We Take Requests! (Sam Brownback Edition)

258 thoughts on “We Take Requests! (Sam Brownback Edition)”

1. The sad inability of pro-lifers to come up with anything resembling a coherent explanation of why a small group of cells containing human DNA is equivalent to a real person is, to me, one of the clearest proofs that they are completely full of it

2. As a matter of principle, I don’t think taxpayers should be forced to fund any activity that a large number of them have a serious moral objection to.
   Once we’ve all agreed on this fundamental point, I’d like my share of the war funding back, please.

3. Hilzoy, thanks for the basic point up towards the front:
   Naturally, the whole question is whether a five day old blastocyst should be treated as a human person or not.
   Same deal with abortion, and on both issues, pretty few people notice that “what’s a human person” is actually the only relevant question.
   It’s odd, on abortion, I run into this frustration more with pro-choicers than pro-lifers, though frankly it’s a pretty close call (props to Publius as an example of a pro-choicer who clearly defines where he believes life begins, why, and makes it clear that abortion after that point is unacceptable to him).
   But on stem cell research, it’s alllll the other direction; the pro-lifers almost never have a solid argument on whether or not it’s a human life, which is really sad. I do know folks who have such an argument, consistent with their other beliefs and thoroughly considered, regardless of whether or not I agree with them, but their voices are so utterly totally drowned by intellectual dishonesty that it’s just, well, sad.
   As one friend of mine put it “I truly believe my reasons are good, but when everyone else on my side of an issue is being dishonest, it makes me wonder if I can possibly be right.”

4. Joe Thomas: Same deal with abortion, and on both issues, pretty few people notice that “what’s a human person” is actually the only relevant question.
   It’s odd, on abortion, I run into this frustration more with pro-choicers than pro-lifers
   That’s because (speaking as a pro-choicer) we know that a woman is a human person, whether or not she’s pregnant, and that makes any argument about whether or not she should have the right to choose to terminate or continue a pregnancy based on the human rights of fetuses pretty much irrelevant: even if you grant a five-day-old blastcyst full human rights, those human rights do not include the right to use another human person’s body against his or her will, not even to save your life.
   So, with the “ethical dilemma” of abortion, the only relevant question is “is a woman a human person?” and if you answer yes to that, there’s no need to argue the case of when a fetus becomes a human person.
   For scientific research making use of blastocysts, though, the question does focus on blastocysts only – and in my view it’s for the people who say that a 5-day-old blastocyst is legally, ethically, and morally in all ways identical to a 5-minute-old infant, to show that they behave in this way throughout their life, not just when making anti-science/anti-women noises. (The vast majority of 5-day-old blastocysts in the US that are disposed of without ceremony or concern go out with tampons/sanitary towels, after all.)

5. Thanks, hilzoy — when I read it, I was taken aback but what a muddled collection of well-poisoning, question begging, and basic nonsense it all was, and kept thinking to myself, “This man is running for president?”
   I mean, geez:

   • The massive leap from “blastocyst” to “young human.”
   • The question-begging leap to embryonic stem cell research being unethical.
   • The constant harping on the research being speculative as if all research isn’t speculative! (If we knew the endpoints in advance, it wouldn’t be research. It would be engineering.)
   • The elision of the fact that the bill in question would apply only to alread-existing embryos that are scheduled for disposal by IVF clinics.

   It just . . . nothing about it is any good at all. It’s at the reasoning level of a fifth-grader.
   By the by, if Sen. Brownback is so concerned about Ms. Rabon’s medical expenses, then if he’s going to use her as a political prop in a thinly-veiled antiabortion screed, I suggest he sponsor a universal health care bill and/or pay her back.

6. hilzoy,
   I think you’re being dishonest. You conclude:

   Those patients who believe that a five day old blastocyst is a human person who should not be destroyed can obtain peace of mind through the simple expedient of not using any therapies involving embryonic stem cells.

   If you actually think it’s reasonable for a person who thinks a blastocyst is a human being would be satisfied with by “not availing themselves of the technology”, try recasting the argument. Would you be “satisfied” by knowing that so long as you didn’t purchase the products manufactured in a gulag or similar place would “obtain peace of mind” for you? I don’t think so, and its unclear how you expect that of anyone. Or perhaps its just (to use Phil’s words) “the reasoning level of a fifth grader” on display.

7. Mark Olsen: I was assuming that readers would know that I was referring back to Sen. Brownback’s statement, the one I was commenting on:
   “Patients should have the peace of mind that their treatment did not come at the expense of another’s destruction”
   This is, indeed, something that can be gotten by the simple expedient of not using those treatments.
   Had I been talking about the peace of mind that comes from knowing your country does not condone the slaughter of innocent human persons, you would of course be right. But, as I said, the crucial question is whether five day old blastocysts are human persons, and that’s not a question that Sen. Brownback offered any arguments at all on.

8. I always love it when stem cell opponents harp on the fact that there aren’t any embryonic stem cell therapies at the same time that they’re actively campaigning to prevent any research that might develop such therapies. It’s the political/medical version of “Stop hitting yourself! Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself!”

9. I have a hard time believing that there aren’t many people on the “a 5-day-old embryo is equivalent morally to a walking, talking person” side of the debate who honestly believe their position. I’m also sure that there are some who simply use that stance as a rhetorical device for purely political reasons, but I want to discuss the honest ones, because they’re far more confounding, if less contemptible.
   While I have to think a good number in the embryo = human camp are truly principled, honest people, I simply cannot for the life of me understand how they reach that position. I don’t think an embryo is worthless or nothing, but to equate its value to that of a fully developed human being seems JUST PLAIN CRAZY to me. I don’t like to say that, because I think it’s worthwhile to understand, at least on some level, the positions of those with whom you disagree. But, in this case, I just can’t. I can understand people who may have questions in their mind on the subject, but I really don’t get how someone can truly feel strongly that a relatively small collection of undifferentiated cells frozen in some kind of laboratory container carries the same value of, say, a blog commenter.
   Maybe it just gets back to this:
   …in my view it’s for the people who say that a 5-day-old blastocyst is legally, ethically, and morally in all ways identical to a 5-minute-old infant, to show that they behave in this way throughout their life, not just when making anti-science/anti-women noises. (The vast majority of 5-day-old blastocysts in the US that are disposed of without ceremony or concern go out with tampons/sanitary towels, after all.)
   A thought experiment I’ve offered before involves a number of “people who say that a 5-day-old blastocyst is legally, ethically, and morally in all ways identical to a 5-minute-old infant” (and who, assuming I’m right that such people exist, believe it) outside a still enterable burning building in which there are frozen embryos and infants. You can take it from there.
   And, Joshua, me too. I’d say it’s like someone wearing a mask refusing to remove it unless someone can describe his face.

10. It seems clear to me that, given immune rejection issues, the primary use of embryonic stem cells is research to learn enough of the developmental process to be able to regress adult cells of patients to become specific stem cells. The potential for their actual use in treatment seems minimal.

11. Brett B: immune rejection issues are precisely the same as in bone marrow transplants from different donors, or in solid organ transplants. They are managed in those cases, and people get real benefits from those therapies. Why embryonic stem cells should be different is a mystery to me.
    Moreover, there are vastly fewer immune rejection issues when you transplant stem cells produced via somatic cell nuclear transfer from a person’s own DNA.

12. The most troubling part of Brownback’s approach is the breathtaking dishonesty that he engages in. Sure, he lies to us, but he is so convinced by the lies to himself that he can no longer see how dishonest his arguments are.
    The Monty Python song “Every Sperm is Sacred” is a wonderful parody of the argumentation that Brownback goes into. He asserts, without any physical evidence or adequate logical support, everything he needs to force the conclusion that he wants. Then, of course, he proudly pats himself on the back for how ethical he is being. Hogwash. All life is life. Eggs, sperm, blastocysts, embryos, fetuses, babies, adults, sick people. It’s all a continuation of life, but it’s not all equal, not legally, not ethically, not morally, not practically, not realistically, not even politically.
    If Sam Brownback wants to talk about murder, fine. I’ll ask him:

    • Who are you to say that someone should die to support your commitment to an intellectually indefensible claim about blasocysts that have never been in a placenta and therefore are not going to develop into human beings?
    • Where do you get your special ability to know who should die so that fertilized eggs may be kept in liquid nitrogen?
    • When did God give you this remarkable revelation?
    • Is your God really that petty?
    • Do you have the guts to face someone who is dying because you refuse to allow research that might save their life?
    • Do you have the guts to tell them that you and your friends are responsible for cutting off the opportunity to survive?
    • How many people do you think should die to make you feel good about your supposed commitment to life?

    I have no use for self-righteous, smug folks who are willing to kill people or at least let them die for their special Humpty Dumpty definition of life. Sorry, but I don’t accept the claim that it’s God’s will that people die, not when supposed Christians are part of the reason those people are dying.

13. I don’t believe a blastocyte is equal to a human baby – we gladly donated our unused IVF embryo’s to science. At the same time I have problems understanding people who feel that 5 minutes before birth a baby is not a person at all, but 5 minuts after birth he is.

14. The fertilized egg=human being arguement has two roots that I’ve been able to trace.
    1. From an anti-abortion stance, it allows one to argue against any and all abortion procedures. It can even be easily extended to cover any form of birth control that prevents implantation in the uterus: IUDs and Plan B.
    2. Viewed from a gender politics perspective, it denies female agency–a pregnancy becomes something done by a male, with the female as passive actor. Start looking for the tracks left by this mindset and you’ll find them all over.
    The argument is a poorly-crafted tool, but it’s not intended for subtle work. Mainly, it’s a bludgeon.

15. It can even be easily extended to cover any form of birth control that prevents implantation in the uterus: IUDs and Plan B.
    Plan B is basically a birth control pill. It doesn’t work by preventing implantation, it works by preventing ovulation.

16. Plan B is basically a birth control pill.
    Like that matters to most anti-choice/anti-abortion people. It’s all the same to them.

17. I don’t believe that a 5-day blastocyte counts as a human being. But because I know that for abortion purposes, 5-minutes before birth also doesn’t count as a human being, I have reservations grounded in the potential for a slippery slope on involuntary human research involving fetuses.
    I would feel much more comfortable if we could get a clear set of guidelines on exactly when (and why) everyone thinks fetuses and/or zygotes should not be subject to research. I’m skeptical that this will happen, because it would have obvious implications for abortion which pro-choice advocates would want to resist–they would especially resist cloaking these judgments with science.

18. But because I know that for abortion purposes, 5-minutes before birth also doesn’t count as a human being…
    Really? How do you know this? Can you cite any instances of 5-minutes-before-birth infanticides which were done for the purposes of aborting the pregnancy?

19. Sebastian: I’m skeptical that this will happen, because it would have obvious implications for abortion which pro-choice advocates would want to resist–they would especially resist cloaking these judgments with science.
    Why would we worry? The key question for pro-choice advocates is whether you consider a woman is a human being. Where a woman is a human being, it’s her decision (and her physician’s) when or if to terminate a pregnancy.
    Only if you dismiss the idea that women are human beings with inalienable human rights, as pro-lifers must, does it become at all important when in a woman’s pregnancy the fetus she carries “becomes” a human being.
    As for your claim that a fetus can be aborted 5 minutes before birth, CaseyL’s right: you need to show that this has ever happened or that legislation even permits it to happen.

20. “Can you cite any instances of 5-minutes-before-birth infanticides which were done for the purposes of aborting the pregnancy?”
    I presume you are aware that pro-choice groups have successfully made it impossible to collect data on the purposes of aborting pregnancies when you ask that. So you can’t actually prove that any late term abortions were necessary for the health of the mother either. The data just is not reliably collected–unlike medical data on almost any other topic. And that is 100%intentional.
    But ok, great since we are assuming I’m wrong about that, I’m certain that Jesurgislac and CaseyL will have very little trouble coming up with a broadly acceptable definition of when fetal research (that destroys the fetus) should not be permitted.

21. “So you can’t actually prove that any late term abortions were necessary for the health of the mother either.”
    You didn’t say late-term abortion. You said 5-minutes-before-birth abortion.
    “I presume you are aware that pro-choice groups have successfully made it impossible to collect data on the purposes of aborting pregnancies when you ask that.”
    I presume you are aware that such a wide-open study as “the purpose of aborting pregnancies” isn’t at all what the Bush Admin was interested in. It wanted actual, non-anonymous records of actual, non-anonymous girls and women, for the purposes of public exposure. I also preume you are aware that women exposed in public as having had abortions are subject to harrassment and death threats.

22. “But because I know that for abortion purposes, 5-minutes before birth also doesn’t count as a human being,”
    You know this. You know it. It’s a fact. An absolute fact. Known.
    This is, in fact, an outrageous claim, Sebastian, and you have to know that. I have no problem understanding that you got carried away for a few moments on the subject, and hit “post.”
    But to be intellectually honest, you have to admit that this is an unsupportable, false claim. Hospitals deal with premature births, and premature labor, and premature babies, every minutes of the day, somewhere in this country.
    Nowhere does anyone take a pregnant woman in her ninth month, and when she comes into the hospital in that ninth month, then treats the embryo as a blastocyte.
    You know this. It’s not a matter of finding abortion statistics. It’s a fact that you can’t possibly find Ob/Gyn doctors who would support any such claim, that five minutes before birth, the baby is perfectly abortable without thought or care, and that that’s just how it goes in hospitals across America.
    “But ok, great since we are assuming I’m wrong about that” isn’t good enough: on this one you need to out and out admit that you were flatly wrong, and carried away, when you said that. It’s the only intellectually honest responsible possible.
    Incidentally, I was six weeks premature, which wasn’t a small thing in 1958 (particularly since my mother was Rh-negative, and my father RH+, and they’d not yet invented the drugs that make that non-problematic).

23. Sebastian: I’m certain that Jesurgislac and CaseyL will have very little trouble coming up with a broadly acceptable definition of when fetal research (that destroys the fetus) should not be permitted.
    If a blastocyst is not implanted in a uterus, it dies. So I’m not sure why your caveat “(that destroys the fetus)” – it’s not actually relevant.
    Even if you define a 5-day-old blastocyst as the legal equivalent of a 5-minute-old infant, the parent(s) certainly have a right to donate their brain-dead infant to scientists for the purpose of research, don’t they? And you don’t actually get much more brain-dead than a blastocyst…

24. Phrased sarcastically, but that is in fact my position: phrased less sarcastically – I believe that a woman (or a couple) who wish to do so ought to be able to donate fertilised eggs (or sperm: or eggs) for the purpose of scientific research.
    I have issues, which I’d be happy to discuss, with the idea of taking sperm or eggs which the donors believed were going to be used in fertility treatment, and using them without the donors’ knowledge to create embryos for the purpose of stem-cell experimentation. That seems to me to be over the line.

25. Yeah, I think Gary’s rant is squarely on point here. Who the heck can even imagine an abortion 5 minutes before birth? Is the scenario that a woman stumbles into a hospital, dilated and undergoing rapid contractions, and says to the duty nurse “the baby is coming, I want to abort it before it pops out”? And that somewhere in this land, there exists the medical professional who would respond “no problem, it’s your choice”?
    Are there really people who have been so brainwashed by “abortion on demand” rhetoric that they believe there is any sort of constituency in support of completely elective abortions 5 minutes before birth? Come on. The very thought is ghastly. It’s nothing but a rhetorical device to be followed by “okay, if you won’t draw the line there, where WILL you draw it?”

26. I have idea. I’ll draw the line for myself in my life and my circumstances, and everyone else is free to do the same. Otherwise, the question becomes where will the federal or state governement draw it for all of us.

27. “It’s nothing but a rhetorical device to be followed by ‘okay, if you won’t draw the line there, where WILL you draw it?'”
    This exactly is why flipping the question around is totally dishonest, and why I was so emphatic that the only intellectually defensible and honest response would be to simply admit that the claim was a wild exaggeration.
    I’m sure people can get used to flinging around that sort of language in an anti-abortion environment, to the point that they become oblivious to the fact that it’s a crazy claim, with no connection to reality, since no one ever challenges the rhetoric in those circles, but the fact is that it’s absolutely indefensible as a description of reality.
    Of course, if Sebastian can come up with a couple of examples of how easy it is get an abortion five minutes before birth (oh, let’s be generous, and accept three times longer as meeting the challenge, making it three times easier on Sebastian), any time in the past couple of decades, anywhere in America, why, then, Sebastian would not have been making an utterly false claim, and those noting that would have to agree we were wrong.
    There are many thousands of hospitals in America, so it shouldn’t be hard to find examples of this widespread practice of fifteen-minutes-before-birth abortions.
    Alternatively, it shouldn’t be too hard to admit that was a few rhetorical bridges too far, in the heat of the moment.

28. “Of course, if Sebastian can come up with a couple of examples of how easy it is get an abortion five minutes before birth”
    Considering that a widely used abortion procedure involves inducing labor, and then aborting the baby while it’s in the birth canal, moments from being born, maybe you want to ask for a more difficult example to supply?
    I have no concern at all about aborting blastocysts, and embryonic stem cell research doesn’t give me even a moment’s pause, but I am more than troubled by a “pro-choice” movement that insists on choice post-viability. When it’s a case of the mother’s convenience weighed against the baby’s life.

29. Brett: Considering that a widely used abortion procedure
    “Widely used” in the 1.4% of abortions in the US that take place at 21+ weeks gestation, which is to say, not very widely used…
    involves inducing labor, and then aborting the baby
    that is, the 20-24 weeks fetus – just a correction: and bear in mind that there is no evidence that a human fetus <22 weeks gestated can survive outside the uterus. (And it's way more likely that a fetus under 25 weeks will die outside the uterus than it will live.)
    while it’s in the birth canal
    Ah, I understand. You’re referring to the process of intact dilation and extraction, which is “a surgical abortion wherein an intact fetus is removed from the womb via the cervix. The procedure may also be used to remove a deceased fetus (due to a miscarriage) that is developed enough to require dilation of the cervix for its extraction.” In fact, according to this, the procedure is used in 0.17% of abortions in the US: so “widely used” is pretty much just wrong.
    moments from being born
    Depends how you define “birth”, doesn’t it? If a fetus is “born” whenever it leaves the uterus by the cervix, the majority of fetuses are “born” at >4 weeks.

30. “You didn’t say late-term abortion. You said 5-minutes-before-birth abortion.”
    So what? It effects my point not at all. You can’t prove that a single late term abortion was medically necessary because we very purposely are restricted from collecting such data. That includes 8-month abortions and very last second abortions.
    (Interesting that this issue comes up on two separate threads and in both cases the purposeful suppression of data is in the furtherance of liberal policy. There was screaming up and down by you guys in the global warming case–and appropriate screaming I might add).
    “I presume you are aware that such a wide-open study as “the purpose of aborting pregnancies” isn’t at all what the Bush Admin was interested in. It wanted actual, non-anonymous records of actual, non-anonymous girls and women, for the purposes of public exposure.”
    Well you are apparently unaware that the restrictions go back to the 1970s, invoking the naughty Bush administration doesn’t help you.
    Gary,
    “You know this. It’s not a matter of finding abortion statistics. It’s a fact that you can’t possibly find Ob/Gyn doctors who would support any such claim, that five minutes before birth, the baby is perfectly abortable without thought or care, and that that’s just how it goes in hospitals across America.”
    What is this without thought or care? I’m talking legally. Legally you can kill a ‘fetus’ 5 minutes before birth. Hell, before the partial-birth abortion ban you could kill it during birth so long as the head was still inside the mother’s body. You know this, so what in the world are you talking about?
    And if I hear people say that only happens when “medically necessary” I’m going to scream because you definitely don’t know that. That information is pursposefully NOT COLLECTED. Attempts to collect that information have been absolutely shut down every single time it has been attempted in the past 30 years. If the prison wardens absolutely refused to document prisoner treatment, would you blithely assume that no mistreatment happened? I seriously doubt it. When someone’s life is on the line, a multi-decade refusal to even go through super-basic documentation should not be considered a great sign that everyone is always doing the right thing. And even if we restrict ourselves solely to the very very late term abortions, we are still talking about more than 1,000 per year. For fewer executions, we demand years of appelate review on every single case. The fact that we can’t even get a doctor to document the reasons why a late-term abortion was medically necessary in a one-liner is ridiculous given the level of documentation we demand for other life and death decisions.

