Roe v Wade is on deck

[thebeave]

Okay, so birth it is then.

That would be like a 120 mph speed limit on the highway. Something that is insane. You are being purposely obtuse.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Okay, so birth it is then.

That would be like a 120 mph speed limit on the highway. Something that is insane. You are being purposely obtuse.

Dude, take it up with each of the governments that recognize birth as the start of personhood via a birth certificate.

 

[bilby]

Establishing a demarcation point between "personhood" and "non-personhood" is always going to be inherently fraught with ambiguity. Yet, we do similar things, such as establishing reasonable speed limits on roads. I think we could all agree that 120 mph on a highway is too fast, and 10 mph is ridiculous and would bring civilization to a halt. So, we pick something reasonable in between and stick with it. Like, say, 70 mph. Would 75 mph be OK? Yes, that's pretty reasonable too. Would 65 mph be OK? Yes, that's also reasonable. There is often quibbling and whining about the exact speed limit, but we recognize that establishing a number is a sensible thing to do and come together to abide by it. Yet it does seem like people are having problems with this concept. [End of Captain Obvious rant]

Sure, but if your life depended on driving at 75 in a 70 zone, you would not only be justified in ignoring that law, but also justified in despising anyone who tried to ensure that it was enforced.

Particularly if they had no particular knowledge of your individual circumstance, but were pursuing enforcement on purely ideological grounds, either because they believed that obedience to law was more important than preservation of your life; Or because they believed that their imaginary friend had told them to do it; Or both.

 

[Emily Lake]

What the difference is between a fetus in the womb and a neonate is : certainty. We like to believe that every healthy pregnancy results in a healthy baby —and healthy mom. Unfortunately that is not the case, even in ideal circumstances. Things can go horribly wrong during labor and delivery and not every fetus lives.

Can you connect the dots for me on this?

(1) I agree that there's no certainty that a healthy fetus in a healthy mother will result in a delivered newborn being healthy and the mother not having any complications. I haven't suggested such.

(2) I believe that at some point in the pregnancy, it's not 'just a fetus' but is a baby, and as such, abortion without good medical necessity (severe defect or congenital condition, risk to the mother's life or health) is tantamount to murder.

Can you explain how holding view (1) somehow negates view (2)?

I see that as a very good question without an answer. How about you write legislation that will keep all the parties safe from harm and legal punishment?

Abortion is available in the first two trimesters without limitations. Any abortion provider is expected to perform the procedure at the mother's discretion, with consideration for scheduling and workload. Abortions in the third trimester are limited to situations in which the mother's health or life are endangered, or in which the fetus is injured, damaged, or has a congenital condition that precludes thriving. In those cases, the provider must document the diagnosis on medical records when providing the procedure. Records may be subject to audit, and doctors may be held liable for failure to properly document appropriate medical diagnoses.

 

[Emily Lake]

You are really really reaching for a particularly ugly right wing lie and I’m not having it.

It's apparently an 'ugly right wing lie' that the entire rest of the world embraces across the board.

 

[Emily Lake]

Ok: A fetus is not a separate person until it is born and separate from the mother’s body,

In any pregnancy which is intended to be carried until term ( or as close as possible) any medical intervention or care plan for mother or fetus affects both and is designed and delivered with that fact in mind.

I'm going to restate this from my perspective. Please correct where I've gone wrong.

"If the mother decides at week 38 that she doesn't intend to carry to full term, then the fetus isn't a person at all and it's perfectly fine to terminate it. On the other hand, if the mother intends to carry to full term, but goes into premature labor at week 30, it's a person, and termination would be murder."

What happens if the mother doesn't intend to carry to term, but ends up going into premature labor at week 28, and the infant gets delivered via c-section? Is it a person, because it's been born and is separate from the mother's body... or is it not a person since she didn't *intend* to carry it to term?

A woman who, at 38 weeks decodes she dies not want to continue to carry the pregnancy—please believe me when I say that is most pregnant women at 38 weeks gestation— does not go to her doctor or hospital or clinic and say; I’ve changed my mind. Do an abortion. Because guess what? That choice would not be given to her. She’d be treated to some serious intervention by mental health professionals and kept under close observation until the baby was delivered.

