You're right. It
isn't a novel concept. People here have been saying that over and over again.
Where I think the argument is rooted is in who gets to decide what's reasonable, what's necessary, and whether this is a matter for a pregnant woman and her doctor to decide.
Your arguments indicate you think the woman and her doctor shouldn't have the final say, that there should be laws they cannot transgress. Others obviously think they should, that the laws should never disallow medical procedures that a pregnant woman and her doctors think is needed. I think the politicians and preachers who want to criminalize abortions should become better educated about women's health because some of those folks are so ignorant they don't have a clue just how clueless they are. If they weren't so ignorant they wouldn't write
terrible laws just like the one that prevented doctors in Ireland from providing the medical care Savita Halappanavar needed
Look, I have too much going on to play word games. I’m tired, I’m grieving, and I simply don’t have the patience for bullshit.
You keep substituting things that nobody in this thread is talking about, and for which there is absolutely no confusion at all. From context, it’s abundantly clear we’re talking about voluntary abortion - not spontaneous abortion which is commonly referred to as miscarriage, nor doctor assisted early termination of pregnancy with a live birth which is commonly referred to as induced delivery. You know that’s not what anyone is talking about. So why try to introduce obfuscatory language? It’s disingenuous attempts to hijack and distract from the actual topic. Thus, a red herring.
You (and others) also keep mischaracterizing the debate and focusing on cases where there’s a clear medical need for abortion, either to save the mother from injury or death, or because the fetus is deformed or otherwise unable to thrive. You, and others, keep pretending like I oppose such needed procedures, despite me having been exceedingly and repeatedly clear about it.
I’m not going to engage in a stupid linguistic joust where the objective seems to be the intentional complication and obfuscation of the topic, as if that would somehow result in a ‘win’ for you. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and an insult to all of our intelligence.
So how about we stick with the actual crux of the issue, and address it with a modicum of integrity?
I'm not playing word games.
You keep missing my point and I keep trying to explain it to you. A third trimester abortion that intentionally destroys a healthy fetus is an extreme act. That doesn't automatically make it a bad choice. It should never be done wantonly but it should be available as an option for those extremely rare times when providing the best medical care possible makes it a valid choice.
I oppose laws that rule out types of abortions or limiting when they might be done because when laws like that have been adopted the result was women dying for no good reason.
Just so we’re on the same page, the only countries that you would support, given the above, are china, guinea-bissau, North Korea, Vietnam, and apparently Canada. With the exception of Canada, every single other westernized democracy on the planet has a gestational limit for voluntary, non-medical-necessity abortions. RvW had a more generous limit than nearly all European countries.
Just so we're on the same page, I support having Medical Boards staffed with doctors and researchers who are in charge of certifying doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, for the establishment of medical guidelines and standards of care, for establishing and delineating a code of medical ethics to be followed by medical professions under their purview, and for investigating reported violations of those standards and/or ethics and censuring the offenders.
I am not in favor of having no rules or guidelines at all.
I am opposed to having laws that criminalize medical procedures that Medical Boards have certified as legitimate treatments, especially laws crafted by ignoramuses who know nothing about medical conditions beyond what they learned in a middle school health class,
because (and this is important)
the people crafting those laws cannot predict when that procedure or treatment might be needed in order to provide the best medical care to someone.
This is the lesson that should have been learned when the laws in Ireland prevented doctors from providing very much needed medical care to Sativa Halappanavar, thereby sentencing her to suffer for a week in a hospital and then die while doctors waited for her doomed, unsavable fetus to no longer have a detectable heartbeat. But that lesson wasn't learned. We still have politicians crafting "fetal heartbeat" laws and other potential death sentences for pregnant women while smugly proclaiming themselves "Pro-life".
I can only speculate why they want to criminalize what might be life-saving procedures but I suspect it is a combination of ignorance and authoritarianism, with a side of "Oh, that sounds awful". Well, amputations sound awful but the doctors who cut off half of my father's foot shouldn't be prosecuted for the crime of deliberate maiming. They did it so the gangrene in his toes wouldn't spread to the rest of his body and in accordance with the medical ethics and standards of care set by the State Medical Board where he lived. And yeah, my father wasn't dying right at that very moment but still, it was a predictable outcome once other treatments had been tried and failed, and I believe my father and his doctors were the right ones to make that call, not some rando in the State legislature with a background in retail.
I’ll also remind you - again - that medical need is something I 100% support. The only thing I oppose is when there is NOT a medical need AND the pregnancy is in the last trimester. And even then, I’d be quite willing to push that threshold to something higher than the 27 week mark (?) that RvW used.
Well then, I guess the only thing we disagree on if we trust women and their doctors to make that call or if we think people far removed from the situation and who literally know nothing about it can be trusted to craft laws that don't present an undue burden on health care providers.
I don't believe that a politician writing a law can predict all the situations that doctors and patients subject to that law will face. Not even Boards full of medical professionals can do that. So either that law has to be very generous in its allowances for doctors to choose not to strictly follow it, or it's a crappy law that will put people in needless danger. It might even result in preventable deaths which makes it much worse than merely crappy.
Do you personally think that it should be legal and allowable for a healthy woman with no identifiable medical risk to voluntarily abort and kill her perfectly healthy fetus, when that fetus has reached a stage where it is viable outside the womb?
Does there exist a late gestational situation for which you would view abortion as immoral, and equivalent to the intentional murder of a human?
I believe it should be legal for a healthy 30 weeks pregnant women to abort her healthy fetus but I also believe she should have a damn good reason to do it. The same goes for the doctor who agrees to help her. And of course, by abort I mean terminate the pregnancy. Destroying the fetus when live birth is possible would be a violation of medical ethics unless there is a valid reason to believe a live birth would result in a worse outcome.
Let me get this straight, because your view seems unusual to me. Your position seems to be that if a woman 30 weeks along, with no medical issues, with a fetus that is healthy, decides she doesn’t want to continue the pregnancy… you support her right to terminate the pregnancy, but not to kill the baby? Meaning, you would obligate her to induce labor early and go through delivery?
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure an induced early delivery would be more dangerous for both the baby and the mother than carrying it to term. Certainly more dangerous than aborting.
At that point in gestation, I’m pretty sure carrying to term would be the safest option if you oppose killing the baby on ethical grounds.
That depends what factors are present that affect the safety of carrying to term.
This is why I presented a thought experiment about a pregnant woman suffering from sleep deprivation due to pregnancy induced insomnia.
Sleep deprivation is literally torturous. It can lead to terrible outcomes, starting with mental health disorders but also physical decline. She might be healthy when she seeks treatment but so won't be for long if her insomnia isn't successfully treated. If you take early delivery off the list of available options, you aren't ensuring the best outcome for her and her fetus. You are decreeing she must suffer, maybe to the point of psychosis, maybe to the point she tries to induce labor herself,
for no good reason.
If a doctor, acting in accordance with the medical guidelines and standards of care set by the Medical Board that certified him/her as a medical provider, deems an early delivery to be the best option for their patient and her fetus and their patient agrees, who are you to overrule that decision? You don't know the particulars of that case better than the doctor. You don't know what is or isn't feasible or advisable in that situation. If you're trying to limit the treatment options a doctor can consider then you're basically trying to second guess them before their patients even show up at their offices.