31. “Considering that a widely used abortion procedure involves inducing labor, and then aborting the baby while it’s in the birth canal, moments from being born, maybe you want to ask for a more difficult example to supply?”
    Unless you can support the claim that this is a “widely used abortion procedure” for women who decide to have a non-medically-necessary abortion five minutes before they give birth, you’re not honestly supporting or addressing the claim, Brett.
    I noticed as I hit “post” that I’d not included the obvious qualifier, but wondered if anyone would try to blatantly twist and blur the distinction between medically-necessary abortions, and abortion-on-whim, in the case of five-minutes-before-birth, but figured no one would be dumb enough to think they could get away with trying to pass that as an honest argument.
    Oh, well, hardly the first time I’ve been wrong.

32. What incentive do you think exists that would cause doctors to perform unneccessary late-term abortions on anything approaching a scale wide enough that it is pertinent to the overall abortion question?

33. “Widely used” in the 1.4% of abortions in the US that take place at 21+ weeks gestation, which is to say, not very widely used…”
    I’m sorry, wasn’t I just getting slammed by Gary for “never ever happens”. Since the number of abortions in the US is in the 3.4 million range, 1.4% is in the 47,600 range each year.
    My understanding is that the number of partial birth abortions in the rigorous “delivering the baby” definition numbers in the 4-6,000 range. Even in that range we are talking about far more than the number of people who are executed. So at an error rate of even 0.1% we are almost certainly talking about more babies killed than prisoners wrongfully executed each year.

34. “What is this without thought or care? I’m talking legally.”
    I’m talking reality. Reality turns out to be really easy to prove if something is widespread.
    Women are deciding, on whim, to have abortions five minutes before birth.
    I said we don’t need statistics: give us some anecdotes. Give us just enough to suggest that this is a significant occurrence. Not enough to prove it. Just enough to even suggest it.
    This is going on all across America, after all: it’s a real problem. There should be no problem whatever finding some examples of it.
    Either it’s real, or it isn’t. So introduce some real examples, please. Heck, just start with, say, six examples in the past ten years.
    Either it’s real, or it isn’t.

35. “Unless you can support the claim that this is a “widely used abortion procedure” for women who decide to have a non-medically-necessary abortion five minutes before they give birth, you’re not honestly supporting or addressing the claim, Brett.”
    Gary, you apparently have completely missed the context of the discussion.
    I am uneasy about human zygote/fetus experimentation because the pro-choice lobby has helped successfully erase distinctions in such a way as to make it non-obvious where the experimentation will stop.
    If you would care to point to the sentence in which you believe I made claims that fairly translate to: “women who decide to have a non-medically-necessary abortion five minutes before they give birth”. I would be surprised to have said that, because I know that nobody has any real idea of how many late-term abortions are medically or non-medically necessary.
    My point remains that the legal distinction between the zygote and the 5-minutes before birth fetus, has been rather not well maintained–to be incredibly generous to the pro-choice lobby.
    Since that seems like it could very possibly spill into the research question, I’m very concerned.
    If you think there is a clear line where research would be inappropriate, please share that line and explain how you derived it.

36. “I’m sorry, wasn’t I just getting slammed by Gary for “never ever happens”. Since the number of abortions in the US is in the 3.4 million range, 1.4% is in the 47,600 range each year.”
    Woo-hoo, and I fail to notice any demonstration that the women made the decision to have the abortion only five minutes before they would have given birth.
    Moving goalposts: not allowed.
    CaseyL asked you: “Can you cite any instances of 5-minutes-before-birth infanticides which were done for the purposes of aborting the pregnancy?”
    Your response was to dodge the question, say “But ok, great since we are assuming I’m wrong about that,” and challenge her with a different question.
    So, are we assuming that you were wrong in claiming this is a significant, widespread, problem, or not? Which is it?
    Maybe your initial response was just a hypothetical, abstract, concern, about the law and what it theoretically allows, and your worries and concerns about that, rather than an assertion about reality. Would you care to clarify that you were not, in fact, claiming we have a significant problem of women, minutes before birth, suddenly demanding an abortion? (Look, a door out! Might want to walk through, maybe.)

37. “I’m talking reality. Reality turns out to be really easy to prove if something is widespread.”
    Apparently you have a rather different definition of widespread than I do. Apparently you are the type of person who would be untroubled by say ONLY 5 innocent people executed every single year. So untroubled in fact, that you would be ok with never allowing an investigation into why someone was executed. Is that an accurate depiction of your stance Gary? Because your broad misreading of my stance seems even less fair than that, thank you very much.

38. Sebastian: . Since the number of abortions in the US is in the 3.4 million range
    Never in years, Sebastian. “U.S. abortion rates continued to decline in 2001 and 2002, although the rate of decline has slowed since the early 1990s. The Institute estimates that 1,303,000 abortions took place in the United States in 2001—0.8% fewer than the 1,313,000 in 2000. In 2002, the number of abortions declined again, to 1,293,000, or another 0.8%. The rate of abortion also declined, from 21.3 procedures per 1,000 women aged 15–44 in 2000 to 21.1 in 2001 and 20.9 in 2002.” Abortion rates in the US So we are in fact talking about approximately 18 000 late-term abortions in the US.
    Now, you’re asserting that out of those 18 000 abortions that take place at 21+ weeks gestation, some of them take place at “5 minutes before birth”.
    Or at least that there exist states in the US where legally you can kill a ‘fetus’ 5 minutes before birth. The only states in the US where that may be true would have to be the states where there is no state law regulating abortion, only a total ban which is overridden by the federal law that abortion must be available.
    But, never mind. You have (approximately) 18 000 possible examples of abortions taking place, not in the 21-24 week range where common sense and statistical evidence say they’re taking place, but “5 minutes before birth” – ie, labor has started, the cervix is dilated, the woman is about to give birth in 5-15 minutes.
    And you claim it’s legal for her to decide to abort. Where? What examples do you have that have led you to think so?

39. “Woo-hoo, and I fail to notice any demonstration that the women made the decision to have the abortion only five minutes before they would have given birth.
    Moving goalposts: not allowed.”
    Gary, you are going to have to exactly quote what I said that led you onto this tangent. Because frankly you aren’t making sense.

40. Jesurgislac, you are absolutely right about the 1.3 million abortions, I have no idea why I wrote 3.4.
    You are absolutely not right about the 5 minutes before birth thing. Partial-birth abortions occur during birth. I know you and Gary and CaseyL are all aware of that fact, so I don’t know what you are saying.

41. I would draw the line on research potentially destructive to the [insert appropriate stage of development] at a point before being alive AND in utero, at least for now. That may have to be revised if we can start growing babies outside the womb. The reason is that, thus far, only living embryos in utero can become developed humans. Is that too simple?

42. Sebastian, let’s make it even easier for you than the “5 minutes before birth” claim. Can you provide any examples or even any direct evidence from medical witnesses or patients or hell, even relatives who saw it – that any abortions in the US take place after the waters break? This is well before your “five minutes” – hours, days, or occasionally weeks before labor starts.

43. You are absolutely not right about the 5 minutes before birth thing. Partial-birth abortions occur during birth.
    By “partial birth abortion” I’m going to assume you mean intact dilation and extraction, okay? If you mean something else, you’re going to have to use the medical terminology so that I know what you’re talking about.
    Okay, again, can you offer any evidence that anyone has ever used intact dilation and extraction to remove a fetus after a woman’s waters broke? That’s well before your “5 minutes before birth” timing.

44. My point remains that the legal distinction between the zygote and the 5-minutes before birth fetus, has been rather not well maintained–to be incredibly generous to the pro-choice lobby.
    You cannot point to a single law in the United States that supports your contention. Not only was Roe clear that there could be some fairly rigorous laws about abortion in the third trimester, but I am not aware of any states that have not taken advantage of that fact. Could you please point to a single state that does not make a legal distinction between a zygote and a 5-minutes before birth fetus? One?
    The fact that the Supreme Court does not allow legislatures to ignore the life or health of the mother does not mean that third trimester fetuses do not have substantial rights under the law.

45. Really? How do you know this? Can you cite any instances of 5-minutes-before-birth infanticides which were done for the purposes of aborting the pregnancy?
    I think that I was the one mentioning the 5 minutes before birth first. I did that because I found in many of these kind of discussions with pro-choice people they stated that the rights of the baby only began when it was out of the womb, when it started breathing.
    I’ve seen discussions where pro-choice people said that they thought it was ridiculous to compare a 7 month fetus with a born baby. I think it was at Atrios, when they ridiculed a right-wing congressman (I forgot his name, the darkhaired one, well known, lots of kids) for bringing their 6 month-gestation fetus home and treating it as a stillborn baby. My niece was born at 27 weeks gestation (last October) and is a healthy baby now. I know folk who miscarried after 6 months and had their child burried. I’ve given birth tho three boys and I felt them grow and kick in me, and have their dad cuddle them (they would shuffle to his hand). They were persons to me long before they were born.
    Asking Sebastian about figures does not change that quite a number of pro-choice people have difficulty deciding *when* a fetus earns rights as a person. Hilzoy once mentioned a certain development in the brain as a cut off point (around 22 weeks of gestation I think, when we assume the fetus starts to feel instead of just have reflexes). What *should* be the cut off point? Why not look for the area the majority agrees on, instead of discussing the extremes?

46. I think the “5 minutes before birth” thing needs to be dropped. It’s not really crucial to the point Sebastian is making. What I think is important is that he feels that there may be some number of unneccesary late-term abortions happening, since there is no collection of data on the reasons for late-term abortions. I would argue that there is no incentive for performing unneccessary late-term abortions, that doing so would require a conspiracy involving doctors and nurses and would-be mothers and probably others. If such a conspiracy is what is troublesome, collecting data won’t help much, since it would be collected from the conspirators.
    What makes me entertain such distractions?

47. Jes-
    Sorry to take so long to respond; apparently I’m not as bloggarrific as I need to be to engage in comment-based discussions. Anyway.
    full human rights. . .do not include the right to use another human person’s body against his or her will, not even to save your life
    Frankly, I disagree. If you are granting humanity to an embryo or fetus, then abortion would be killing someone. How much of a problem or threat does someone have to be for it to be OK to kill them? We’re talking about the rather unique situation where one human being would be functioning as a non-lethal parasite on another (what you phrase as “us[ing] another human person’s body against his or her will”), and of course, for most working class women, you’re probably also looking at: “They’re going to be seriously problematic for the next 9 months, losing me my job [that doesn’t offer maternity leave] and thus causing a real financial crisis, possibly including homelessness.” That’s a pretty damn serious pair of problems (the parasitism and the financial disaster), but does it justify killing someone? I’d argue no — according to my morality, at least, killing someone is only justifiable if they pose a credible threat to your own life or the life of another (so, as an aside, if a pregnancy is causing potentially lethal problems, abortion would still be perfectly justifiable as self-defense).
    Obviously, that’s all dependent on the “If” at the beginning of that section, which is why I think it’s a relevant “if” to discuss. Doesn’t mean you have to agree with me, naturally, but it’s why it frustrates me that most pro-choice advocates whom I know ignore the question.
    It’s also dependent on the claim I just made that “killing someone is only justifiable if they pose a credible threat to your own life or the life of another,” with which you also are free to disagree.

48. Partial-birth abortions occur during birth.
    I’m just checking here, but are you defining ‘birth’ as ‘the emergence from the uterus of the dead or dying fetus during the process of an intact dilation and extraction’ regardless of the point in gestation at which that takes place? Because I think everyone else in the thread is thinking of ‘birth’ as ‘the culmination of either labor or a surgical procedure intended to bring about a live birth, generally at close to 40 weeks gestation.’ The concept of ‘five minutes before birth’ is poorly defined, of course, given that the exact time of a birth can’t be predicted before it takes place.
    But if you’re saying that a D&X in the 20th week of gestation is a ‘birth’ if the fetus is not dead before it leaves the uterus, then you’re using words in a confusingly private sense.

49. “I think it was at Atrios, when they ridiculed a right-wing congressman (I forgot his name, the darkhaired one, well known, lots of kids) for bringing their 6 month-gestation fetus home and treating it as a stillborn baby.”
    Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, I assume you mean.

50. Joe, I don’t donate blood any more (though I used to, for about 15 years) because I have thin-walled veins and the vein in my left arm has had so many needles stuck into it by so many vampires that it’s useless as a blood source: they told me at the blood bank that I could “probably” donate blood three or four times from my right arm before that vein too became useless. There is a blood donor shortage in the UK right now, and I suppose I could go back and offer the last three or four donations from my remaining usable vein, but I choose not to: I think I would like to retain one vein that’s fit to get a blood sample from (or a transfusion to) in case I need it.
    It’s possible that in the years since I stopped giving blood someone died because the hospital didn’t have a pint of fresh A Negative that I could have supplied and decided not to. Say it’s so. That person was undoubtedly a human person, with full human rights, and my decision not to donate blood killed them. They were not a problem or a threat to me: I just made the decision that giving blood had ceased to be something I was comfortable doing.
    Your argument is that the law ought to force me back into the blood bank, tie me down, stick a needle in my arm, and take the last three or four donations I didn’t want to give: I don’t have the right to refuse the use of my blood to save a life.
    I don’t agree. I’m pro-choice. It’s my right to decide when or if to give blood.
    Neither do I agree that just because you (hypothetically) have two healthy kidneys and someone who is a donor match is dying of renal failure, that you can be legally be held prisoner and one of your kidneys removed. I’m pro-choice. It’s your right to decide when or if to donate a kidney.
    But you are arguing that you are not allowed to refuse to have a kidney removed and used for a life-saving transplant: the only way to prevent your kidney being removed is if a doctor agrees that removing one of your kidneys will kill you.
    Or rather, you’re not arguing that. Because that pro-life argument would apply to men and women alike: and pro-lifers are only ever interested in arguing that the right to decide what to do with your own body can be removed from women.
    Which is why the key point is: are women human persons? If so, it’s up to the pregnant woman to decide whether to terminate or continue her pregnancy. It’s not up to anyone else. Just as it’s up to me to decide whether or not to be a blood donor, or you to be a kidney donor.

51. “Okay, again, can you offer any evidence that anyone has ever used intact dilation and extraction to remove a fetus after a woman’s waters broke? That’s well before your “5 minutes before birth” timing.”
    How the heck do you do the extraction without causing the woman’s water to break? I would take it as a given, just based on what I know of human physiology and the birth process, that essentially ALL intact dialation and extractions involve the water breaking.
    “Because I think everyone else in the thread is thinking of ‘birth’ as ‘the culmination of either labor or a surgical procedure intended to bring about a live birth, generally at close to 40 weeks gestation.'”
    Oh, sweet: If you intend to abort, the exact same physical processes which would otherwise lead to a live birth in a matter of minutes, are suddenly defined as not being “birth”. What a cozy argument.

52. Jes, by the time the fetus is viable, the woman has had half a year or more to think about whether to deliver. And yet, you want to permit her to kill a viable infant, when she had the ability to kill a blastocyst instead.

53. Marbel: Asking Sebastian about figures does not change that quite a number of pro-choice people have difficulty deciding *when* a fetus earns rights as a person.
    Possibly, but the pro-choice position is that it’s not relevant: the individual pregnant woman gets to decide.
    Nor does it change the fact that the pro-life (forced pregnancy) position is absolutely dependent on deciding *when* a woman ceases to be a human person, and becomes an incubator without the right to make decisions about her own body.

54. “But if you’re saying that a D&X in the 20th week of gestation is a ‘birth’ if the fetus is not dead before it leaves the uterus, then you’re using words in a confusingly private sense.”
    Well of course it is dead before it leaves the uterus. That is rather the point of the procedure. What I’m saying is that if perform the procedure at 35 weeks or 38 weeks or 39 weeks (all within your legal right and beyond even cursory verification of medical neccesity in say rather small states like California and New York) that the fetus is alive as labor is induced and or course aborted after that time. Obviously there isn’t a LIVE birth at that time. So if Gary was appealing the logical impossibility of having a succesful abortion and having a live birth, I guess he is right about that. But considering that doesn’t change my argument at all, I don’t understand that point.
    Again, if you believe there is a clear point beyond which experimentation on a fetus which will terminate the fetus is inappropriate, I’d be thrilled to hear it.

55. No, the point is that if we’re talking about ‘5 minutes before birth’ as intended to describe a point in the gestational process, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to tie it to labor — the point about 40 weeks into gestation at which birth would take place on its own. If you want to define ‘birth’ as including ‘an abortion, at whatever point in gestation’, then we aren’t talking about time anymore — you’re making the tautological point that if abortion is (sometimes) the same thing as birth, than abortion always (sometimes) happens simultaneously with birth. To which the only answer is, sure, if you want to define your terms that way. Me, I’m a teapot.

56. That last was to Brett, not to Sebastian.

57. Brett: How the heck do you do the extraction without causing the woman’s water to break?
    If it’s “five minutes before birth”, Brett, the woman’s waters will already have broken. That was my point.
    Jes, by the time the fetus is viable, the woman has had half a year or more to think about whether to deliver.
    You’re going for 26+ weeks as viability, then? Fair enough.
    I will commit to saying that I do not believe any abortion is carried out at anywhere in the US or the UK, at 26+ weeks, unless the fetus is dead already and must be removed. In which case, viability is not an issue, is it?
    Even the tragic instances of a baby that will die painfully soon after birth if it’s brought to term, I have never heard of abortions occurring at 25w+, let alone 26w+. Certainly not Sebastian’s “five minutes before birth”.

58. This will probably be redundant by time I finish typing it, so sorry.
    I think Joe Thomas makes a good point. I agree that there should be some recognition that we’re not necessarily talking about the life of the fetus versus the life of the woman carrying it. Usually, it’s a matter of the life of the fetus versus the rights of the woman carry it. Even if you don’t grant a fetus the full moral weight of a living, birthed human being, it may carry some weight, and it may carry enough that killing it for, say, the convenience of the mother is morally unjustified. I would argue that the moral, ethical and legal weight increases from its lowest point at conception to some point before full term at which the fetus should be considered fully human.
    Given all of that, there is a weighing of concerns that has to be done. What are the reasons for terminating the pregnancy? (Or what are the consequences to the woman of allowing the pregnancy to continue?) How far along is the pregnancy? (Or how important is the life of the fetus given its stage of development?) These things are much greyer before the point at which the fetus can be considered a full human being, which is itself a grey area.
    The question then becomes, who gets to answer these questions? The government? If so, how are the answers enforced?

59. Jes, at some point we’re not talking about forced “pregnancy”, we’re talking about forced “delivery instead of abortion”.
    Suppose somebody breaks into my house. I can’t be forced to give them 9 months room and board, but I damn well can be forced to let them walk out the door instead of being dragged out in a body bag.
    But the pro-choice community wants there to be no circumstances, no circumstances at all, where a woman who wants her baby dead might end up frustrated. I can’t stomach that, that’s not a defense of a woman’s choice not to be pregnant, it’s a defense of her choice to kill the baby. Because, post viability, you can end the pregnancy by giving birth.