At which point, CPS would definitely be involved to determine if it were safe to send baby home with mom or even allow mom in the same room as baby. Unfortunately pregnancy does sometimes cause serious mental health issues, including life threatening crisis

I may be misremembering but I think you do not have biological children? I’m only mentioning because you seem to be suffering under the delusion that pregnant women call the shots re: their care during pregnancy and labor and delivery

They don’t . At best, they get to state their wishes and plans and if things go according to plan and there is t some other reason-/different doctor. Lots of babies being born thst night, nurse with strong opinions that conflict with mother’s—everything might go to plan. Might. Doesn’t usually but it could happen

Reality is that women are given c-sections they don’t want, refused c-sections they do want, given episiotomies and meds they don’t want or are denied those things—depending on what the medical team things is best.

Not true, at least in some states. Oregon for example, which has basically no restrictions:

Oregon Health Authority

• Abortion is legal in Oregon.
• You do not need to be a resident of Oregon or a U.S. citizen to get abortion services in Oregon.
• Oregon has no restrictions on abortions based on how far along in pregnancy you are.
• There are also no required waiting periods before receiving an abortion.
• There are no restrictions on getting medication abortion pills by mail within Oregon.

While medical providers may refuse to give you abortion services based on their personal beliefs, they cannot interfere with your legal right to choose to have an abortion. If you are refused an abortion, please know there are providers who will help you obtain abortion services in Oregon. See here for where to get an abortion in Oregon.

You can ‘choose’ all you want but that choice is not a reality if no one and no medical facility will perform the procedure.

Toni, they literally provide a list of places that absolutely *will* provide abortions at any point in the pregnancy.

Seriously, you're clinging to this "no doctor would ever do that" belief, even when OHA is telling everyone where to go to do the thing you insist can't ever happen.

Look, you and Elixir and bilby and a few others have expressed your beliefs that abortions should be legal and available at any point in the pregnancy, with no restrictions - that's correct, isn't it?

If *you* hold that belief, what on earth makes you think that no doctors exist that hold that same belief? If a doctor holds the belief that abortions should be legal and available at any point with no restrictions... why do you think they would refuse to perform the procedure they truly believe should be an absolute unqualified right?

 

[Emily Lake]

The reason for it, as I have articulated several times, is that at some point in the pregnancy, it's no longer a fetus but a baby, and at that point you are murdering an infant.

Sure; But the way laws work is that they have to specify a point.

The rest of your post is irrelevant, given that I have specified the point at which I think that limitation ought to be set. FFS, I've even provided the reasoning behind that point.

But okay, let's talk about your speed limit. The speed limit is set by law. And everyone is expected to obey the limit. And if you don't, you can be pulled over and given a ticket or even lose your license. That's the rules.

Now let's talk about application. Clearly the speed limit doesn't apply all the time. For example, it doesn't apply to law enforcement going to the scene of a crime where speed is of the essence. It doesn't apply to ambulances or firetrucks. If there's a gigantic boulder rolling down the road tomb-raider style right behind you, I'm betting you're off the hook for that ticket. Because even though it's the law... there are reasonable exceptions to that law that are fairly well understood.

Even more pragmatically, there's some reasonable wiggle room involved. So even if the posted limit is 65, if you're going 68 you're likely fine. If you're going 70 and so is pretty much everyone else, then it's probably okay. There's room to balance the letter of the law against the spirit of the law, and the justice system makes a judgement call that takes that into consideration.

And even if you do get pulled over, the response can vary significantly based on how fast you were going, the road conditions, and any number of other things that might influence the event. If you're going 108 in a 55 zone, you're probably going to lose your license (unless you have an extraordinarily good reason that justifies your excessive speed). If you're going 30 in a school zone, the likelihood of you just getting a warning is almost non-existent. If you have no priors, and aren't being egregious, and you're cooperative when you're pulled over, you might get off with just a warning. If you've had several speeding tickets previously then you're probably going to face a fine at a minimum. If you're on a remote state highway with no other traffic around and a clear line of sight... the cops might realistically just wave at you as you whoosh past at mach fuck. If you're in a straight-laced residential area there may not be much tolerance for speeding even a teensy bit.

Realistically, this same approach applies to nearly all US laws. There's very little that's truly zero tolerance - there's almost always some element of judgement and consideration for circumstance. Hell, judgement and circumstance make the difference between murder and self-defense.

 

[Emily Lake]

You might not *agree* with where I've set the boundary, but to claim that one does not exist is disingenuous.

No, it is exactly what you just agreed to be the case. There is no boundary, just a continuum.

You're claiming that red is exactly the same as blue.

