIV. Many of them would have had no prenatal care because the mothers couldn't afford it, or just didn't know what to do. A greater percentage of aborted fetuses had these problems than the percentages of the same problems in born babies, since these are some of the reasons people choose abortions in the first place. Just exactly what do they plan for us to do with all of these babies? We're already not willing to provide enough for the education of the kids who are born. We already want to make cuts in all forms of social assistance. It seems to me that when pro-lifers refuse to address this question, they are saying that while they believe LIFE has an inherent value, the person who owns that life does not.

Daleth

Since I was in a hurry to get the cat out, I didn't look up any numbers to back up what I was saying earlier to Ronin. So here goes.

First off I made a mistake in that last reply to Ronin. I said that we would be interested in stats for 24 weeks or greater based on viability, but that is not correct. I was thinking of the fetal age as measured against the date of the last menstrual period (LMP) which is the way doctors generally talk about it with their patients. LMP dating adds to the age of the fetus because it includes the (approximately) 2-3 weeks of the cycle before the pregnancy occurred. 23-24 weeks LMP is approximately equal to 21 weeks gestational age, which is what I think this chart refers to.

According to the CDC stats provided by Ronin, 1,105 abortions at 21 weeks gestation or greater happened in Georgia, under Georgia law (and state laws can and do regulate these third trimester abortions already). According to a 1993 article Georgia law is as follows:

• (Georgia Code 16-12-141)
  1. The patient must be 18 years of age or older, or must have parental consent
  2. The physician performing the abortion must be licensed in the state of Georgia
  3. If the procedure is performed in the second trimester, the abortion must be performed in a hospital or licensed clinic.
  4. Abortions in the third trimester must be verified by the performing physician and two other physicians that the abortion is necessary "to preserve the life and health of the woman".
  5. Documentation of the abortion must be provided in writing to the state within 10 days of the procedure.

A search on FindLaw confirms that this law is still in effect. I could not determine the penalty for violating this law, but 3 subsections later is a law prohibiting "partial birth" abortion. It's clearly stated that performing this procedure is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and up to $5,000 in fines and also provides for civil action. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, GA's laws restricting post-viability abortion are so restrictive that they are probably not constitutional. Georgia has made several attempts to make their laws more restrictive since the 1993 article was written, but I'm not certain whether those laws have passed. According to this same page, 40 states & DC have laws regulating post-viability abortion, but 5 of these are not currently being enforced due to judicial review or something similar.

New York has essentially the same law as GA, restriction of third trimester abortions for any reason other than preservation of the mother's life (not her health, not because the fetus has no brain, not anything else) and here breaking that law is a class D felony, punishable by up to 7 years in prison. 927 of these abortions were in New York City, the population of which is very close to the population of the state of GA.

Based on the fact that so many of the 9,643 late abortions listed by the CDC took place in states with laws this stringent, so much so that they're possibly not even constitutional, I think I'm being at least reasonable in concluding that either yes, these abortions are being done for medical reasons, or else legislation just doesn't solve this problem. At any rate I'm thus far not convinced that more laws are what we need, or that there's definitely a problem that needs solving.

It is interesting to look at the numbers of late abortions that happened in states that have no laws restricting them.
Mississippi -- 17
New Mexico -- 21
Vermont -- 58
Colorado --44
Oregon -- 325
West Virginia -- 2
Hawaii -- 48
New Jersey -- 812
(No stats available for Alaska or New Hampshire)

A quick search turned up more references than I can list confirming that any surgical termination of a pregnancy is considered an abortion, even if the fetus is dead.

Abortion.com, a site which exists for the sole purpose of helping people locate abortion providers, does not list third trimester abortion providers at all.

That's about all I can come up with right now. It's very difficult to find out anything about why these abortions were performed or the frequencies at which life-threatening pregnacies and the most severe defects can be expected to occur.

Loren Pechtel

Maybe they consider the D&E safer than inducing labor in such cases.

Ronin

Thank you for researching this code as I think a similar uniform Federal code would be equally beneficial...and may put to rest many of the reservations those, like myself, have regarding this topic.

As I may have indicated before, I live in Mississippi...I also do not feel comfortable with even one such late term life termination without laws restricting them...much less 17 or 1,327.

The Georgia law would be a sufficient standard on which to agree.

Daleth

The trouble is, it's considered likely to be unconstitutional. I think the reason for that may be that it does not include any provision for the health of the fetus (ie a situation in which the fetus has a defect incompatible with life, but the pregnancy does not threaten the life of the mother). The law could include such a provision and require a court approval before the abortion, since there's no imminent danger. From what I read, another reason it may be unconstitutional is that there's no provision for severe but non-life-threatening damage to the health of the mother, even if it's permanent damage... that is, it says life and health rather than life or health, which matters a great deal in legalese. With those minor changes, I would be able to support it on a national level.

Dal