60. Brett: How the heck do you do the extraction without causing the woman’s water to break?
    If it’s “five minutes before birth”, Brett, the woman’s waters will already have broken. That was my point.
    Jes, by the time the fetus is viable, the woman has had half a year or more to think about whether to deliver.
    You’re going for 26+ weeks as viability, then? Fair enough.
    I will commit to saying that I do not believe any abortion is carried out at anywhere in the US or the UK, at 26+ weeks, unless the fetus is dead already and must be removed. In which case, viability is not an issue, is it?
    Even the tragic instances of a baby that will die painfully soon after birth if it’s brought to term, I have never heard of abortions occurring at 25w+, let alone 26w+. Certainly not Sebastian’s “five minutes before birth”.

61. But the pro-choice community wants there to be no circumstances, no circumstances at all, where a woman who wants her baby dead might end up frustrated.
    Actually, no. I know of no pro-choicer who supports or defends infanticide: none. Nor do I think you’ve ever heard of any.

62. hairshirt: I agree that there should be some recognition that we’re not necessarily talking about the life of the fetus versus the life of the woman carrying it.
    No: we’re always talking about the basic human right to decide what to do with your own body. Either you grant that a woman always has that basic human right, even when pregnant, or you argue that she doesn’t.

63. I thought it was a great op-ed by Sam Brownback. See also a profile on him done by The Weekly Standard which I wrote a post on here: Mr Compassionate Conservative.

64. Sebastian?
    I don’t think this: “What I’m saying is that if perform the procedure at 35 weeks or 38 weeks or 39 weeks (all within your legal right and beyond even cursory verification of medical neccesity in say rather small states like California and New York) that the fetus is alive as labor is induced and or course aborted after that time.” is true.
    I didn’t know the state of the law in NY in any detail, but this sounded odd to me, and I don’t think it’s true. Searching the NY State code for ‘abortion’ comes up with Penal Law s. 125.05, defining abortion as criminal where it does not meet the standard for a ‘justifiable abortional act’ defined as follows:
    “Justifiable abortional act.” An abortional act is justifiable when committed upon a female with her consent by a duly licensed physician acting (a) under a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life, or, (b) within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy. A pregnant female’s commission of an abortional act upon herself is justifiable when she acts upon the advice of a duly licensed physician (1) that such act is necessary to preserve her life, or, (2) within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy. The submission by a female to an abortional act is justifiable when she believes that it is being committed by a duly licensed physician, acting under a reasonable belief that such act is necessary to preserve her life, or, within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy.
    So, in NYS, the rules are in the first 24 weeks, or to preserve the life of the mother. Were you unaware of the state of the law, or are you carping that it’s systematically unenforced, and if the latter on what evidence?

65. Sebastian?
    I don’t think this: “What I’m saying is that if perform the procedure at 35 weeks or 38 weeks or 39 weeks (all within your legal right and beyond even cursory verification of medical neccesity in say rather small states like California and New York) that the fetus is alive as labor is induced and or course aborted after that time.” is true.
    I didn’t know the state of the law in NY in any detail, but this sounded odd to me, and I don’t think it’s true. Searching the NY State code for ‘abortion’ comes up with Penal Law s. 125.05, defining abortion as criminal where it does not meet the standard for a ‘justifiable abortional act’ defined as follows:
    “Justifiable abortional act.” An abortional act is justifiable when committed upon a female with her consent by a duly licensed physician acting (a) under a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life, or, (b) within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy. A pregnant female’s commission of an abortional act upon herself is justifiable when she acts upon the advice of a duly licensed physician (1) that such act is necessary to preserve her life, or, (2) within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy. The submission by a female to an abortional act is justifiable when she believes that it is being committed by a duly licensed physician, acting under a reasonable belief that such act is necessary to preserve her life, or, within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of her pregnancy.
    So, in NYS, the rules are in the first 24 weeks, or to preserve the life of the mother. Were you unaware of the state of the law, or are you carping that it’s systematically unenforced, and if the latter on what evidence?

66. “I will commit to saying that I do not believe any abortion is carried out at anywhere in the US or the UK, at 26+ weeks, unless the fetus is dead already and must be removed.”
    I will commit to saying that you’re certainly wrong, which is why the pro-choice movement is so adamant that no mechanism ever be put in place with could actually prevent elective abortions of viable infants.

67. Right. Which is why the marches in the streets to change the NY abortion law. I keep on missing those.

68. LB, I looked up the law regulating abortion and discovered that the only states in which Sebastian is right as far as legislation is concerned are those where (Delaware: Minnesota) there is an absolute ban on any abortions. This ban can’t be enforced because of Roe vs Wade, and the state legislature chooses not to regulate (which would be enforceable).
    Of course, this doesn’t mean a woman could get an abortion at 39 weeks in Delaware: to do so she would have to find a physician willing to perform an abortion, and all medical associations have codes of conduct with regard to abortion.
    Why those states prefer to leave abortion unregulated is not altogether understandable to a rational person – are they still hoping that, after 34 years, Roe vs Wade will be overturned?

69. But the pro-choice community wants there to be no circumstances, no circumstances at all, where a woman who wants her baby dead might end up frustrated.
    Should we discuss whether pro-lifers all want to make women into reproductive slaves?
    I really see your comment as an overwrought exaggeration. There may be a very few radicals who are willing to characterize pro-choice that way, but I always seem to see such claims about pro-life from those who are opposed to abortion under almost all circumstances. The vast majority of Americans are quite comfortable in the middle, tolerating abortion when necessary, but supporting sensible limits later in the term.

70. Jes, are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?

71. Brett: I will commit to saying that you’re certainly wrong
    Okay, find me an example. One example of a legal abortion of a viable fetus taking place at 26w+ somewhere in the US.
    which is why the pro-choice movement is so adamant that no mechanism ever be put in place with could actually prevent elective abortions of viable infants.
    Actually, as far as I can see, it’s the pro-life movement (those bans in Delaware and Minnesota which prevent regulation?) that seek to avoid mechanisms to prevent your hypothetical, unproven, abortions of viable fetuses (26w+).

72. Yeah, the relevant statute for California is this:
    123468. The performance of an abortion is unauthorized if either of
    the following is true:
    (a) The person performing or assisting in performing the abortion
    is not a health care provider authorized to perform or assist in
    performing an abortion pursuant to Section 2253 of the Business and
    Professions Code.
    (b) The abortion is performed on a viable fetus, and both of the
    following are established:
    (1) In the good faith medical judgment of the physician, the fetus
    was viable.
    (2) In the good faith medical judgment of the physician,
    continuation of the pregnancy posed no risk to life or health of the
    pregnant woman.
    I’m not sure if Sebastian is confused about the state of the law, or speaking in some manner that I don’t understand.

73. hairshirthedonist: Jes, are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?
    If your answer to The question then becomes, who gets to answer these questions? is “the woman who’s pregnant, with the advice of her physician” then we are in agreement.

74. but I always seem to see such claims about pro-life from those who are opposed to abortion under almost all circumstances.
    Sorry, garbled that. I intended to say that the pro-lifers are the ones who claim that all pro-choice folks are totally opposed to all regulation. Pro-choice people do not generally say what the pro-lifers claim they say.

75. Isn’t it interesting that a thread supposedly to discuss whether or not it’s ethical to do scientific research on 5-day-old blastocysts that will never become humans because they will never be transplanted into a human uterus, Joe Thomas very promptly brought up the issue of abortion and now we’re discussing 26w+ fetuses?

76. It seems to me that pro-choicers say things that they say pro-lifers don’t think they say, but that they say the things pro-lifers try to say they say in response to the things that they say first. Right?

77. Oh, sweet: If you intend to abort, the exact same physical processes which would otherwise lead to a live birth in a matter of minutes, are suddenly defined as not being “birth”. What a cozy argument.
    Well, exactly. Because if you weren’t intending to abort, those “exact same physical processes” wouldn’t occur naturally for several months more.
    The woman’s intent does, in fact, make all the difference. If you want to focus solely on the “physical process,” there’s no difference at all between a standard abortion and a wacko doctor who decides he’s going to abort a woman’s baby without her consent. In either case, he does the exact same thing, but it’s a crime in one case solely because of the woman’s intent.
    I’m glad, though, that we’ve narrowed the issue down to whether partial-birth abortions occur during “birth.” (It’s because of word games like this, incidentally, that we can never reach universal agreement on a set of terms.) Imagine a woman in her late second trimester, about 20-24 weeks (which is when most partial-birth abortions occur), who is having an abortion for whatever reason. The doctor determines, in his medical judgment, that while he could perform a standard D&E procedure, it would be safer for the woman to perform an intact D&X, the partial-birth abortion procedure.
    Now if it’s fine (or at least legal) for her to have an abortion using the standard procedure, but you think it should be illegal in the latter case because the physical processes involved look too much like childbirth to you, then what you’re saying is that the law should require this woman to face a greater risk of death or physical harm because you, a person with no involvement, feel too much of an “ick” factor. I hate to tell you, but the fetus will end up dead either way.
    Mind you, most “partial-birth abortion” statutes end up getting drafted to ban the D&E procedure as well, which doesn’t look very much like birth. But my real point is that if you want to legally mandate a procedure that is less safe, in the judgment of the treating physician, then you ought to at least be accomplishing something more tangible than reducing the “ick” factor for people who are totally uninvolved.

78. Jesurgislac, nobody, male or female, can do everything they want with “her own body.” A woman, no more than a man, cannot move her own body into a position where its arms happen to be around somebody else’s neck, and then squeeze the muscles in that arm so that said other person dies. A woman, no more than a man, can’t pump heroin into a vein of her own body. A woman, no more than a man, can’t cause the vocal cords of her own body to defame another person. A woman, no more than a man, has no absolute right to breed typhoid inside her own body and take that body into a nursery. A woman, no more than a man, can’t implant a subdermal transmitter and use it to broadcast confidential matters. If you are actually arguing — as you seem to be — that abortion is an absolute right, you need some basis other than an inviolable right to do what you want, whether inside your body or outside.
    Brett’s analogy to a trespasser goes to exactly the point that troubles me, and I think bothers most voters, to judge by our national consensus on late-term abortions. At some point, there appear to be two people, and therefore two sets of rights at stake — a very real right to avoid invasion, physical harm (EVERY pregnancy & delivery involves health risk, and almost all do SOME harm to lifelong health), financial loss, job risk, inconvenience, physical pain, emotional trauma (if you don’t want the baby, it’s obviously upsetting to have it inside you, there’s no upside to the pain of labor/c-section, and your hormones will probably make you attach just enough that giving it up for adoption hurts like hell no matter how sure you are), etc. versus, well, a right to life. It is far from obvious to me which must win out. And the fact that the woman in question did not avail herself of abortion opportunities beforehand makes me less disposed to prioritize her rights. You seem to think that this line of reasoning is meritless. Please explain?

79. hairshirthedonist,
    Didn’t you know that when it comes to purely emotional issues, the other guy always started it and they always misrepresent your position.
    The real problem is that there are people who have been radicalized on both sides who don’t trust either their opposing radicals or those who are in the pragmatic middle on this. Pragmatic people can do evil, but to do great evil takes a zealot who is completely convinced of his unassailable moral superiority.
    Brownback, in this case, does come across as a radical, completely unwilling to make any effort to compromise because he is so convinced that his moral position in unquestionably perfect. He has decided that the value of a blastocyst is unquestionably greater than the value of a sick child or adult. I cannot support his hubris.

80. trilobite: Jesurgislac, nobody, male or female, can do everything they want with “her own body.”
    Really? So you’re claiming that there are states in the US where people with two healthy kidneys who are viable donors for people dying of renal failure, are legally forced to have one kidney removed? Can you list them, so I know which states to avoid if I ever visit again?
    You seem to think that this line of reasoning is meritless. Please explain?
    See above. What is your justification why the law does not force a person with two healthy kidneys to have one removed to save a recipient dying of kidney failure? Why is organ transplant not forced by law from anyone with two healthy kidneys, or a nice large healthy liver?

81. Hell, you know that in the UK, it’s the law that I get to decide whether or not my organs will be used for transplant even after I die? At which point I can’t claim that it will cause me the slightest inconvenience. Nonetheless, if I have made clear that I do not wish my organs to be so made use of after my death, it’s both illegal and inethical to take them against my will, even though doing so will save many lives, not just one.

82. Hell, you know that in the UK, it’s the law that I get to decide whether or not my organs will be used for transplant even after I die?
    That’s the law in the US as well, and as far as I know, it’s universally an opt-in procedure where you have to affirmatively elect to donate your organs.
    You’re not really addressing the point head-on, though, which was that there are many respects in which the law doesn’t grant you unrestricted control over your body. (Although I think only the heroin example arguably didn’t include harm to another person.) Your response is to go to the other extreme and point out that the state doesn’t exert unlimited control over your body, either. That’s true, but doesn’t really address the argument that we only enjoy partial autonomy in the first place.

83. Hell, you know that in the UK, it’s the law that I get to decide whether or not my organs will be used for transplant even after I die?
    A law subject to repeal by a majority vote?

84. I think where you guys are talking past each other is whether abortion is to be viewed as an affirmative act or as a decision to withhold bodily services. The right not to perform personal service is pretty close to absolute — were it possible to by act of will shut off blood flow to the fetus, a claim that the woman was obliged to provide food/oxygen/waste disposal for the fetus would be about as weird as Jes is saying it is.
    The fact that abortion in practice involves affirmatively killing the fetus, rather than simply evicting it, makes the situation less clear, but given that the result of a simple ‘eviction’ would be the same, her analysis isn’t obviously flawed.

85. Steve: You’re not really addressing the point head-on, though, which was that there are many respects in which the law doesn’t grant you unrestricted control over your body.
    But no respect in which the law requires me to give up my control over my own body to save a life against my will. I can’t be forced to provide a pint of blood, or give up a kidney, or halve my liver and share it, or supply bone marrow. Unless you can come up with some ethical argument that justifies your being forced to provide any or all the above to save a life against your will, you cannot justify forcing a woman through pregnancy and childbirth against her will.

86. LB: The fact that abortion in practice involves affirmatively killing the fetus, rather than simply evicting it
    Actually, no. Early abortion – certainly before 13 weeks, which is when the vast majority of abortions take place – does in practice involve removing the fetus from the uterus. The fetus will then die, of course. Almost instantly, and it’s not biologically capable of feeling pain at that point.
    In effect, by an act of will – the woman tells the doctor “Okay, I want an abortion” and the doctor carries out her act of will – the woman does “shut off blood flow to the fetus” – by having the placenta removed from the lining of her uterus.

87. But no respect in which the law requires me to give up my control over my own body to save a life against my will.
    The Draft?

88. But no respect in which the law requires me to give up my control over my own body to save a life against my will.
    Well, that doesn’t sound right. If you want to jet off to Paris and leave your newborn baby at home to starve to death, the law does in fact have a problem with that. The government requires you to provide nourishment to that baby and keep it alive, even at the cost of some of your autonomy.

89. If you want to jet off to Paris and leave your newborn baby at home to starve to death, the law does in fact have a problem with that.
    And this has what connection with the answer I asked you to provide?
    Unless a woman is breastfeeding (and the law can’t and doesn’t require her to do that, either) a mother can jet off to anywhere leaving her newborn baby anywhere she likes – the law only has a problem with that if the newborn baby is left somewhere it will starve/die of neglect, but – once born – it’s no longer dependent on its mother’s body as a fetus is, especially a non-viable fetus.

90. I guess your point would have been clearer if you had said that the law doesn’t require you to give up your bodily fluids, or parts of your body or whatever. Because it’s quite clear the law often does take away your “control over your body” in the ordinary sense of the phrase.

91. Ugh: The Draft?
    Hm… well, my country hasn’t had conscription in years, but that’s actually a good point. Still, conscription did have its limits, and those limits included not (for example) requiring soldiers to provide pints of blood against their will. (To quote Heinlein who was quoting West Point rules, “an upperclassman can’t order you to hold still while he takes a poke at you, or order you to take a poke at him” – ah, those days when “take a poke” suggested “start a fight” rather than “have sex”…)

92. Steve; Because it’s quite clear the law often does take away your “control over your body” in the ordinary sense of the phrase.
    Does it? Again, what example are you offering of the law taking away your control over your own body and forcing you to provide bone marrow, liver, kidney, or blood to save a life?

93. Lizardbreath: “(a) under a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life” is completely unenforced and in fact pro-choice groups have insured that it is impossible to enforce because the doctors are not required to make such a showing.
    As Gary rather pointedly mentioned, it is the actual practice that is important. There is absolutely no way of knowing that, because pro-choice groups don’t want us to look in to it and they have been extremely successful in keeping paper trails or other documentation out of reach.
    “(1) In the good faith medical judgment of the physician, the fetus
    was viable.
    (2) In the good faith medical judgment of the physician,
    continuation of the pregnancy posed no risk to life or health of the
    pregnant woman”
    In the California statute, the history of the practice of the previous health definition is suggestive:
    “Alone among pre-Roe statutes with a mental health exception, California attempted to define what would qualify as a mental health related abortion in terms at least as strict as the standard for civil commitment, i.e., that the pregnant woman “would be dangerous to herself or to the person or property of others or is in need of supervision or restraint.” Id. § 25954, renumbered as § 123415 in 1995. Notwithstanding that narrow definition, more than 60,000 abortions were performed in California in 1970, 98.2% of which were performed for mental health reasons. People v. Barksdale, 503 P.2d 257, 265 (Cal. 1972). In Barksdale, the California Supreme Court expressed “[s]erious doubt . . . that such a considerable number of pregnant women could have been committed to a mental institution” as the result of becoming pregnant. Id. The experience in California strongly suggests that mental health exceptions in abortion statutes are inherently manipulable and subject to abuse.”

94. Again, what example are you offering of the law taking away your control over your own body and forcing you to provide bone marrow, liver, kidney, or blood to save a life?
    You’re being extremely obtuse. There’s plenty of ways in which you can exert “control over your body” that don’t involve providing bone marrow, liver, kidney, or blood to save a life.
    I opened my comment by saying: “I guess your point would have been clearer if you had said that the law doesn’t require you to give up your bodily fluids, or parts of your body or whatever.” Point being, if you had put it that way, I would have agreed with you. Why you’re continuing to pick a fight over something I agreed to is beyond me.

95. Well, “within your legal right” is just flat out false — no one has a legal right to violate the law. So that bit was hyperbolic. For the rest of it, can we leave it at the fact that although you have no evidence of any sort of which I’m aware that these laws are ever violated (if you have got evidence, you could link it), you’re dissatisfied with the procedures for enforcing them.

96. Jesurgislac, the connection is that you have legal obligations to children in your care that you do not have toward the population in general, so you can’t necessarily deduce, from the fact that you have no generalized Samaritan duty, that you have no duty to refrain from aborting your own child in some circumstances. You may say that you didn’t choose to have the fetus in your care — but that just gets you back where you started: why is your presumptive duty to a 7-month fetus less than to a one-day-old baby? In both cases, all you necessarily did to elect responsibility was to let nature take its course.
    You seem hung up on the “kidney or a pint of blood” analogy, but it’s not the only possible comparison. We have made others — to providing nourishment in other ways to children once they attain personhood, and to other ways that the government asserts control over your innards. All analogy is imperfect, but I don’t see why yours is better than these.
    There are at least 2 reasons not to presume a right to harvest organs from the newly dead that don’t apply to abortion, btw: 1) respect for religion; 2) moral hazard (i.e., it might encourage doctors and policymakers to hasten a death).