 

[Emily Lake]

Seriously - go back and review. I have no moral view about veganism. I think it's silly, given that we evolved to consume meat. There's no moral position in there... unless "this is silly" is something you consider to be a moral judgement. And I think that's really stretching the idea of morality there.

We didn't "evolve to eat meat" (as I have already pointed out), and the claim that we did is clearly a moral judgement (as is the claim that veganism is therefore "silly") - or perhaps it is an excuse for refusing to consider the morality of your position, which is itself a choice of moral position.

Sure sure. Cat's didn't evolve to eat meat, pandas didn't evolve to eat bamboo. It's all just moral judgements on their part, and anyone who disagrees that it's a cat's moral judgement to be an obligate carnivore is really making an excuse for refusing to consider the morality of the cat's position, and that's a moral position in and of itself.

Please be less absurd.

 

[Emily Lake]

What a crock of faux Captain Obvious shit.

Highways and roadway curves are designed for a particular speed. Physics would force cars to fly off them when exceeding that speed by a FoS or two. Additionally, we have statistics that can look into whether speeds should be increased or decreased based on accidents, deaths, incidents that have been observed as well as looking back at decades of data regarding how fast can reliably be expected to drive safely on.

The bolded is only partially true.

First off, most roadways aren't designed for any particular speed at all - they're designed to allow for people to get from point a to point b. REsidential roads aren't designed based on physics at all, they're designed *around* the layout of the houses. Many state roads aren't designed around physics, they're simply laid out to avoid terrain obstacles in a reasonable fashion.

Second, for those roads that actually have been designed with physics in mind (the autobahn and many but not all US interstates) the speeds are based on the capabilities of the cars at the time the roads were built. Automobile capabilities have advanced, and there are tons of roads that were deemed to be unsafe at speeds above 40 mph back in the 80s that would now be perfectly safe at 65 mph, because cars have gotten better.

Arguments regarding personhood date back millenia, have no concensus, and have no objective basis from statistics to rely on onee thing to justify one choice over the other. The only consistent thing is that legal provisions generally only apply to an individual post birth.

And that's totally why the entirety of Europe restricts abortions at an earlier gestational period than what I've proposed. Yep. Totally.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm going to step back a moment. Let's approach this from a different perspective.

@Toni , @Elixir , @bilby , @ZiprHead , @Jimmy Higgins and anyone else who would like to answer:

Let's assume a situation in which there is no known risk or deleterious condition in the fetus, and no known risks to the mother's health or life. For all intents, both the mother and the fetus are healthy.

Given that the normal length of a pregnancy in humans is 40 weeks...

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

 

[laughing dog]

The justification for killing a fish or a cow is that they're food which we have evolved to eat.

So are other humans.

For Papua New Guineans perhaps, but for the vast majority not so much.

Ya get them hungry enough and that majority, if it still exists, won’t be so vast.

We didn't *evolve* to eat other humans.

Not yet.

 

[laughing dog]

I'm going to step back a moment. Let's approach this from a different perspective.

@Toni , @Elixir , @bilby , @ZiprHead , @Jimmy Higgins and anyone else who would like to answer:

Let's assume a situation in which there is no known risk or deleterious condition in the fetus, and no known risks to the mother's health or life. For all intents, both the mother and the fetus are healthy.

Given that the normal length of a pregnancy in humans is 40 weeks...

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

A reasonable doctor makes reasonable decisions based on the specifics of the situation. In that scenario, no decision by the doctor concerning a medical procedure should be prohibited by statute, IMO.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'm going to step back a moment. Let's approach this from a different perspective.

@Toni , @Elixir , @bilby , @ZiprHead , @Jimmy Higgins and anyone else who would like to answer:

Let's assume a situation in which there is no known risk or deleterious condition in the fetus, and no known risks to the mother's health or life. For all intents, both the mother and the fetus are healthy.

Given that the normal length of a pregnancy in humans is 40 weeks...

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

A reasonable doctor makes reasonable decisions based on the specifics of the situation. In that scenario, no decision by the doctor concerning a medical procedure should be prohibited by statute, IMO.

It doesn't matter whether we think a reasonable doctor would perform the procedure; if the doctor is reasonable, the doctor will do the reasonable thing no matter what that happens to be from our probably-less-reasonable point of view, seeing as we do not have access to all the reasons doctors do.