97. And this: “There is absolutely no way of knowing that, because pro-choice groups don’t want us to look in to it”
    is simply ridiculous. Not one woman, nor one doctor, who regrets their decision to break the law enough to come forward? If these laws are broken with any frequency whatsoever, you’re envisioning a hell of a conspiracy of silence there.

98. Ugh, you’re not the first to make that comparison. I seem to recall seeing some late-19th – early-20th century political rhetoric comparing the duty of young men to lay down their lives to the duty of young women to create new lives, in both cases for the good of the country. Come to think of it, I think that’s where the joke about “lie back and think of England” comes from.

99. The experience in California strongly suggests that mental health exceptions in abortion statutes are inherently manipulable and subject to abuse.”
    Sure, just as the number of divorces based on infidelity and mental cruelty shrank once no-fault divorce came in. The question is, how many of those mental-health abortions were dishonest after viability? You’re assuming that the moral choices the doctors substituted for the legal standard were poor; they may not have been.

100. trilobite: the connection is that you have legal obligations to children in your care that you do not have toward the population in general
     But a fetus a woman has decided to abort is not (and never will be) “a child in her care”.
     so you can’t necessarily deduce, from the fact that you have no generalized Samaritan duty
     Are you going to argue then that the law can and does force a parent to provide bone marrow, blood, a kidney, or half a liver to their child? I wasn’t aware of that, either. In which states is this the law?
     All analogy is imperfect, but I don’t see why yours is better than these.
     Because my analogy isn’t an analogy: it’s a direct equation. You are arguing that a woman has no right to make decisions about her own uterus: I am asking you to provide an ethical argument that justifies this for everyone (or, if you want to restrict it just to all parents) and for all organs, not just the uterus. Why do you believe it ethical, if a father does not want to give up one of his kidneys to his child, for him to be forced to do so against his will to save his child’s life?
     There are at least 2 reasons not to presume a right to harvest organs from the newly dead that don’t apply to abortion, btw: 1) respect for religion; 2) moral hazard (i.e., it might encourage doctors and policymakers to hasten a death).
     But there is no moral hazard in forcing a woman through pregnancy and childbirth against her will, and no religion that (in your view) mandates regarding a woman as a human being with full human rights, even when pregnant?

101. “To quote Heinlein who was quoting West Point rules”
     I don’t recognize the reference, but I don’t claim to have every word of Heinlein memorized, so that’s irrelevant; however, I’m inclined to suspect he’d have been referring to Annapolis, the Naval Academy in Maryland, which he went to extreme efforts to get nominated to, and then graduated from, rather than West Point, the Army Academy, in New York.
     “Does it? Again, what example are you offering of the law taking away your control over your own body and forcing you to provide bone marrow, liver, kidney, or blood to save a life?”
     Steve was picking up on your poor phrasing, which is what’s making it necessary for you to add the clause that comes after “and” here, to save you from having made an over-strong claim.
     The State puts a lot of requirements on our bodies, as regards the sort of things Steve referred to. Another would be that the state requires you not to relax your hand muscles if you’re holding a child over the balcony of a twelve-story building; it requires you not to, when holding a two-hundred pound weight over someone’s head, release the weight with your hand muscles. You are constrained by the State from poking your finger through someone’s eye. Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
     What it doesn’t do is put the more specific, and limited, requirements upon the internals of your body, that you actually have in mind, but wrote in such a way as to instead include all behavior of your body.
     Basically, the State can and does constrain us from a gazillion positive actions we can take with our bodies — this is constraining our bodies; what we pretty much don’t let the State do is enjoin us to take positive actions, such as donate blood, give up an organ, etc.
     (Though that distinction is arguable, too: for instance, we’re at least theoretically both restrained from jaywalking, and enjoined to walk across streets at cross-walks; what’s a constraint versus an enjoinment is sometimes a matter of POV.)
     It’s a relatively trivial point, and completely avoidable by simply being a bit more careful, and a bit less sweeping, in your phrasing.

102. Steve: Point being, if you had put it that way, I would have agreed with you. Why you’re continuing to pick a fight over something I agreed to is beyond me.
     Sorry. Probably because threads that turn into abortion threads tend to get acrimonious: I apologize for picking a fight with you, and will now retire from the thread…

103. The experience in California strongly suggests that mental health exceptions in abortion statutes are inherently manipulable and subject to abuse.
     The pre-Roe statistics are, quite frankly, indicative of civil disobedience. The pre-Roe California statute provided that you couldn’t get an abortion, even early in the first trimester, unless “there is a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother” or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. Clearly, there were some doctors who felt that it was ridiculous to ban first-trimester abortions, and relying on the mental health exception was the easiest way to circumvent the statute. I’m not saying that makes it right, but if I were a doctor, it’s possible I’d feel the same way after the first time I sent a woman home only to have her return in a body bag following a botched DIY.
     Anyway, consider that today, we’re discussing the mental health exception only in the context of late-term abortions, something most doctors and medical associations are reluctant to approve in the first place. Just because doctors in California were routinely abused the mental health exception in order to approve first-trimester abortions hardly means they will be equally willing to find any excuse to approve an abortion at 30 weeks. The sort of doctor who approves a third-trimester abortion for no good reason is surely rare, and I’m not convinced such a creature even exists.
     In addition, you’re kind of going down the road of the typical conservative argument which says “some people cheat at welfare, so we shouldn’t have welfare.” Either you’re disdainful of the notion that abortion could ever be necessary for mental health reasons, or else you’re looking to ban abortions that ought to be performed for such reasons on the grounds that if we allow them, some people will get away with gaming the system.

104. “The pre-Roe statistics are, quite frankly, indicative of civil disobedience. The pre-Roe California statute provided that you couldn’t get an abortion, even early in the first trimester, unless “there is a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother” or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. Clearly, there were some doctors who felt that it was ridiculous to ban first-trimester abortions, and relying on the mental health exception was the easiest way to circumvent the statute.”
     Ahh, this works really well with Lizardbreath’s argument that I should trust doctors to do the right thing without any supervision or check whatsoever. Thanks for setting my mind at ease.

105. Have you got any evidence at all that these laws are ever violated? The pro-choice conspiracy of silence didn’t successfully conceal all the pre-Roe illegal abortions — are you asserting that it’s more effective now?

106. Think for a moment how incredibly difficult it is to get good statistics on prisoner abuse. This is true EVEN THOUGH PRISONERS ROUTINELY SURVIVE PRISON AND ROUTINELY ARE RELEASED FROM PRISON.
     Now, posit it a situation where the prisoners are never released, and never survive incarceration. Would you be comfortable with a situation where the professionals in charge (the wardens) don’t have to track their treatment of the prisoners. Would you be fine with a complete lack of supervision? Why or why not?

107. “The pro-choice conspiracy of silence didn’t successfully conceal all the pre-Roe illegal abortions — are you asserting that it’s more effective now?”
     What exactly are you talking about? Doctors were claiming in California that 80,000 women per year were going to be so mentally ill that they would have to be institutionalized because of their pregnancies and how many were prosecuted for that? Sounds like it was pretty darn effective back then too!

108. But it’s not difficult to get anecdotal evidence that prisoner abuse happens sometimes — often enough to worry about. Accurate numbers are difficult to collect, but testimony on individual cases is all over the place.
     You’re worried that these laws banning elective late term abortion are routinely violated, but I haven’t seen you cite to a single anecdote from someone claiming firsthand knowledge of a violation. Without some such evidence, I can’t see treating lax enforcement of the law as a social issue of primary importance.

109. my analogy isn’t an analogy: it’s a direct equation. You are arguing that a woman has no right to make decisions about her own uterus: I am asking you to provide an ethical argument that justifies this for everyone (or, if you want to restrict it just to all parents) and for all organs, not just the uterus. Why do you believe it ethical, if a father does not want to give up one of his kidneys to his child, for him to be forced to do so against his will to save his child’s life?
     Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions, they are not, however, entitled to their own language. Uterus:kidney, is an analogy. So, for that matter, is donation:gestation.
     What you appear to mean is that your analogy is more exact. But more exact is not always better, nor is it obvious that the similarity between donation and gestation is greater than that between gestation and nourishment. You do not lose the future use of your organs when you gestate; you do when you donate. I hope it is clear that I am talking about pregnancy in general here, not about pregnancies involving major health risk, as to which my arguments do not apply because of the self-defense issue. You made an argument for a right to abort independent of major health risk, and I have been answering that argument.
     But there is no moral hazard in forcing a woman through pregnancy and childbirth against her will, and no religion that (in your view) mandates regarding a woman as a human being with full human rights, even when pregnant?
     Of course there is. But the moral hazard is a different one, and so is the religious precept, and you can’t necessarily assume that because the one is respected so must the other be. And please don’t put words in my mouth.
     Whoops, it says up there that you’ve gone home. Well, I’ll post it anyway, for the sheer intellectual fun of the thing, which is why I wrote it in the first place anyway.

110. Sebastian, “good statistics” is one thing, no evidence at all is another.

111. What exactly are you talking about? Doctors were claiming in California that 80,000 women per year were going to be so mentally ill that they would have to be institutionalized because of their pregnancies and how many were prosecuted for that?
     What I’m talking about is that it was an open secret. The law was violated, but people knew it was being violated; we have statistics on how often it was being violated (perhaps not perfectly accurate, but there on some level). If in 1969, someone asked “Is there any evidence that the abortion laws are ever violated in California?” the answer would have been yes.
     Now, not so much. When did the abortion-rights conspiracy get so good at keeping secrets?

112. “Think for a moment how incredibly difficult it is to get good statistics on prisoner abuse.”
     Sebastian, I observe that people keep asking you for some evidence and you keep responding that there are no reliable definitive statistics.
     It should be needless to point out that this response is not responsive to the question.
     You’ve not been asked to provide “good statistics.”

113. Ahh, this works really well with Lizardbreath’s argument that I should trust doctors to do the right thing without any supervision or check whatsoever. Thanks for setting my mind at ease.
     I’m glad I put the effort into a substantive and detailed comment just so you could blow it off with this snotty response.
     As I alluded to above, the conservative thought process holds that as long as someone, somewhere, is gaming the system, that’s sufficient reason to revoke everyone’s privileges.
     Yes, there was widespread disobedience of the onerous abortion laws in the years before Roe. And for you, this proves that even if we have restrictions that are far more reasonable, restrictions that virtually every doctor and medical assocation would be on board with, there would still be widespread disobedience. Rosa Parks violated the Jim Crow laws, she’ll probably violate other, more reasonable laws as well. As I explained in detail above, I’m not impressed by that argument.

114. “But it’s not difficult to get anecdotal evidence that prisoner abuse happens sometimes — often enough to worry about.”
     That is because the prisoners themselves make allegations. The fetuses are dead. If a prisoner ends up dead, there is at least a pro forma investigation. When the fetus ends up dead, we don’t even attempt to require that the doctor justify himself.

115. Would you be comfortable with a situation where the professionals in charge (the wardens) don’t have to track their treatment of the prisoners.
     But of course, most jurisdictions do require abortion reporting. Of course the reporting isn’t perfect, but much of that is due to the fact that reporting in general tends to suck, not because there’s a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.

     Upon reviewing 86 third-trimester induced abortions reported to the Georgia Department of Health and Human Services in 1979 and 1980, the authors found that the vast majority of the abortions were misreported. Only three procedures could be verified as actual third-trimester induced abortions; 58 of those reported were actually fetal deaths in utero, and 15 more were first- or second-trimester abortions that had been misclassified as third-trimester. The researchers concluded that the correct rate of third-trimester abortions for Georgia in 1979 and 1980 was 4.3 per 100,000 total abortions, rather than the rate of 123.1 per 100,000 abortions reported by the state’s department of health.

     link
     Of course, to the extent anyone is out to deliberately misreport, it might have something to do with the fact that abortion providers do get shot in this country, and women who have abortions do get harassed for it. You can’t just ignore these very real concerns and lament the fate of the poor, ignored reporting requirements.

116. Isn’t it interesting that a thread supposedly to discuss whether or not it’s ethical to do scientific research on 5-day-old blastocysts that will never become humans because they will never be transplanted into a human uterus, Joe Thomas very promptly brought up the issue of abortion and now we’re discussing 26w+ fetuses?
     You’re right that I derailed the conversation; that derailment was unintentional. Though I certainly think the issues are not unrelated, I admit that the shift in focus has clearly obscured Hilzoy’s original intent. In the interests of returning the thread to that topic (or at least not leading it further down the rhetorical black hole), I’ll bow out.
     And, as I’m reviewing to post this, I realize that Jes has done the same. Good move, I think (not because your opinion was not valuable, but for the exact reason that you cite).

117. Third trimester abortions are major surgery that take place in hospitals. With nurses, and multiple doctors, and charts. And there’s still no evidence to point to. Again, that’s a hell of a conspiracy.

118. Gary, yes, tnxs, Sanctorum was the guy I ment.
     Women should not be forced to go through prenancy and childbirth against her will, but babies should be protected when they are persons in their own right. Stating that abortions that late are rare, but still saying that it is only the women who should decide feels like saying that infanticide is rare so it should not be made illegal.
     Abortion in third trimester means actively ending the life of the fetus before it is born. It still needs to be born, it does not dissolve back into the body or something. You are also not talking about inducing labour, so that the mother can *stop* “being an incubator” because the child will be out of her body. The women has the right to her body, but does the viable fetus have rights too? Or only after it leaves the body and has breathed? When does the fetus start to have rights?
     We have a lawsuit (I’ve not read an outcome yet) against a father who heard from his wife that she wanted a divorce and that the baby she was carrying (38 weeks) wasn’t his. He got angry and deliberately stabbed a few times with a knife into her belly. The baby died, and he is now accused of killing an unborn child…

119. Good thing for our conspiracy that nurses tend not to be religious types, or consider life important. Especially OB/Gyn nurses. They just hate babies, that’s why they choose that specialty.
     FWIW, I don’t think the thread was so much derailed, as just developed — Hilzoy nailed Brownback’s demagoguery, and if anybody thinks a 5-day embryo is a person, no amount of argument will ever dissuade them, so there wasn’t much to say directly on point. Fortunately, so far very little of the country thinks so.

120. “The law was violated, but people knew it was being violated; we have statistics on how often it was being violated (perhaps not perfectly accurate, but there on some level).”
     Not perfectly accurate? Please give me an good statistic plus or minus 40% of the total number. I’m asking you to document at plus or minus 32,000 out of a total of 80,000 per year. The only reason I don’t ask for it with an even easier interval is that at 50% you could choose any number at all from 1-80,000 and you’d have it.
     And that was back when the doctors had to document it. Now they doctor doesn’t have to document it.
     According to Luhra Tivis Warren (Operation Rescue member but former medical secretary to famous late-term abortion doctor Tiller):

     I was required to falsify the medical records. But not just that, related to that, I was required to lie to the women over the phone. And the way he’d explain it to me was, without coming right out and saying it, these are really third trimester abortions, but we’re going to tell them they’re only in the second trimester. They would say, well, I’ve already had a sonogram, and my bpd was 7.8 or 8.3 or whatever. He said, when they tell you that, don’t turn them away as being too far along. Tell them to come in, and we’ll do our own sonogram, and it will show they’re not that far along. Tell them that sonogram reading is an art, not a science. He explained to me that the bpd is a measurement of the angle of the baby’s head, where at that angle, the baby’s head is roughly egg-shaped. The usual way that you measure the bpd is from the top of the egg to the bottom of the egg, which is at the widest point. But we measure it from side to side, at the narrowest point.

121. Sebastian specifically said that he didn’t think the 5-day blastocyte was a person, but that he would be more comfortable with clear guidelines about when it is. Hence the thread turning into a discussion about when the fetus *is* a person.
     At least – that’s how I read it.

122. Stating that abortions that late are rare, but still saying that it is only the women who should decide feels like saying that infanticide is rare so it should not be made illegal.
     It’s not just that late-term abortions are rare, it’s that (we believe) they don’t happen without a good reason, like serious health complications. If women are routinely marching into hospitals across America after 7 or 8 months of pregnancy and demanding elective abortions, it’s certainly news to me.
     That’s not to say that we can’t have third-trimester bans, but we need to make sure they leave exceptions for the times when there’s a good reason. And people like Seb have a way of saying no, we can’t have exceptions because then people who want purely elective abortions will find a way to exploit the exceptions. Hence the difficulty in finding a rule we can all agree on.

123. And that was back when the doctors had to document it. Now they doctor doesn’t have to document it.
     Where is it that doctors don’t have to document abortions? A tiny handful of jurisdictions?

124. I’m not certain what Sebastian’s talking about with ‘don’t have to document’ abortions. It’s a medical procedure, and there are the same requirements for documentation as with any other medical procedure. There seems to be some particular kind of documentation he’s worried about, but I don’t know what it is.

125. “With nurses, and multiple doctors, and charts.”
     And clerks and orderlies and technicians. Who talk to co-workers and relatives and friends.
     But, after all, the security checks and polygraphs prevent anyone even remotely bothered by “5-minutes before birth” whimsical abortion decisions getting even a hint of the multitude of last-minute abortion decisions that we suffer from in America.
     Hell, it was impossible for anyone in WWII to find out about the Holocaust, too, since all the prisoners were killed, and they actually had Gestapo-level security.
     Oh, wait, it was reported in American newspapers in 1942. Even though the people who were killed were dead! (And the German authorities weren’t “investigating” the deaths.)
     There, now someone can claim that their understanding of Godwin’s Law means that the thread is over.
     New subject: what form of gun control is and isn’t acceptable for Windows, Mac, and Linux, users to require for those evil people using those wack other OSes? Which OS users tend to have the best positions on gun control, and does Captain Kirk use the best OS, or Captain Picard? Was abortion treated more perceptively in Lord of the Rings, the books, or the movies? Who deserves to be aborted more: crunchy peanut butter fans, or those of smooth?

126. But not just that, related to that, I was required to lie to the women over the phone. And the way he’d explain it to me was, without coming right out and saying it, these are really third trimester abortions, but we’re going to tell them they’re only in the second trimester.
     This looks marvelously credible. Innocent women, being deceived into having illegal abortions by a doctor lying about their medical condition.

127. “Sebastian specifically said that he didn’t think the 5-day blastocyte was a person, but that he would be more comfortable with clear guidelines about when it is. Hence the thread turning into a discussion about when the fetus *is* a person.”
     Except it hasn’t at all. So far I haven’t seen Jesurgislac, or CaseyL or Gary suggest when they think the fetus is a person. They all seem to think it is COMPLETELY OBVIOUS but won’t bother telling. (Except from previous discussions I know that Jesurgislac thinks “after birth” which for medical experimentation purposes doesn’t reassure me).

128. “Where is it that doctors don’t have to document abortions? A tiny handful of jurisdictions?”
     Argh. They document the fact of an abortion. They don’t have to document the medical reason for it.

129. “Innocent women, being deceived into having illegal abortions by a doctor lying about their medical condition.”
     C’mon, everyone knows that third-trimester abortions are far more fun than second-trimester ones! After all, our goal is to abort as many babies as possible, and we get extra points for the third trimester!
     Gadzooks, Sebastian is onto us! Am-scray!

130. “So far I haven’t seen Jesurgislac, or CaseyL or Gary suggest when they think the fetus is a person. They all seem to think it is COMPLETELY OBVIOUS but won’t bother telling.”
     Not my job to answer that. Not even my hobby.
     I’m not even required to have an opinion.
     I’m perfectly willing to live with Roe v. Wade, though, until such time as technology may make it obsolete (artificial external wombs, for instance).

131. They don’t have to document the medical reason for it.
     Of course, just as for any other medical procedure, they do — it’s not as if someone’s chart says “Quintuple bypass” without any indication of why the surgical procedure was indicated. You may be dissatisfied with the level of oversight of documentation, or you may think that doctors are systematically documenting third trimester abortions falsely, but it’s nonsense to claim that abortions are exempt from the normal documentation requirements that cover medical care generally.

132. “That’s not to say that we can’t have third-trimester bans, but we need to make sure they leave exceptions for the times when there’s a good reason. And people like Seb have a way of saying no, we can’t have exceptions because then people who want purely elective abortions will find a way to exploit the exceptions. Hence the difficulty in finding a rule we can all agree on.”
     I’m saying that since we are talking about killing a baby post-viability, there should be some documentation more than just “I said so” to the idea that the abortion was necessary for the health of the mother or that the baby was non-viable. Prosecutors and judges are professionals too, but no one here would be ok with executions based on “According to my professional judgment he was guilty” with no further documentation.
     “This looks marvelously credible. Innocent women, being deceived into having illegal abortions by a doctor lying about their medical condition.”
     You aren’t reading very carefully. These women wanted abortions but other providers had told them that they fetus was too far along in the pregnancy for the abortion to be legal. The deception was in the “They would say, well, I’ve already had a sonogram, and my bpd was 7.8 or 8.3 or whatever. He said, when they tell you that, don’t turn them away as being too far along. Tell them to come in, and we’ll do our own sonogram, and it will show they’re not that far along.”

133. “C’mon, everyone knows that third-trimester abortions are far more fun than second-trimester ones! After all, our goal is to abort as many babies as possible, and we get extra points for the third trimester!
     Gadzooks, Sebastian is onto us! Am-scray!”
     Wow, what happened to you famous reading comprehension Gary? Did you read the quote or just spout off? Unlike my questions on the other thread, THAT was a rhetorical question with an obvious answer.

134. Like I said, being deceived into having illegal abortions — the quote describes women seeking legal abortions, and being tricked into going ahead despite the fact that they were far enough along that their abortions would be illegal.

135. Possibly, but the pro-choice position is that it’s not relevant: the individual pregnant woman gets to decide.
     Um, I am fairly certain that there is no such thing as “the pro-choice position,” as the simple expedient of reading the thread will demonstrate.
     Not one woman, nor one doctor, who regrets their decision to break the law enough to come forward? If these laws are broken with any frequency whatsoever, you’re envisioning a hell of a conspiracy of silence there.
     Indeed, especially given the nontrivial number of women in the pro-life movement who claim to have had abortions and now regret it. If any of them had had such an illegal procedure, I can’t think of a better motivator for talking about it.

136. “You aren’t reading very carefully. These women wanted abortions but other providers had told them that they fetus was too far along in the pregnancy for the abortion to be legal.”
     That would probably be because what you quoted said no such thing, and you provided no link. Darn LizardBreath for not reading more carefully what isn’t there!
     (Hint: the sole information on the women in what you quoted is that they are “women.”)

137. To put it another way — I can see a motive for a woman who wants an abortion to lie and claim to be earlier in her pregnancy than she is. I could imagine a sympathetic doctor going along with that. What’s the motivation for the doctor to lie to the patient there? Just enjoys it? Not enough business? How does that work?

138. According to Luhra Tivis Warren (Operation Rescue member but former medical secretary to famous late-term abortion doctor Tiller):
     Um. I have firsthand experience that Operation Rescue members are . . . what’s the polite term? . . . often great big fat liars.

139. “Wow, what happened to you famous reading comprehension Gary? Did you read the quote or just spout off?”
     I read it. Since you’re asserting that you quoted things that you didn’t, it seems possibly that you might want to quote slightly more carefully, and provide links to whatever it is you’re quoting, rather than berating people for not reading material you didn’t provide or enable them to read.
     All we know is that you quoted one “Luhra Tivis Warren (Operation Rescue member but former medical secretary to famous late-term abortion doctor Tiller,” whomever they are, and referred to “women.”
     If you present an accusation that women (some unknown number in some unknown place at some unknown time for some unknown reason) are being tricked into having third-term abortions, and supply not a clue as to why the doctor would do that, or what’s going on, or where this quote came from, or who these people are, readers just might tend to be lacking that information, Sebastian.

140. Argh. They document the fact of an abortion. They don’t have to document the medical reason for it.
     I’m afraid I don’t believe you. I’d like to see the jurisdiction where the reason for an abortion is relevant – i.e. “no third-trimester abortions except where the life of the mother is at stake” – and yet there’s no obligation for the doctor to document that the life of the mother was at stake. And your implication that it’s like this everywhere is really, really hard to believe.

141. For the record: I believe that there is no moral problem with aborting embryos or fetuses prior to the development of sentience. Last time I checked, conservative estimates put that somewhere around the 22nd week; other estimates were later, but on this I’d rather be conservative.
     After the development of sentience, I think abortion is OK when medically necessary, up until whatever time it is that the fetus is not just viable in the “we can keep it alive, but it will probably be profoundly disabled, including cognitively” sense, but viable in the “there’s a decent chance this child will not be harmed by being premature” sense. (Don’t ask me to make this more precise; that would take a while.) After that, abortions should not be done: the child can always be put up for adoption. It’s fine to decline the honor of raising a child; it’s not fine to insist that a child be killed so that you won’t have to be anyone’s mother.

142. I tried to look up figures for the UK, as requested earlier in the thread (can’t look them up for the Netherlands, abortions are illegal after 22 weeks gestation. We do propose euthanatia if the kids *are* very severely handicapped though. I’m comfortable with both), but it’s hard because abortion over 24 weeks is only legal if the child is severely handicapped of a health danger to the mother – so those are the only reasons listed.
     I did come across this story, where for me the fetus was entitled to some protection:

     A BABY survived at least three attempts to abort it from the womb and was born alive at 24 weeks old.
     The boy was delivered in hospital after his 24- year-old mother changed her mind about wanting the child after feeling it move on the way home from an abortion clinic.
     Although the clinic had told her an ultrasound scan had confirmed the child was dead, she went into labour that afternoon and the boy was born alive.
     Now two years old and healthy, he is the first long-term abortion survivor to have been born so prematurely. His remarkable entrance into the world is documented in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
     The mother had not realised she was going to have a baby until 22 weeks into the pregnancy and felt that she could not cope with a second child. She was given a series of abortion drugs over four days at a private clinic.
     After birth the child was rushed to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit where he was on a ventilator for 7Å weeks. He fought off several life-threatening infections and suffered from severe lung disease for his first six months. He was allowed home after seven months of treatment.

     And here they refer to a report:

     In July, the Department of Health in England revealed that 12 babies had been aborted late in pregnancy for the cosmetic reason of cleft lip and palate between 2000 and 2002.

     But I couldn’t find the report and it is way past midnight here so I’m off to bed.

143. What’s the motivation for the doctor to lie to the patient there? Just enjoys it? Not enough business? How does that work?
     He/she thinks he/she’s helping them.

144. Not impossible — people do nutty things — but awfully nutty.

145. Applied Ontology

     Ontology as a word, is a new study in philosophy although being has been a concern of philosophers going back quite some time, apparently. But only recently has being emerged as a separate field of study. Lest we consider th…

146. A colleague here had a “partial birth abortion” recently. Her very much wanted baby had severe birth defects and would not, the doctors said, survive long even if she was carried to term. The docs elected to induce and abort. My colleague’s life wasn’t at risk. One could argue that it was a matter of convenience. I mean, she could’ve carried the baby to term, borne it, and had it die right away. Or a couple of days later. Or a week.
     I am glad, for her sake, that she was not forced to justify her decision to anyone.

147. Argh. They document the fact of an abortion. They don’t have to document the medical reason for it.
     Then, please let’s START from there. Do we have some numbers here?
     Everybody is arguing with a distinct lack of numbers. Many of those arguments would really, really be helped with some numbers. Please.

148. A few points:
     Stem cells were first isolated in 1998.
     Nope. They were first isolated in 1964 by cancer researchers studying embryonal carcinomas. They were first cultured as stand-alone cell lines in 1998–three years AFTER Clinton signed the Dickey Amendment barring the destruction of human embryos in medical research. The Bush admin has kept pre-existing law in place, not imposed new law of their own devising.
     Naturally, the whole question is whether a five day old blastocyst should be treated as a human person or not.
     Yep. Brownback dances around that–it’s a philosophical question, not one of science, not amenable to scientific proof or disproof. But it’s not correct to equate embryo harvest with organ donation, either. Unless you’re killing people on purpose to get your organs. That comparison also begs the philosophical question.
     It’s also relevant to note that federal funding for all embryonic stem cell research is not banned. Funding for existing cell lines is not banned. Nor is there any bar to private funding of ESC research. What is banned is federal funding for research on new lines of ESC, per Dickey.
     Therapies utilizing stem cells have been around since before stem cells were known to be the agent of therapy. Bone marrow transplants began in the 1950’s, for example. It worked sometimes. Good enough.
     It’s also a bit disingenuous to decry the length of time it takes for techniques to gain FDA approval on one hand in defending ESC research, while on the other hand using FDA approval of ASC therapies as the gold standard for belittling the list of applications for adult stem cell therapies. There are quite a few ASC therapies awaiting approval, and many more under research. There are a few ESC therapies under research using existing cell lines, but nothing terribly promising has yet emerged. Cord stem cell research and ASC research have shown more potential to date. ESC research may yet produce some good stuff–but ASC research using the patient’s own stem cells is the most promising area. Both ESC and CSC therapies have the problem potential of immuno-rejection, which ASC using the patient’s own cells does not.
     And no, none of this is commentary on the abortion debate. That’s your own mileage–but it’s what fuels the objections and the shouting.

149. I was busy at work (yes, that does happen) and couldn’t respond to anything here for a while. Now I’m home, and I can.
     1. Sebastian wants to know when I think a fetus is a person. My answer: I don’t know. Like hilzoy, I think sentience is a major factor. I would add viability outside the womb to that. So let’s say, around the 24th week of gestation.
     2. However, although an abortion after the 24th week makes me uncomfortable, I’m not prepared to support an outright prohibition of them.
     3. Why? Because at that point, circumstances come very much into play.
     I also know someone who was pregnant, who very much wanted the child, and who was told – in the 3rd trimester – it was acephalic: that is, the fetus had no brain; practically had no head. It might, the doctors said, live long enough to be born – but would not live very much longer than that. It might also die before birth. She had an abortion. You would think that would be a self-evident good, if not only, choice – but you would be reckoning without the anti-choicers, who would’ve insisted she have it anyway, and “let God decide.”
     I also know women who developed serious health problems in the 3rd trimester – gestational diabetes, extremely high blood pressure, heart problems, spinal problems – that would have put their lives and health in jeopardy if they didn’t abort. That, again, is to me a no-brainer to get the abortion. But it is also, to anti-choicers, another opportunity to say “Let God decide.”
     Since I don’t believe in God – at least, not the Yaweh type – I can’t take the position of “let God decide” seriously. But even if I were, I would say “Maybe God ‘decided’ by letting me have this information; maybe God is telling me what I need to know to save my own life and health.” Because, really, why should we assume that God would ‘want’ women to die, or be crippled? That sounds like a very peculiar deity to me.
     What it comes down to is, I’m not going to make those decisions for those women. I don’t know what their situation is. I do not consider a fetus – however sentient, however viable – to be worth more than the person carrying it.
     I also have a really hard time believing that a woman who has carried the fetus that long, has endured the pregnancy that long, would suddenly have a frivolous reason for wanting to abort it.
     Even if the reason isn’t a medical emergency – maybe she’s lost her income, lost her house, lost her partner; maybe she has another child who’s developed serious health problems and will need a lot of medical care; maybe any number of things – then I don’t see any reason to question her judgment. Because, basically, it is her body, her life, her decision.
     In other words, even though I am prepared to say that, yes, fetuses are probably persons after the 24th week, I am not prepared to say they have more value, more moral standing, or more of anything, than the women carrying them.
     If you take that to mean I don’t value all human life, you’re damned right I don’t. Neither do most people. Most people will kill in self-defense, or to defend someone else; many people will kill in war, even kill people who aren’t threatening them; most people will accept the death of civilians as a regrettable but inescapable fact of war. Trained medical personnel do triage and decide who won’t get medical care.
     Hell, conservatives believe it’s OK – ‘unfortunate’, but OK – for people to die if they’re unable to afford medical care. And many of the people clamoring to save fetuses think it’s perfectly all right to let AIDS victims die. What moral value does that uphold?
     “Reverence for life” isn’t a universal value. It isn’t a value most people hold for all life, all the time. Why should fetuses be an exception?

150. “That’s not to say that we can’t have third-trimester bans, but we need to make sure they leave exceptions for the times when there’s a good reason.”
     I’m fine with that. I’m not fine with, per Doe v Bolton, making the doctor’s determination that there’s a good reason to kill a viable infant utterly unreviewable. As far as I know, Doe v Bolton is still the law of the land. And unreviewable decisions are an open invitation to abuse.
     Saying “when there’s a good reason” implies “not when there’s not a good reason”, and if you’re not allowed to look at whether the reason is good, you’re establishing “when there’s any reason, good or bad”.

151. Tully: it was not my intention to belittle therapies using adult stem cells. On the contrary: they do a lot of good. Similarly, I don’t want to belittle new vaccines, or new cancer treatments. But there’s no reason to think that we have to choose between any of these things and ESC research.
     About this: “But it’s not correct to equate embryo harvest with organ donation, either. Unless you’re killing people on purpose to get your organs. That comparison also begs the philosophical question.”
     On the contrary. Someone who is brain dead can be a living organism. Their heart might still be beating, their blood might still circulate, etc. We treat such people as dead on the grounds that their brains are dead. If we treated them as living human persons, then removing their hearts for transplant would, in fact, be murder. The point is that we don’t.

152. I’m not fine with, per Doe v Bolton, making the doctor’s determination that there’s a good reason to kill a viable infant utterly unreviewable.
     I feel like I’ve been over Doe v. Bolton with you before, although maybe it was someone else. Anyway, the case doesn’t say any such thing. Here’s a good analysis that I endorse.

153. I checked that link, Steve. It does look like that’s a misreading of Bolton, but it also seems that the Sixth Circuit has bought into it. It looks as though the Supreme Court also misread Doe v. Bolton, in Beal v. Doe, but did so in dictum, in a footnote, that was completely irrelevant to any issue in the case, so that shouldn’t matter much.

154. I find it hard to imagine any person who has ever had a child to determine when in the 270 days preceding that birth it would have been okay to abort that baby. Even in the case of a baby that may not live long, or have extreme deformities, the argument for abortion seems no stronger than euthanasia after the birth. I would argue that it is in fact weaker, because at least after the birth you actually know the extent of the deformities, as opposed to a best guess by the physician.

155. Even in the case of a baby that may not live long, or have extreme deformities, the argument for abortion seems no stronger than euthanasia after the birth.
     That attitude is why the woman I knew with the acephalic fetus only told me about her decision. She worried that other people would say “You should have had it anyway.” Easy to say, when it’s not you.
     It was traumatic enough for her to look at the sonogram. Imagine what it would have been like to give birth to… something… that hardly had a head. To go through labor, hours of pain and effort, knowing that what was going to come out was something you couldn’t bear to even think about, much less look at.

156. Yeah. Sometimes life is hard. Sometimes people have children that are killed right in front of them, but somehow, most go on.
     That it would be hard to have a baby that would likely be deformed sucks, but is not a reason to kill the baby.

157. Wow. The compassion fairly drips from the page.

158. Compassion for whom?

159. “I’m afraid I don’t believe you. I’d like to see the jurisdiction where the reason for an abortion is relevant – i.e. “no third-trimester abortions except where the life of the mother is at stake” – and yet there’s no obligation for the doctor to document that the life of the mother was at stake. And your implication that it’s like this everywhere is really, really hard to believe.”
     California. To mention one state with about 1/6th of the population of the US.
     “In other words, even though I am prepared to say that, yes, fetuses are probably persons after the 24th week, I am not prepared to say they have more value, more moral standing, or more of anything, than the women carrying them.”
     So to be clear, are you ok with medical experimentation through the 24th week? What if there were no ‘self-defense’ problems?
     Gary:

     I read it. Since you’re asserting that you quoted things that you didn’t, it seems possibly that you might want to quote slightly more carefully, and provide links to whatever it is you’re quoting, rather than berating people for not reading material you didn’t provide or enable them to read.

     I know you’re aware of google. But in any case it is right there in the bit I quoted:

     They would say, well, I’ve already had a sonogram, and my bpd was 7.8 or 8.3 or whatever. He said, when they tell you that, don’t turn them away as being too far along. Tell them to come in, and we’ll do our own sonogram, and it will show they’re not that far along. Tell them that sonogram reading is an art, not a science.

     I don’t know which way you are stretching that, but it sure sounds to me like they wanted an abortion and had previously been told that the fetus appeared too old in the sonogram. He says not to turn them away on the basis of the sonogram, and later fails to read it properly so he can say that the fetus is young enough. (Can we say lower than reported number of late term abortions?)

160. California. To mention one state with about 1/6th of the population of the US.
     My link above contained this information:

     As of January 1998, 48 states, the city of New York and the District of Columbia collect data on induced abortions. The two nonreporting states, California and Oklahoma, have abortion reporting statutes on the books that are not currently in effect due to legal actions taken against related abortion statutes.

     That’s not up-to-the-minute information, so I don’t have a clue what the current state of California’s reporting requirement might be. But 48 states with currently enforced requirements, plus 2 states where the law is in flux, doesn’t exactly add up to a successful liberal conspiracy to ensure abortion statistics are never kept.
     Surely somewhere in the 48 states that aren’t California or Oklahoma, some halfway decent statistics can be located.
     Seriously, this is what you’ve got? After all the rants, after all the indignation and comparisons to prisoners turning up dead and no one looking into the cause, you’re giving me 2 out of 50 states where the abortion reporting laws aren’t currently being enforced? Good lord.

161. jrudkis: I find it hard to imagine any person who has ever had a child to determine when in the 270 days preceding that birth it would have been okay to abort that baby.
     Fetus. You can’t actually abort a baby, or a child, though I remember a Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch about a woman asking her doctor if she could abort at 15 years…
     The distinction is important: no one on this thread has been arguing that it’s okay to commit infanticide.
     You might find Pro choice Motherhood by Rivka, who is Respectful of Otters, enlightening. (If you wish to be enlightened, of course.)

162. “But 48 states with currently enforced requirements, plus 2 states where the law is in flux, doesn’t exactly add up to a successful liberal conspiracy to ensure abortion statistics are never kept.”
     You get reports that the abortion happened and usually the age of the fetus. That is pretty much it.

163. Sebastian: You get reports that the abortion happened and usually the age of the fetus. That is pretty much it.
     I know I’ve frequently in the past linked you to CDC webpages with far more information that that on abortions carried out in the US, even in the summary data. But I take you’ve just forgotten that I did that, and obviously you never clicked on the links I provided and read the information available, which would let you know that the statement you just made was demonstrably false. Perhaps you could devise some mnemonic for yourself to remind yourself to consult the CDC website, to avoid the embarrassment I am sure that you suffer when – every time you make a claim like this, someone points out to you that it’s just plain wrong, and that you could have found out that it was wrong by looking at CDC data, publicly and readily available?