The place to argue the unreasonableness of any such thing is in medical school and in philosophy classes long before the doctor is expected to be reasonable by their current beliefs, but immediately after they have learned and proven the solidity of their reasoning skills so as to eliminate the unreasonable beliefs.

Why is Emily asking you, rather than making an argument as to what makes something reasonable and unreasonable? She's just kicking the can of worms for someone else to pick through.

 

[TomC]

The justification for killing a fish or a cow is that they're food which we have evolved to eat.

So are other humans.

For Papua New Guineans perhaps, but for the vast majority not so much.

Ya get them hungry enough and that majority, if it still exists, won’t be so vast.

We didn't *evolve* to eat other humans.

Not yet.

And once again, Emily says something quite reasonable and the folks who don't like it say something asinine.
Tom

 

[pood]

You might not *agree* with where I've set the boundary, but to claim that one does not exist is disingenuous.

No, it is exactly what you just agreed to be the case. There is no boundary, just a continuum.

You're claiming that red is exactly the same as blue.

No, he’s not. The claim is not that red is blue, but rather that depending on how they are mixed, it can be impossible to precisely pinpoint where one “becomes” the other; indeed there can’t be such a point, because first it must transition through various shades of purple. The debate lies in the fuzzy continuum.

 

[pood]

Seriously - go back and review. I have no moral view about veganism. I think it's silly, given that we evolved to consume meat. There's no moral position in there... unless "this is silly" is something you consider to be a moral judgement. And I think that's really stretching the idea of morality there.

We didn't "evolve to eat meat" (as I have already pointed out), and the claim that we did is clearly a moral judgement (as is the claim that veganism is therefore "silly") - or perhaps it is an excuse for refusing to consider the morality of your position, which is itself a choice of moral position.

Sure sure. Cat's didn't evolve to eat meat, pandas didn't evolve to eat bamboo. It's all just moral judgements on their part, and anyone who disagrees that it's a cat's moral judgement to be an obligate carnivore is really making an excuse for refusing to consider the morality of the cat's position, and that's a moral position in and of itself.

Please be less absurd.

Animals didn’t evolve to do anything or for anything. That is a teleological position. Cats are obligate carnivores, which means they must eat meat, even if not exclusively, to survive. But they didn’t evolve “to do” that; that is just how they ended up by luck of the genetic lottery. Humans are in no way obligated to eat meat, and there is evidence that a vegan or vegetarian diet can not only be healthier for the person, but manifestly so for the environment as well. I don’t see why you find that silly.

 

[bilby]

I'm going to step back a moment. Let's approach this from a different perspective.

@Toni , @Elixir , @bilby , @ZiprHead , @Jimmy Higgins and anyone else who would like to answer:

Let's assume a situation in which there is no known risk or deleterious condition in the fetus, and no known risks to the mother's health or life. For all intents, both the mother and the fetus are healthy.

Given that the normal length of a pregnancy in humans is 40 weeks...

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

That depends on the situation. Every case is unique.

Why do you think it is reasonable to specify a number that would be universally applicable?

More importantly, why do you think that number should be enshrined in law?

 

[Elixir]

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

When a reasonable doctor opines that it's a viable fetus, they will also reasonably refuse to perform an abortion.

More importantly, why do you think that number should be enshrined in law?

Why is there still an obsession with identifying "a number" that we all have agreed does not exist, enshrined wherever or not?

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm going to step back a moment. Let's approach this from a different perspective.

@Toni , @Elixir , @bilby , @ZiprHead , @Jimmy Higgins and anyone else who would like to answer:

Let's assume a situation in which there is no known risk or deleterious condition in the fetus, and no known risks to the mother's health or life. For all intents, both the mother and the fetus are healthy.

Given that the normal length of a pregnancy in humans is 40 weeks...

At how many weeks of gestation do you think a reasonable doctor should refuse to perform an abortion in this situation?

A reasonable doctor makes reasonable decisions based on the specifics of the situation. In that scenario, no decision by the doctor concerning a medical procedure should be prohibited by statute, IMO.

I'm going to attempt to parse your tap dancing.

Are you saying that in your personal opinion, when the mother and fetus are both healthy and there are no known risks to either of them, a reasonable doctor should not refuse to perform an abortion at any point in the pregnancy, right up until the 40th week?

I'm asking a pretty straightforward question, and I'm looking for a straightforward answer.

Fuck it, your answer turned out to be the least dodgy of the bunch, even though you still avoided providing as direct an answer as I was looking for.