164. Jesurgislac: Rivka refers mainly to how she feels about the first trimester. The majority of abortions (ca 90% in the US, over 95% in the Netherlands) are in the first trimester. We are discussing third trimester pregnancies.
     You say that in the third trimester we should not talk about babies, but about a fetus. For me, that advanced in the pregnancy, it is a baby and a person. Calling it fetus implies that for you it isn’t. Aborting at that stage for cosmetic reasons (hare lip) seems to be no problem for you, since it is that womens decision. For me it *is* a problem, because at that stage I feel the fetus/baby is becoming a person in itself and thus has rights. I even gave examples (the abortion surviving child, the murder on the unborn baby).
     Caseyl: Your example has happened with someone I know too. Actually, since the baby is not viable, it is one of the very few instances where you can abort late. Nowadays it should be detected earlier though, with prenatal screening (they’ve now extended the free prenatal services with a ‘structural’ ultrasound at 18-22 weeks), which makes it easier to meet the legal limit. But that is also because of our ‘socialized’ healthcare system.
     When there is a risc for the mother (HELLP syndrom is more prevalent than diabetes), they will usually do an emergency ceasarean. If they have to choose between mother and child they will choose for the mother. Refusing to abort a viable fetus/baby does not mean that you see the woman as an uterus on legs, it means that you have to way the interests of two parties. That one party (the mother) is more important does not mean the other party (the fetus/baby) should not be considered.

165. You say that in the third trimester we should not talk about babies, but about a fetus.
     The biological reality is that it is a fetus, yes.
     For me, that advanced in the pregnancy, it is a baby and a person.
     But nevertheless, it is a fetus.
     For me it *is* a problem, because at that stage I feel the fetus/baby is becoming a person in itself and thus has rights.
     But that’s not relevant, unless you can show that in the third trimester of pregnancy a woman ceases to have rights or can have her right to make decisions about her own body involuntarily removed. If you can, can you make the same argument for any parent having their right to decide involuntarily removed when a child needs a pint of their parents’ blood or a parental kidney to stay alive?
     Note, if you’re just arguing about what in your view is morally right to do, we’re not arguing: I’m pro-choice, so I support your right to do what you want according to what seems best to you at each stage of each pregnancy – but not to impose your moral views on anyone else who might make a different decision.
     There are reasons I am fairly sure I would not agree with for having an abortion, no matter when it happened. (The example someone offered me once was, supposing there were a “gay gene” test, a homophobe who aborted because her fetus tested positive for homosexuality.) But I neither think it right or practical to give anyone but the woman herself and her attending physician to have the legal right to say “This abortion is unnecessary” – because it is never either right nor practical to argue that the woman must be forced to continue the pregnancy and give birth against her will.

166. Fetus. You can’t actually abort a baby, or a child, though I remember a Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch about a woman asking her doctor if she could abort at 15 years…
     One might suggest asking actual pregnant women how they refer to the being in their respective uteruses, particularly as the day of delivery draws closer, usage being the primary determinant of meaning and all that, but one suspects you’re less interested in doing that than in winning some semantic battle which would keep you from having to ever give any ground at all in an abortion discussion.
     PS: You aren’t Dr. House.

167. The only difference between a viable fetus, and a baby moments after it’s born, is location. Inside, we call it a “fetus”, outside, a “baby”, but it’s the same entity.
     “because it is never either right nor practical to argue that the woman must be forced to continue the pregnancy and give birth against her will.”
     Once the fetus/baby is viable, it is no longer necessary to kill the baby in order to end the pregnancy. She can end it with a live birth instead.
     Post viablity, a decision to abort instead of deliver isn’t about ending the pregancy, it’s about a determination to kill the baby. At that point you’re elevating the woman’s whim above the baby’s very life.
     You and I agree on probably 98+ percent of abortions. By your own arguments, you think post viability abortions are essentially unheard of. So why do you feel the need to defend them?

168. Brett: Once the fetus/baby is viable, it is no longer necessary to kill the baby in order to end the pregnancy. She can end it with a live birth instead.
     She can, yes. If she chooses to do so.
     You and I agree on probably 98+ percent of abortions. By your own arguments, you think post viability abortions are essentially unheard of.
     So do you. So does Sebastian. So does everyone on this thread, evidently.
     So why do you feel the need to defend them?
     I defend a woman’s right to decide for herself what she’ll do.
     Why do you feel it necessary to attack that right?
     Note, you agreed that “viable” means “26w+”. Marbel earlier cited as an example of bad decisions 12 women who had apparently decided to abort “late-term” because a fetus had a cleft palate. In the UK, because the limit of viability has been legally fixed at 24w, doctors will in practice not agree to perform an abortion if the pregnancy is at 20w+ unless it’s actually life-threatening/damaging to health, because they assume that a woman can have made a mistake of up to 4 weeks in how advanced her pregnancy is. So, “late-term” in that article could not have been more advanced than 20w: below the most optimistic estimate of fetal viability if delivered.
     Phil: One might suggest asking actual pregnant women how they refer to the being in their respective uteruses, particularly as the day of delivery draws closer, usage being the primary determinant of meaning and all that
     One pregnant friend used to refer to it as her parasite, but her partner got upset about that, so she took to referring to it as “small”, which didn’t, and which she could live with. Another pregnant friend, in both pregnancies, referred to it as “futurebaby”, all one word. My sister, as I recall, said “IT” – with such meaning one always knew which IT she was referring to. None of them wanted to know the gender of the fetus before birth. Another friend had all the tests, discovered her fetus was a boy, named him and referred to him as Fred (well, no, but I won’t say the actual name) and had a miscarriage in the sixth month: whenever we’ve discussed her loss, we’ve referred to him by name. (Her next pregnancy may also have been named, but she didn’t share the name with friends until after birth: I assume her partner knew.) I can’t remember all of the names/identities/labels my friends have used when they were pregnant, but that’s a fair sampling of those I do. In my experience – YMMV – how pregnant women refer to the fetus varies by individuals, and the polite thing to do is to go along with an individual woman’s usage for each pregnancy.
     That does not affect the point, however, that when speaking generically, we’re discussing a fetus, not a baby.

169. “I defend a woman’s right to decide for herself what she’ll do.
     Why do you feel it necessary to attack that right?”
     Because in some instances she’s deciding she’s going to kill somebody.

170. Because in some instances she’s deciding she’s going to kill somebody.
     Okay, that’s explicit. So, present this as an ethical case for all examples: No parent can be permitted to decide whether or not their bodily organs will be used to save their offspring’s life.
     For example, if a child needs a kidney and one of their parents is a tissue match, that parent will be short one kidney as soon as the operation can be arranged. That’s your ethical position, right?

171. Pregnancy is not comparable with giving organs Jesurgislac. The women *is* pregnant, has been for at least 6 months and carries a child that could survive outside the womb. The natural order of things is that she gives birth. What we are discussing is actively terminating the life inside of her and than give birth, *instead* if giving birth without the killing.

172. Because in some instances she’s deciding she’s going to kill somebody.
     Only in the humpty-dumpty world of the ‘pro-life’ movement.

173. Pregnancy is not comparable with giving organs Jesurgislac.
     Pregnancy is giving organs, Marbel. Renewably, usually, though permanently, sometimes.
     The women *is* pregnant, has been for at least 6 months and carries a child that could survive outside the womb. The natural order of things is that she gives birth.
     So the six-month miscarriage my friend suffered was, in your view, completely outside the “natural order of things”? Just checking.
     What we are discussing is actively terminating the life inside of her and than give birth, *instead* if giving birth without the killing.
     No, what we are discussing is what rights a woman has over her own body. You may feel that fetal rights trump the woman’s rights: I disagree.

174. Let’s try this ethical case: Where ejecting a tresspasser alive is not significantly more dangerous than killing them, people are not permitted to kill tresspassers.
     Abortion isn’t arguably any more of a moral issue than any other medical procedure prior to viability. But once you’ve got more than one way to eject the trespasser, insisting on the right to chose the one that kills is insisting on a right to murder.
     This is a regrettably common stance in the pro-choice movement, and it’s every bit as loony as the pro-life movement’s obsession with protecting 5 day old blastocysts.

175. Jes: your friend gave birth, the baby didn’t survive. Unfortunately that sometimes happends – I have friends with similar experiences.
     Comparing pregnancy with giving organs is comparing apples with pears, as the Dutch expression goes. The fact that there are similarities does not mean they are the same.
     You feel that untill birth actively terminating the life of the child is completely the right of the mother – I feel that the child at that point in time is a person, no matter where she (or he) is located, which means that she should have some rights of her own. It seems silly to say that those rights only exists once the child travels outside of the body of the mother.
     Comparing pregnancies to other things doesn’t help, because it is a rather unique proces.

176. Brett; Let’s try this ethical case: Where ejecting a tresspasser alive is not significantly more dangerous than killing them, people are not permitted to kill tresspassers.
     If you like, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that trespassing on property is equivalent to making use of your organs. Do try, if you like. You see no ethical difference between Hawkeye and Trapper removing a pint of Frank’s blood while he’s asleep, and Ho Jon stealing Frank’s silver picture frame?? None at all?
     But once you’ve got more than one way to eject the trespasser, insisting on the right to chose the one that kills is insisting on a right to murder.
     So, again, you see anyone who insists that a parent has the right to decide whether or not to be organ donors to their children as insisting on the right to murder their children?

177. So, again, I don’t see the analogy to organ donation as valid. You’ve already noted that a post-viability abortion is a major surgical procedure. The woman IS going to undergo a significant procedure, the only question being whether it’s the one that removes the baby alive, or the one that removes the baby dead. Chosing the latter isn’t a decision about the mother’s body, it’s a decision about the baby’s life.

178. Comparing pregnancy with giving organs is comparing apples with pears, as the Dutch expression goes.
     You may know that the American version of the expression is “comparing apples to oranges.” While everyone is free to adopt their own analogy, I find it somewhat odd that the Dutch, of all people, would have an aversion to Oranges.

179. They may have an aversion to comparing them to other things :^)

180. Marbel: Comparing pregnancy with giving organs is comparing apples with pears
     Agreed… two very similiar things? 😉
     Brett; So, again, I don’t see the analogy to organ donation as valid.
     It’s not an analogy: it’s an equation. If it’s ethical to remove a woman’s right to decide because one of her choices may be that she decides to abort, it’s equally ethical to remove all parents’ rights to decide in such circumstances since one of his/her choices may be that s/he’s not going to provide a kidney.
     the only question being whether it’s the one that removes the baby alive, or the one that removes the baby dead.
     There is no baby, again: it’s a fetus.
     And no: the only question is whether the person who gets to decide what to do with her own body is the pregnant woman, or if she should have that basic human right removed. She is the one who decides (with, yes, her physician).
     An imaginary example (which I admit I stole from House, pretty much): there’s a woman who’s 24 weeks pregnant who’s suddenly diagnosed with cancer. Bad cancer.
     She can’t have chemotherapy while pregnant; before she has chemotherapy, she has to terminate. If she has chemotherapy immediately, the prognosis is very good – she might well have 10-15 years to live, maybe more, if she takes good care of herself or if new techniques are developed in that time.
     But every week that goes by, the cancer is more established and the less effective chemotherapy will be. She can certainly survive till the baby is born naturally, but if she delays chemotherapy that long, she’ll be dead before the child’s first birthday.
     The longer she waits, the better chance for her child, the worse chance for her.
     Who gets to decide, then? When or if to terminate? Now: two weeks time: never?
     You and Marbel argue that she must not have the right to decide for herself.
     I say she must, and she’s the only one who really can. And while is an extreme scenario, the fact is all choices about her pregnancy directly concern her body: arguing that she can’t be allowed to decide for herself suggests strongly that you think if a pregnant woman does get to make her own decisions they’ll be bad ones. Yet you’re unable to come up with a single example of this happening…

181. I don’t think anyone is saying that a post viable baby most be carried to term, just that rather than an abortion the baby should be induced or c-sectioned.

182. That gets really weird, though, because prematurity is strongly associated with morbidity for the baby — it’s not as if ‘viability’ is a bright line immediately after which a c-section would produce a healthy child. I can’t imagine a doctor being willing to perform a c-section with the goal of terminating a pregnancy early, at the substantial risk of producing an injured or disabled baby.

183. I agree that it is sticky the closer to the line you get, but babies are induced early, especially in the third trimester, or when there are multiples.

184. “I can’t imagine a doctor NOT being willing to perform a c-section with the goal of terminating a pregnancy early if the alternative was simply killing the baby outright.

185. But at that point we’re again talking about imaginary abortions. No one’s having an abortion in their eighth month (or at least it’s insanely, insanely, unlikely), and no doctor (same caveat) would induce or perform a c-section earlier than that without a medical justification. So talking about induction or c-section as an alternative to abortion is pure thought experiment — it’s not relevant to anything with any likelyhood of happening.

186. On this thread there have been examples of terminations in the third trimester as mercy killings (which in my mind is one step removed from eugenics.) Alternatively, the pregnant woman with cancer in the 6th or 7th month would be a candidate, rather than abortion.

187. LB: But at that point we’re again talking about imaginary abortions.
     Which is why I have a problem of expressing it in terms of regulation. (Not in terms of moral choice, as I hope I made clear.)
     When you legislate to remove human rights from a class of people (such as pregnant women) you need (I think) to show that there is a real need to do so.
     Ugh’s example earlier of the draft – the real need there is explicit: the country is at war, men (usually!) are needed to fight, more men than are volunteering: the government thus removes the right of a person to decide for themselves whether or not to join the military. Agree or disagree that the need is real, it is at least explicitly stated.
     Where is the need that requires removing women’s human rights in pregnancy, early or late? Neither Brett nor Sebastian were able to provide an example of a woman having a healthy fetus aborted at 26w+ – for any reason or none.

188. Sorry, I should have said no one’s having an abortion in their eighth month other than for self-preservation or because the baby isn’t viable. The odds of an elective abortion at that point are pretty much zero.

189. In the strict legal sense there are occasions where one person’s (independent of sex) right to decide can be removed temporarily, provided that person’s actions endanger other persons (if that ‘other’ person can be the person itself is an open legal question that is answered differently in different places).
     I consider it at least possible that a late term pregnancy that is not a likely danger to the life/health of the pregnant woman can be reasonably considered such an occasion.
     This makes no statement about the pre-viability period or the case of probable danger to the pregnant woman.
     This is clearly not a case of 1-size-fits-all and any decision should take primarily female considerations into account.
     My (therefore not relevant) opinion/belief is that there are (very) rare cases of “irresponsible abortion wishes” where I would consider a law that puts restrictions on “choice” as not completely out of question.
     The problem I see – and on this I think I am 100% on Jes’ side – is with an abuse of any kind of law by the “pro-life” goalpost shifters that would see it as primarily a gap in the armor that could be exploited.
     —
     On a different point discussed far above:
     The military (at least over here) is authorized to extract certain amounts of bodily fluids from its members even against their will. To be exact: the amount sufficient for a full exam (my rough guess is that this would mean an upper limit of about 50 ml of blood). In theory this could be used for other purposes (because the drafters of the regulation probably hadn’t enough imagination to imagine a “transfusion by many drops” by pooling the samples of enough people) 😉
     —
     The question whether parents can be forced to donate blood (though not organs) for their own infant is actually legally discussed. As far as I remember the topic in real court is/was about the legality of seizing the children if the parents refuse life-saving medical procedures (in this case a blood transfusion) for their children (out of religious beliefs). In the case in question it was at least seen by legal authorities that one was moving in uncharted regions and the outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion. Sorry, I can’t remember what the outcome was in the end, I only mention it to state that this is a potentially unresolved legal question.

190. I think instances have occurred in the UK of children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who needed blood transfusions to survive, whose parents refused to consent, being made legally wards of court so that the children could have the blood transfusions.
     I know of no instance where a JW was forced to provide the blood.
     Yet I can conceive that a parent and child with a rare blood type could be the only two donor partners for each other in a region.
     Are Marbel and Brett and Jrudkis going to argue that because the parent could choose to let their child die rather than provide a blood transfusion, no parent should have the right to refuse to provide blood to their child?

191. My (therefore not relevant) opinion/belief is that there are (very) rare cases of “irresponsible abortion wishes” where I would consider a law that puts restrictions on “choice” as not completely out of question.
     But of course, laws that place restrictions like that on abortion exist almost every place, and there’s no groundswell of hostility against them. The argument Sebastian was making above was whether the existing laws need to be more stringently enforced.

192. There have been real cases* where women refused a c-section despite being informed that in that case both she and the child would die.
     I think the legal status quo on this is “suicide is legal, we can’t do anything”.
     In cases were the medical opinion is that both could live if a c-section is performed, I’d seriously question the mental state of the woman in question but would really not want to be the one to decide whether her will should be overridden.
     *i.e. I have read about it at some time in the past in sources I consider reliable but technically cannot link to (printed German newspaper).

193. There you get into messy considerations of ‘when otherwise do you compel people to submit to medical treatment against their will’ to which the answer is pretty much ‘if they can express their will, you don’t’. I can’t remember the details well enough to link to it, but there was an American case of a doctor/hospital trying to legally compel a pregnant woman to have a c-section, when the medical evidence that it was necessary appeared to be far from overwhelming.

194. No objection LB. I just wanted to state that there can easily be tricky situations that probably noone of us could judge with certainty. Noone could legally stop the woman (or anyone else) from simply committing suicide or refusing medical help to the same effect. The case of a an extra endangered live that could be rescued without doing real harm*/** creates a/the real dilemma. I would not be able to come up with a non-abusable or not otherwise flawed legal solution here.
     *i.e. within reasonable conditions
     ** still better than the notorious situation with the police having to decide whether they should kill a hostage taker to save the hostages (the pregnant woman would be no criminal with evil intent to name just the most obvious difference)

195. “I can’t imagine a doctor being willing to perform a c-section with the goal of terminating a pregnancy early, at the substantial risk of producing an injured or disabled baby.”
     I don’t understand why you seem to think this, but think that it is defensible to go through the same exact procedure to make certain you get a dead baby.
     “Sorry, I should have said no one’s having an abortion in their eighth month other than for self-preservation or because the baby isn’t viable. The odds of an elective abortion at that point are pretty much zero.”
     Pretty much zero, or zero? Because if it is 0.1% or so we are still talking about 2-4 viable babies being murdered (non-accidentaly having their lives terminated)each year. Now maybe you are saying that 2-4 murdered babies per year are worth what it would take from the point of view of civil liberties in order to stop it. But that is a very different argument from pretending that it just couldn’t possibly happen.
     That is why I keep bringing up capital punishment. At viability, the child is legally supposed to have the rights of a person in most states. If we strongly suspected that 2-4 factually innocent people were being executed in the criminal justice system each year (which so far as I know even reputable death penalty opposition groups don’t claim) there would be quite a bit of clamoring for more serious controls.
     The idea that in the late term abortion case, we should have completely unreviewable, single doctor decisions of the same magnitude, just doesn’t make sense to me.

196. If we strongly suspected that 2-4 factually innocent people were being executed in the criminal justice system each year (which so far as I know even reputable death penalty opposition groups don’t claim) there would be quite a bit of clamoring for more serious controls.
     Well, that’s probably because you’d be talking about 5-10% of the executions being of innocent people, as opposed to 0.1%, since there are a lot more late-term abortions than executions each year. The other obvious difference is that scrutinizing the cases of the 99.9% of guilty people more closely in order to identify the 0.1% of innocent people wouldn’t invade anyone’s privacy. In fact, the guilty people would probably welcome a closer review, in hopes they might somehow get off.
     Let’s go with the idea, though. Say there are 2-4 cases per year in the United States of completely elective abortions in the eighth month of pregnancy, purely on a whim with no reason. In specific terms, what would you propose we do about it?

197. In specific terms, what would you propose we do about it?
     Whatever your proposal is, I’d also be interested in why you think it’s more necessary or a better use of resources than any change in policing practices or other governmental policies that might be statistically expected to save 2-4 lives of adult murder victims nationwide every year. Or hell, people generally, not just murder victims.

198. I haven’t followed the whole thread, but let me suggest that one reason for the lack of clamor, outside the hard-core of the anti-abortion groups, about the 2-4 viable deaths, would have to do with varying understandings of viability. Plenty among us may not like the notion of eugenics, but I strongly doubt that any of the 2-4 are perfectly healthy, and there’s an understandable reluctance, on the part of many people, to compound tragedy with insult. There’s a sizable minority always ready to go all Schiavo, I’ll grant you. But a little of that goes a long way, and that spectacle itself set the movement back by maybe a decade.
     You can postulate some woman willing to abort a near term perfectly healthy child, I suppose, but this is a situation far enough outside of normal human experience that I think you’re going to have to show an example to get people to believe in it, and complaining that you can’t get the data because it’s not being kept isn’t enough to overcome the presumption most people have about how humans act.

199. “Whatever your proposal is, I’d also be interested in why you think it’s more necessary or a better use of resources than any change in policing practices or other governmental policies that might be statistically expected to save 2-4 lives of adult murder victims nationwide every year. Or hell, people generally, not just murder victims.”
     Why would it take more resources than your average murder investigation or malpractice suit? Require that medical reasons be stated for each late term abortion be kept by the doctor along with the medical tests that confirm it. Since there are only a few thousand each year, and since so many of the cases are allegedly crystal clear, why is that such a ridiculous burden? If it is indeed true that only serious problems lead to late term abortions, there will be almost nothing to investigate–maybe two or three dozen not-super-clear cases.
     And if it is NOT true, well that is a different problem, but it undercuts your whole argument anyway.
     “Well, that’s probably because you’d be talking about 5-10% of the executions being of innocent people, as opposed to 0.1%, since there are a lot more late-term abortions than executions each year.”
     I gave you 0.1% to be generous, because even LizardBreath seems likely to agree that 1 out of 1000 cases of things having to do with human beings can lend to ridiculousness. Considering this Guttmacher Institute study about why women have abortions (including at least 9% of women who reported just taking a lot of time to decide and 4% who waited for a relationship to change) I think you could easily put it in the 5% range being remotely ridiculous. That would put us in the low hundreds of viable babies being killed. (The Institute used 4 months as the basis for ‘late’ which is why I don’t assume that the 90%+ non-medical reasons shown in the late term abortions would hold all the way into the area I’m talking about)

200. If we strongly suspected that 2-4 factually innocent people were being executed in the criminal justice system each year (which so far as I know even reputable death penalty opposition groups don’t claim) there would be quite a bit of clamoring for more serious controls.
     Why do you think this? We know that at least that many are being let off death row nearly every year, and yet I bet the issue doesn’t even register on 99% of people’s radars.

201. The main objection I have to the “use of her body against her will” argument is that consent has a fading value. To deny consent at the beginning of pregnancy allows for a fairly accurate analogy. To deny consent near the end of pregnancy is to assert it is legitimate to give medical aid for five months or longer, only to pull the plug as the patient is nearly healed.
     It is far better to define personhood as beginning with the functionality of the cerebral cortex, since it is the seat of consciousness and fine motor control. This point happens to coincide closely with viability, so it is reinforces an already legally strong position.

202. Require that medical reasons be stated for each late term abortion be kept by the doctor along with the medical tests that confirm it.
     And then what? The government gets to go through those private medical records, with no showing of probable cause, for each woman who has a late-term abortion? Because if you’re not saying that, I’m not sure how you’re ever going to “catch” the 2-4 bad apples, with the relevant evidence sitting in a drawer somewhere. You’re not being clear.

203. “Plenty among us may not like the notion of eugenics, but I strongly doubt that any of the 2-4 are perfectly healthy, and there’s an understandable reluctance, on the part of many people, to compound tragedy with insult.”
     Why would you assume that? Of the thousands of very late term abortions, perhaps most of those are not perfectly healthy, but that isn’t at all the same as saying that absolutely all of them are near death or otherwise seriously impaired.

204. Granted, it’s not the same. And in the space between, most people are willing to look the other way.
     I think this practical factor adds to the legal and policy difficulties identified by others above.
     The road you are talking about, Sebastian, goes the same place as the voter fraud prosecutions, only instead of mostly inadvertent screw-ups, you’re going to find mostly people who wrestled in a very personal way with a very difficult decision. You or I or Hilzoy might apply our our ethical codes to come to a different result (and I suspect all 3 of us would), but we wouldn’t have to live the consequences of the decision. I don’t think most of society has the stomach for it. A couple of Schiavo-esque prosecutions, and the whole anti-late-term abortion movement would come crashing down.

205. Why would it take more resources than your average murder investigation or malpractice suit? Require that medical reasons be stated for each late term abortion be kept by the doctor along with the medical tests that confirm it. Since there are only a few thousand each year, and since so many of the cases are allegedly crystal clear, why is that such a ridiculous burden? If it is indeed true that only serious problems lead to late term abortions, there will be almost nothing to investigate–maybe two or three dozen not-super-clear cases.
     Given that you’re assuming that the doctors aren’t to be trusted, you’re going to have to do quite a bit of investigation of each case (that is, if you trusted the doctor’s word in a chart that the fetus was anencephalitic, you’d probably trust the doctor to abide by the law in the first place). And I’m afraid that I was considering costs to the patients unable to find doctors willing to put themselves at this sort of legal jeopardy, or fearing legal liability themselves, even in cases where there was medical justification for the abortion (given that automatic review of every late term abortion by law enforcement officials, some of whom have been known to be overzealous in their interpretation of the law, appears to be what you want) rather than solely the cost to the law enforcement agencies. I think this conversation would be somewhat more amicable if I had any sense that you were considering those costs as well.

206. I feel the conversation would be somewhat more amicable if I had any sense that were considering the cost of infanticide to the viable child as well. But there we both are.

207. Speaking for myself, Sebastian, the conversation would be far more amicable if I ever got any sense from you that you were considering the cost of criminalization to women who need abortions.

208. On the one hand I agree with Sebastian that any “non-vital” abortion after the viability point is one too much. On the other hand I agree with LB that the effort to prove would require/allow an intrusion so vast into the privacy of so many that the damage would probably outweigh by far the positive results.
     And I think that this would be the case even in a society that has no zealots in it whose whole purpose in life seems to be the harassment of pregnant women. A doctor who would “murder” an unborn child would quite probably have no problems with his conscience to falsify the records about it and to commit his crimes without too many witnesses.
     In practice quite a number of murders are not even recognized as that because not every corpse is checked thoroughly enough. I remember German estimates that maybe up to 10% of murders are successfully hidden not because the police can’t find the murderer but because nobody suspected murder in the first place. The effort to make sure that not a single murder remains undetected would be so huge as to turn the society into a high security prison, which few people would desire. And there is not a zealous lobby of “we need the Orwell state to achieve our moral goals” on the topic of common murder but there is such concerning abortion (including calls for preemptive jailings until birth of women suspected of considering abortion).
     It’s not nice to be just pragmatic about the loss of life of the helpless but I fear that is the lesser evil here. This does not mean we should close our eyes to the problem but just to be aware of the consequences of any action taken.

209. I thought I’d given a good example with the 24weeks case that survived the abortion and is now a healthy 2 yo.
     How about this 32 wk pregnancy in Australia? The doctors felt the guidelines aren’t clear enough.
     According to the Times Online in the UK babies are aborted late in pregnancy for club feet and cleft palate.
     This overview is about PBA’s in the US:

     Physicians who perform large numbers of PBAs have stated that many are performed for elective reasons. In an interview with American Medical News, M. Haskell stated that about 80% of the PBAs he performed were purely elective, with the remainder performed for genetic reasons.[22] In testimony to Congress, J. McMahon reported that for about 2,000-2,100 PBAs he had performed, 1,183 (56%) were for fetal “flaws” or “indicators”, 175 (9%) were for maternal “indicators”, and the remainder (about 700, or 35%) were elective.[23] McMahon further indicated that elective abortions comprised 20% of those he performed after 21 weeks gestation, and none of those he performed after 26 weeks.[24]
     McMahon’s 1995 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee gave more detailed statistics, which have been analyzed by physicians P. Smith and K. Dowling. Among maternal indicators, the single most frequent was maternal depression (39, or 1.9% of total), with 28 attributed to maternal health conditions “consistent with the birth of a normal child (e.g. sickle cell trait, prolapsed uterus, small pelvis)” (1.3% of total) and the remainder (5% of total) for other maternal factors ranging from maternal health risk to “spousal drug exposure” and “substance abuse”. Those performed for fetal indicators included some for lesser conditions such as 9 (0.4% of total) for cleft lip-palate, 24 (1.1% of total) for cystic hydroma, and other for conditions either surgically correctable or involving lesser degrees of neurologic/mental impairment.[25]

     I have a problem with all the comparisons, since they distract because there never is a good comparison. There is the unique situation that a life grows in the body of another person. We all agree that the life is a person in itself after the birth, we almost all agree that it is weird to say that it is not a person right before birth – though I’ve not seen Jesurgislac say *when* she felt the life had rights of it’s own – nor have I seen her deny that she felt the child didn’t have rights till the moment of birth.
     Again; I have no problem with first trimester abortions, I have slightly more problems with second trimester but feel that it is up to the mother to decide there (especially in countries that have bad abortion services). But in the third trimester the child in the womb becomes a person – that doesn’t just happen after it’s birth. As noted before; I am also at ease with euthanatia after the birth, if for instance the child is so handicapped that it will die shortly and is in pain all the time. Though there I also feel that it should not be only the parents decision.

210. Marbel: though I’ve not seen Jesurgislac say *when* she felt the life had rights of it’s own –
     I thought I had.
     Fairly plainly, it is not possible for a fetus to have rights without removing rights from a pregnant woman.
     If you try to make a coherent ethical argument about why those rights should be removed, you end up justifying removing the same rights from any parent. If you try to focus on only removing those rights from women, you have to explain why men are exempt from saving their children’s lives by providing body parts against their will.
     So, once an infant is born, s/he has rights. While it’s a fetus, it can’t have rights.

211. Hartmut: it feels weird to put no limits on it because justitial forces might abuse their powers. We are talking about abortions where their should be a clear understanding of why it happened – like CaseyL’s example of an anencephalic baby.

212. Jesurgislac: I dont’t discriminate. I feel that third term abortion should be restricted for any parent that grows a child in his or her body.

213. Marbel: I dont’t discriminate. I feel that third term abortion should be restricted for any parent that grows a child in his or her body.
     So, if you don’t discriminate, saving your offspring’s life by providing body parts is something that ought to be compulsory – enforced by law – on every parent? If a child needs a pint of blood or some bone marrow, the parents should – you feel – be forced to provide it?
     (I think we differ, too, in that I see pregnancy as an active choice, whereas you seem to see it as a passive state.)

214. Jes, you are every bit as much an extremist as the save every fertilized egg crowd. If the woman wants the pregnancy ended, fine. Just skip the “crush the baby’s skull and extract the brain” part of the abortion. That’s a remarkably trivial imposition on the woman, compared to killing the baby. Hell, if you skip the “arrange for a breach birth” part of the procedure, it can actually be easier on the woman than an abortion!
     And if there are medical reasons why it ISN’T a trivial imposition, bingo! You’ve got your medical basis for demanding an abortion!
     As for the mechanics of preventing abortionists from just lying about why the late term abortion was done, the system struck down in Doe v Bolton involved abortions cases being brought before a panel of doctors. Everybody knows that conspiracies grow exponentially more difficult to sustain as their size grows; A randomly chosen three doctor panel at the hospital looking at late term cases before the abortion is authorized would be entirely sufficient to prevent almost all fraud. And given how few we’re told are happening, wouldn’t be too great a cost, either.

215. Brett: Jes, you are every bit as much an extremist as the save every fertilized egg crowd.
     I didn’t know they existed, Brett – what do they do, campaign for tampon/towel rescue?
     But, that intriguing question aside, you seem to be equating the dubious “right” of every fertilised egg to be implanted in a uterus, with the not-at-all dubious right of every human being to decide for themselves what medical treatment they will receive, and when, and how their organs shall be used. It’s almost as if you see no difference at all between a fertilised egg and a human being…
     …which is where this discussion started, isn’t it?

216. Dutch, I was once for the ban with clearly defined exceptions but had to learn that even those seemingly clear rules were abused especially in Southern Germany (=conservative) while the interpretation in Northern Germany (moderate to liberal) was so liberal as to more or less undermine the restrictions.
     Since then I am for the first trimester being the pure choice of the woman (and I back the mandatory counselling at least 1 day before the procedure [that is strictly informational and not allowed to try to influence the decision]) while for the second and especially the third trimester certain restrictions apply.
     If I were in the US, I would probably become an “extremist” too because I know that any compromise would be seen/abused as the first step to drive it all the way back to a total ban. Europe has for the most part learned the art of non-perfect but tolerable compromise (but look at Poland for how a bunch of extremists can turn the clocks back) but the US seems still to be at least a century behind on that (I use to say the US mindset is Central Europe about 1910).
     On the whole I am for a pragmatic “What does the least damage in total?” approach. [Unfortunately some of that would violate the posting rules ;-)]

217. Jes, there is even the crowd of “every non-fertilized egg is a murder” believers (the nasty (OK, make that “even nastier”) siblings of the “every sperm is sacred” chorus) that consider every non-pregnant woman at child-bearing age as being in permanent mortal sin (those people make the Quiverfullers look moderate). Feddie does not like me saying that but there are more and extremer theological perversions to be found in the RCC history alone than any mere mortal pervert could come up with.
     I think for any normal discussion “extreme” should be defined as “at the border beyond that useful discussion becomes impossible”, i.e. positions at the edge (but not yet completely beyond it). Since legal infanticide is not on the table your position indeed marks the edge of useful discussion while the other end is marked by the contraception=abortion=bad equation. Those “extremes” can be held by reasonable persons, anything beyond is (imo) beyond reason. As I have said above, I have moved from a moderately restrictive to a rather more liberal position but would not go as far as you do while still respecting yours as within the reasonable.

218. So, if you don’t discriminate, saving your offspring’s life by providing body parts is something that ought to be compulsory – enforced by law – on every parent? If a child needs a pint of blood or some bone marrow, the parents should – you feel – be forced to provide it?
     (I think we differ, too, in that I see pregnancy as an active choice, whereas you seem to see it as a passive state.)
     No, I don’t think parents of either gender ought to be forced to provide organs or blood for the children. I do believe that the child grows into a human person in the womb; it doesn’t start out as a human person but it also does not magically become one during birth. So there is a period where the rights of the pregnant woman and the rights of the child have to be weighted against each other. If you do not believe the child has any rights before birth, there is no weighting, which is appearantly your position. Mine obviously differs.
     I do not perceive pregnancy as a passive state. I probabely perceive it as more of a choice than most Americans (about half of the pregnancies in the USA is unwanted – a figure that still makes me cringe). I even think the women is in a contineous period of choice about staying pregnant for the majority of her pregnancy.
     I actually (in agreement with Hartmut) feel that the abortion options in the USA should be more lenient that those in my own country. We have a low number of unwanted pregnancies, very easy access to (free) abortions, good prenatal care, no bankrupting medical costs if your child is handicapped, free access to basic pregnancy screening at earlier stages of the pregnancy, good acces to contraception, etc. The USA is much more backward in that area. Rightwing nuts actually make sure there are *more* unwanted pregnancies and less access to abortions, so the women rights weight heavier there afaiac.
     I would still have a problem with 24 weeks abortions because of cleft palate though.
     In the Netherlands investigations would be done by our Health Care Inspectorate.

219. I would still have a problem with 24 weeks abortions because of cleft palate though.
     Problem enough that you’d send someone to jail? Problem enough that you’d set up an investigative apparatus to find instances where it happened?

220. Sure, why not? If you’d send somebody to jail for killing that baby five minutes after it’s born, why not for killing it five minutes before it’s born? It’s the same entity, even if some people insist on calling a viable infant that just happens to still be inside a womb a “fetus”, as though that erases any rights he or she might have.
     I’m fine with the claim that a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy. The problem is that, post-viablity, that doesn’t imply a right to terminate the baby.

221. If you’d send somebody to jail for killing that baby five minutes after it’s born, why not for killing it five minutes before it’s born?
     Because a 24-week fetus is not 5 minutes away from being born. If it is, my wife got a raw deal.

222. Sure, why not? If you’d send somebody to jail for killing that baby five minutes after it’s born, why not for killing it five minutes before it’s born?
     Again – please find an example (any direct testimony from a woman to whom this happened or from someone who witnessed it happening) of any fetus killed five minutes before it was born.

223. It is, if (As in the case of intact D&E) aborting it involves inducing labor, arranging for a breach birth, and then killing the baby while in the birth canal. The baby is five minutes or less from being born at the moment it’s actually aborted.

224. Marbel: No, I don’t think parents of either gender ought to be forced to provide organs or blood for the children.
     Okay, so you’re actually with me: you agree that a woman has right to decide for herself whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy at any point.
     Mine obviously differs.
     Not at all, if you actually meant it that you don’t think parents of either gender should be forced to provide organs or blood for the children.
     I even think the women is in a contineous period of choice about staying pregnant for the majority of her pregnancy.
     All of it. Otherwise (contrary to your claim) you do think parents ought to be forced to provide organs/blood for their children.

225. Okay, so you’re actually with me: you agree that a woman has right to decide for herself whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy at any point.
     I think the point some people are trying to make is that,* at least with respect to post-viability abortions, terminating the pregnancy doesn’t mean terminating the baby/fetus.
     *I haven’t read the full thread so forgive me if I’m being repetitive here.

226. But now we’re back to saying “abortion is legal if you use procedure X, but someone goes to jail if you use procedure Y, even though the baby ends up dead in either event.” If Y is safer than X in a particular case, it’s kind of rough for the government to tell a woman “sorry, we require you to incur a greater risk of death or physical injury, because some people who aren’t involved have decided the safer procedure is too objectionable.”

227. Brett: It is, if (As in the case of intact D&E) aborting it involves inducing labor, arranging for a breach birth, and then killing the baby while in the birth canal.
     From wikipedia’s description:

     Preliminary procedures are performed over a period of 2–3 days, to gradually dilate the cervix using laminaria tents (sticks of seaweed which absorb fluid and swell). Sometimes drugs such as synthetic pitocin are used to induce labor. Once the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor uses an ultrasound and forceps to grasp the fetus’ leg. The fetus is turned to a breech position, if necessary, and the doctor pulls one or both legs out of the birth canal, causing what is referred to by some people as the ‘partial birth’ of the fetus. The doctor subsequently extracts the rest of the fetus, usually without the aid of forceps, leaving only the head still inside the birth canal. An incision is made at the base of the skull and a suction catheter is inserted into the cut. The brain tissue is removed, which causes the skull to collapse and allows the fetus to pass more easily through the birth canal. The placenta is removed and the uterine wall is vacuum aspirated using a suction curette.

     The point is not to “kill the fetus” when the brain tissue is removed: the point is to preserve the woman’s health and her ability to give birth normally in the future. Sometimes intact D&X is going to be the best way to do that. To argue it should not be performed because (in essence) some people are squeamish about it, is to argue that your “ick!” factor outweighs any concern for women, their health, and their future fertility.

228. That point has been made to Jes a half dozen times or more, and her (non)reaction to it has been enough to make this atheist sympathetic to the Catholic concept of “invincible ignorance”.

229. In the Netherlands abortion is not allowed at that stage, so *if* an abortion takes place (usually that is a delivery) it will be reported to the inspection. It (a.o.) gets reports about deaths and decided wether they warrant investigation.
     Sometimes that is done to determine the borders of policy too, or to protect existing borders. That sounds rather vague, but an example is the case where a doctor gave an old dying lady medication to let her die quicker. She was in at home, in a coma, but had stinking wounds and lay in her own feaces. She was at max a few hours from her death and he thought that even washing her might have killed her. So, at the request of her daughter, he gave her muscle relaxants. He is (after several courtcases and appeals) still convicted for murder (she was not giving permission herself at that moment, nor was she suffering since she was in a coma, which rules out euthanatia). All the courts explicetly stated that he acted in good conscience, and the punishment is one week of ‘suspended prison time’ (I don’t know the legal term in English).
     I have no need to see people go to jail, but I don’t like a system whereby the rights of the child are not an issue. I can understand discussions about when those rights begin, for me that is more or less third trimester, but I have more understanding for people who have difficulty with earlier abortions than for people who claim that a child only has rights after it’s birth.

230. Ugh: I think the point some people are trying to make is that,* at least with respect to post-viability abortions, terminating the pregnancy doesn’t mean terminating the baby/fetus.
     Not if the woman agrees to induced labor/early delivery, no. If she doesn’t agree, we’re back to the argument about a woman being forced against her will to accept a medical procedure carried out on her body. Brett and Marbel appear to see nothing wrong with this…
     Marbel: but I don’t like a system whereby the rights of the child are not an issue.
     And I don’t like a system whereby the rights of pregnant women are not an issue.

231. Marbel: No, I don’t think parents of either gender ought to be forced to provide organs or blood for the children.
     Okay, so you’re actually with me: you agree that a woman has right to decide for herself whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy at any point.
     I very clearly stated that though I see similarities those two are NOT the same. Maybe I should have used “comparing apples and oranges” though other people still understood my literal translation well enough to point me to the correct English expression (tnxs. We probabely don’t use oranges because they are not locally grown – own fruit first 😉 and we’ve only been a monarchy since 1813).
     Pregnancy is a unique situation. You cannot compare it with anything else, because all comparisons are faulty at some point. It is not donating organs, tresspassing, executing criminals. So please don’t try to remake my words.

232. And I don’t like a system whereby the rights of pregnant women are not an issue.
     As I said earlier: they *are* an issue, they are just not the *only* issue.
     Not if the woman agrees to induced labor/early delivery, no. If she doesn’t agree, we’re back to the argument about a woman being forced against her will to accept a medical procedure carried out on her body. Brett and Marbel appear to see nothing wrong with this…
     Giving birth when you are in your third trimester is actually pretty unavoidable. It doesn’t even matter wether the child is dead or not, it is not going to be reabsorbed in the womans body. Calling that a “forced medical procedure” is balderdash.

233. I would distinguish between theoretically viable, as a matter of medical science, and practically viable, given the actual system we have. I think that ends up moving MarBel’s timeline from 24 up into the 30s. I’m sympathetic to Brett’s distinction between terminating pregnancy and terminating baby’s life, but only if/when the state is willing to step up and provide comprehensive care. I think a statute that required a 30 week fetus to be delivered intact, if it could be done without undue risk to the mother, and provided for the health care and eventual adoptive placement of the baby would be constitutional.
     Instead of problem solving statutes, though, the anti-abortion movement prefers to go down the road that will, it hopes, allow for the outlawing of all abortions. They may well be right about their strategy working — we might find out in the pretty near future.
     In the meantime, even reasonable people like Sebastian aren’t willing to go the reasonable statutory route, for fear that compliance will be less than perfect. He’s ignoring the impact such a scheme would have on the psychology of people — it may well be that elective fetus-destroying late abortion would become so stygmatized, in the face of an option that does not demand a lifetime committment from the parents — that this fear would be unfounded. At the least, though, some lives would be saved if we tried it.
     Instead, even the people who are pursuing restrictions on abortion for non-punitive reasons end up following the same policy as those with punitive motive.

234. It’s worth noting that when we’re talking about a 24-week pregnancy, we’re in a real gray area as far as viability is concerned. The record for survival, I think, is 22 weeks.
     I think getting an abortion because of a cleft palate is sick, of course. I still have to ask myself the question, what should we do about it? Should we have a law saying that you need to have a “good reason” for your abortion – with the definition of “good reason” to be provided, of course, by the government – just to avert the handful of extraordinary cases where someone wants an abortion for a really fucked-up reason?
     Or is it that, as the conservatives are always telling us, not every social ill needs to be addressed by government regulation? Some of us feel like it’s not right to require every woman to justify her reasons to the government, even though dispensing with such requirement will let a few of them get away with doing things for the wrong reason.

235. Giving birth when you are in your third trimester is actually pretty unavoidable.
     Well, kinda. I mean, the baby has to come out the birth canal, so you need to be dilated and such, but I’d think if there’s no concern for the baby’s survival it would be a much simpler procedure than if you have to induce full contractions as would occur with a normal birth. Then again, I have no experience with premature births, and maybe it’s a lot easier when the fetus is as small as it would be at 30 weeks. I do know that childbirth is a lot of work and I think it would be very difficult emotionally to go through that for a baby you didn’t want.
     Not that I’m arguing, mind you, because an abortion at 30 weeks is pretty absurdly extreme. Indeed, given the greater risk to a baby born that prematurely, and the developmental problems and the like that often ensue, I’d be sort of wary of setting up a legal regime that provides for “premature delivery on demand” (to coin a phrase).

236. I very clearly stated that though I see similarities those two are NOT the same.
     Are you trying to argue now that a woman’s uterus is not an organ? Or that a fetus is not completely dependent on the pregnant woman’s blood? If you are saying you think a parent ought to be forced against her will to provide her offspring with blood/organs to save her life, that’s a coherent argument. If you’re arguing that only pregnant women ought to be so forced, you have to explain to me why you think pregnant women aren’t entitled to the basic human rights everyone else is.
     Giving birth when you are in your third trimester is actually pretty unavoidable. It doesn’t even matter wether the child is dead or not, it is not going to be reabsorbed in the womans body. Calling that a “forced medical procedure” is balderdash.
     Actually, a fetus is never “reabsorbed in a woman’s body”, no matter what stage of development it’s at. Absent fairly major surgical intervention, the way a fetus leaves a woman’s body is always through the vagina.
     Induced labor is a medical procedure. If a medical procedure is forced on someone against their will, how is it “balderdash” to say: that’s a forced medical procedure?

237. “In the meantime, even reasonable people like Sebastian aren’t willing to go the reasonable statutory route, for fear that compliance will be less than perfect.”
     What reasonable statutory route is on offer that I won’t accept?
     I would have no problem accepting a system above (for example) where the hospital review board of say three doctors have to sign off on the medical neccessity of a late term abortion and document what it is. That is not a very large burden, especially considering the low number of late-term abortions that are taking place.

238. “Induced labor is a medical procedure. If a medical procedure is forced on someone against their will, how is it “balderdash” to say: that’s a forced medical procedure?”
     The labor isn’t forced, even for an abortion there is going to have to be induced labor, that is going to happen whether or not there is a dead baby at the end of the process. The question is whether or not, having settled on the fact that induced labor is a neccessity one way or another, the mother gets to guarantee a dead baby at the end.

239. Steve: I think getting an abortion because of a cleft palate is sick, of course. I still have to ask myself the question, what should we do about it? Should we have a law saying that you need to have a “good reason” for your abortion – with the definition of “good reason” to be provided, of course, by the government – just to avert the handful of extraordinary cases where someone wants an abortion for a really fucked-up reason?
     Exactly.
     Or is it that, as the conservatives are always telling us, not every social ill needs to be addressed by government regulation? Some of us feel like it’s not right to require every woman to justify her reasons to the government, even though dispensing with such requirement will let a few of them get away with doing things for the wrong reason.
     Exactly, again.
     A third trimester abortion is a major medical procedure. It is both basic common sense and basic medical ethics that a doctor who carries out a major medical procedure is doing so because s/he thinks it is necessary for the health of the patient. I do not want that doctor to be trying to figure out if government legislation will permit the procedure that s/he thinks is necessary. How necessary?
     I have a friend who’s had two children and both times for the duration of the pregnancy she went, as she put it herself, crazy. She had paranoid hallucinations, she had emotional surges: she started self-harming (and I think, though I don’t know, that the self-harm was a conscious substitute for suicide). Both children were planned, wanted, and are very much loved. But if there had ever been a time in her pregnancy when it was a clear choice between terminating the pregnancy or her suicide, I would hope any doctor would have agreed that it was better to terminate the pregnancy, as safely as possible, according to whatever procedure seemed best. Because if she committed suicide, the fetus died too: if the pregnancy was terminated, the fetus dies but my friend lives.
     Which is where the argument that a third-trimester fetus is “really” a baby falls down. When a baby’s mother dies, the baby doesn’t die. When a pregnant woman dies, so does the fetus. Deciding that harm to the pregnant woman is okay for the sake of the fetus is backwards reasoning.
     Sebastian: The labor isn’t forced
     In what sense, “isn’t forced”? If a medical procedure is performed on someone against their will, it is in fact a forced medical procedure. As Hilzoy will tell you, doctors aren’t permitted to force medical procedures on their patients even to save their lives. Let alone to save someone else’s life.

240. Sebastian: I would have no problem accepting a system above (for example) where the hospital review board of say three doctors have to sign off on the medical neccessity of a late term abortion and document what it is.
     But, if those hospital review boards were completely confidential and no one except the woman and the three doctors was allowed to see the documentation – wouldn’t you have the same difficulty accepting that system as you do any system (it seems) where the reason for abortion is always confidential between a woman and her doctor?

241. I would have no problem accepting a system above (for example) where the hospital review board of say three doctors have to sign off on the medical neccessity of a late term abortion and document what it is.
     If late term is post-viability, and the procedures are set up in a way not to put doctors at risk of criminal liability for medically reasonable decisions, I wouldn’t have anything against such a law. I don’t think it’s necessary, but wouldn’t strongly oppose it. (If, in practice, it had the effect of reducing the availability of medically necessary late-term abortion, I’d want it repealed, but if fairly and honestly administered, I don’t see that it obviously should.)

242. You’d have to tweak the system to avoid having any doctors on the panel who are against all abortions for any reason. Still, I think if you could create a fair and fast review system, then I think such a statute might well be constitutional. (I could see giving the panel a veto power that has to be exercised within a short period, so there’s be no incentive to filibuster).
     If you also agreed to fully fund the immediate delivery and subsequent care of any child where the abortion was refused by the panel, I think you’d meet a lot of practical objections as well.
     The more people stop acting like it’s about punishment and start acting like it’s about preservation of life, the easier it’s going to be to make late abortion socially unacceptable.

243. You’d have to tweak the system to avoid having any doctors on the panel who are against all abortions for any reason.
     Right — what worries about this is the potential for abuse by categorical opponents of abortion regardless of medical justification. But if you could get around that, then it might be workable.

244. “Or is it that, as the conservatives are always telling us, not every social ill needs to be addressed by government regulation?”
     Well actually it is usually that not every social ill is in fact a Constitutional issue. But sure, it is a common conservative argument that side effects to government regulation can make it not worth it. In that case we typically ask that you balance the potential harm and the potential benefit.
     But let’s do that with a law that says for example that late term abortions have to be authorized by a 3 doctor review board with a potential for state level blind-audit:
     It doesn’t touch at all the ability of a woman to get pre-viability abortions. So a woman can still get–for any reason whatsoever–an abortion in the first 5 or 6 months.
     It still allows for medically neccessary abortions. Therefore it does not impose unreasonable medical risks upon the mother.
     It is a matter of life or death for the fetus/baby in question–which tends to weigh strongly when talking about balancing tests.
     So the problem area is for a woman who doesn’t appear to have a serious medical reason for the abortion, has a viable fetus, and wants to be rid of it by killing it. Some above have suggested that there is no such woman, dutchmarbel’s survey suggests otherwise, but if true that will mean forcing to closely document 2,000 to 4,000 abortions throughout a country which performs more than a million each year. Considering that you can abort freely for 5-6 months that doesn’t seem a huge burden to impose.

245. “If you also agreed to fully fund the immediate delivery and subsequent care of any child where the abortion was refused by the panel, I think you’d meet a lot of practical objections as well.”
     I would have no problem with that at all.

246. So, who’s advocating for a law like this in what states?

247. “Right — what worries about this is the potential for abuse by categorical opponents of abortion regardless of medical justification. But if you could get around that, then it might be workable.”
     It seems to me that this could be done by giving a majority vote of the three doctors to make the immediate decison. The dissenter could require a review immediately after the abortion (or immediately if the dissenter was voting to allow the abortion). If this happened twice (in a suitable period, considering the number of cases involved, say 3 years?) and the dissenter was found to be wrong, he is off the panel. If this happens twice and he is right, the doctors who voted the other way are off the panel. That way neither side could easily manipulate the process by trying to stack the immediate review.

248. “It is both basic common sense and basic medical ethics that a doctor who carries out a major medical procedure is doing so because s/he thinks it is necessary for the health of the patient.”
     LOL! Or at least, that s/he will get paid.

249. That works only under the assumption that the reviewing authority isn’t going to be a categorical opponent of abortion under any medical circumstances either; to the extent they are, that system would stack review boards to prohibit all abortions. I don’t know that that would come up all that often, but it’s a non-zero risk — if a law like this turned out to narrow the availability of medically necessary late term abortions, I’d be lobbying for repeal.
     Still, this sort of argument is moot, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a proposal for a law of this nature actively discussed in any state — my guess is that it doesn’t happen because moderate pro-choice people don’t think it’s necessary, given that the odds of anyone wanting to abort a healthy baby without risk to the mother in the last couple of months of a pregnancy are so low, and pro-life activists are focussed on abortion bans, or publicity stunts like ‘partial-birth’ abortion bans.
     I’d think a law like what you propose wouldn’t have a lot of opposition, but I don’t see what constituency would be pushing for it.

250. Are you trying to argue now that a woman’s uterus is not an organ? Or that a fetus is not completely dependent on the pregnant woman’s blood? If you are saying you think a parent ought to be forced against her will to provide her offspring with blood/organs to save her life, that’s a coherent argument. If you’re arguing that only pregnant women ought to be so forced, you have to explain to me why you think pregnant women aren’t entitled to the basic human rights everyone else is.
     Being pregnant is not the same as donating organs to your child. Pregnancy is a unique situation. There is no other situation that is the same. And as I said I wasn’t arguing that only women should do something, I said that only people who are in their third trimester should do something. Or rather refrain from something. The fact that those people currently *are* only female is one of the many *differences* between donating organs and being pregnant.
     Actually, a fetus is never “reabsorbed in a woman’s body”, no matter what stage of development it’s at. Absent fairly major surgical intervention, the way a fetus leaves a woman’s body is always through the vagina.
     Induced labor is a medical procedure. If a medical procedure is forced on someone against their will, how is it “balderdash” to say: that’s a forced medical procedure?
     I don’t want them to have the induced labour at all. I want them to wait till it happends naturally.
     I think having an abortion at 32 weeks for social reasons is wrong. I *do* feel that women should be able to have early abortions easily, I even feel that they should be able to have an abortion if the child is not (or hardly) viable. Which is why I feel that the default should be that you have no abortion in that stage, unless certain conditions are met.
     30 Weeks gestation would be a to late for me. My niece was born at 27 weeks and immediately had a big operation, and she’s a very happy and healthy baby now.
     

251. darn. Italics off!
     Sorry all. Have to go enjoy the last rays of sunshine with the husband now, the babysit has arrived 😉

252. So the problem area is for a woman who doesn’t appear to have a serious medical reason for the abortion, has a viable fetus, and wants to be rid of it by killing it. Some above have suggested that there is no such woman, dutchmarbel’s survey suggests otherwise
     What Marbel’s link suggests to me is that if there is a problem, it is extremely small.
     Can we agree for the sake of argument that we are talking about 25w+ for viability? There is a 50% chance (in the UK) that an infant born at 25 weeks will die, and many of the extremely premature babies that survive birth at 25 weeks are permanently disabled. The law in the UK says no abortions after 24w because that is what the government has decided is the lower limit of viability, and in practice this means no abortions after 20w unless there is a medical reason.
     What does legislation intended to make it more difficult for women to get abortions after 25w+ accomplish?
     In the one instance I know of where a woman wanted an abortion at 20w, couldn’t get one because the doctor she consulted decided she “doesn’t appear to have a serious medical reason for the abortion, has a viable fetus” as Sebastian would put it, the end result was a dead baby. The woman (she was about 20) told no one, gave birth in her bedroom, and hid the baby in her wardrobe, where the baby died. Her mental state was not considered “a serious medical reason”, and yet, who was better off? Not the woman herself, who was tried for infanticide: certainly not the baby.
     There is no mass number of women who are wanting late-term abortions on a whim. Common sense would tell anyone this. If a healthy woman with a healthy fetus has gone through 25w of pregnancy and wants an abortion, something is wrong. It may be that the “something” is wrong with the woman’s mental state; if so, that problem won’t go away or be made better by forcing her through the next 15 weeks of pregnancy and through childbirth: it’s more likely to get worse. If the woman commits suicide, the baby will never be born. If the woman is in a utter state of denial about the pregnancy, the baby is likely to die. Should all women who ask for abortions at 25w and are denied be locked up under suicide watch for the next 15 weeks and the baby taken away as soon as it’s born?
     Legislating against abortions at 25w+ is not done to discourage: it’s not as if pregnant women reach the point of viability and suddenly think on a whim “Oh, wait, I want to abort.”

253. “I’ve never seen a proposal for a law of this nature actively discussed in any state”
     A few hours after the Supreme court issued it’s Roe v Wade ruling, it issued Doe v Bolton, which struck down as unconstitutional a system pretty much like this.
     http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=410&invol=179
     “Held: …
     (b) The interposition of a hospital committee on abortion, a procedure not applicable as a matter of state criminal law to other surgical situations, (Of course, other surgical procedures don’t involve killing somebody…) is unduly restrictive of the patient’s rights, which are already safeguarded by her personal physician. Pp. 195-198.
     (c) Required acquiescence by two copractitioners also has no rational connection with a patient’s needs and unduly infringes on her physician’s right to practice. Pp. 198-200.

254. Well, except for the whole post-viability issue. Given that a law like that in NY State that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks is consititutional, a law providing for review of abortions in that period would be likely to pass muster.

255. Did that do it?

256. In Doe v Bolton, the Court ruled that a committee approach was impermissible, because the attending physician adequately protected the mother’s interests. Completely blowing off the fact that earlier that day they’d ruled that in later trimesters there were OTHER interests which could be taken into account.

257. If I recall (and reread the opinion)correctly, the law in Doe v. Bolton applied throughout the pregnancy — it was struck down because of the impact on women in the first two trimesters. Come back with a law that’s limited to post-viability abortions, and the Court would be looking at a different question entirely.

258. wow. I take a few days away from my favorite blog for work and all kinds of fun breaks out.
     the interesting question is the one which remains unanswered: where in the US is there a serious effort to rein in third-term abortions only?
     Answer (to Sebastian’s dismay): Nowhere.
     Where Democrats are in charge there is no interest in alienating a powerful interest group by tightening abortion laws. Where Republicans are in charge, the constituency with power on this issue is the evangelical movement which wants to ban all abortions.
     More to the point, I don’t think most people care. Even if the current political climate prevents either party from advancing the kind of statute SH wants, many states have initiative and/or referendum procedures. If the middle 70% is crying out for this law to be passed against the will of the extremists, it sure is not being evidenced through this kind of direct democracy.

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