It seems reasonable to me to allow elective abortion until coordinated brain activity can be detected in a fetal brain; this is apparently around 20 weeks in.
That's for completely elective abotion. But critically, continuing even a wanted pregnancy can sometimes endanger a woman's health, so permitting abortions to preserve the health of…
It seems reasonable to me to allow elective abortion until coordinated brain activity can be detected in a fetal brain; this is apparently around 20 weeks in.
That's for completely elective abotion. But critically, continuing even a wanted pregnancy can sometimes endanger a woman's health, so permitting abortions to preserve the health of the mother throughout pregnancy is important.
AFAICT, once viability is reached, at 24 weeks or so, healthy fetuses don't get aborted, they get delivered. All this talk about aborting babies 5 minutes before their due date is just made up BS.
IOW, there are reasonable compromises, which actually don't look very different from Roe -- elective abortion is OK in the first 4 months, or to preserve the health of the mother. If something goes wrong with the pregnancy and the fetus is past viability, deliver the baby (unless this is impossible, which I've never heard).
It is important when writing laws that a doctor performing a medically necessary abortion is protected if *the doctor* believes that an abortion is necessary. Some red state "exceptions" don't specify who makes this determination, allowing prosecutors to second guess doctors. This is how the anti-choice legislators make exceptions that look good on paper but that doctors can't actually make use of.
"That's for completely elective abotion. But critically, continuing even a wanted pregnancy can sometimes endanger a woman's health, so permitting abortions to preserve the health of the mother throughout pregnancy is important."
Oh yeah, absolutely. Life-of-the-mother and foetal abnormality exceptions are just no-brainers as far as I'm concerned. It's shocking to me that anybody would argue otherwise.
I think there's lots of room for good-faith disagreement around viability vs brain activity vs foetal heartbeat. That could be a sane, science based conversation. The problem is the people who think their subjective feelings should be allowed to govern other people's lives.
The problem with those who don't support "health of the mother" exceptions is that they claim that they *do* support those exceptions, but when you read the text of the laws, you find that instead of a doctor's being able to rely on their own best judgement, the laws in the red states leave out exactly who's judgement is determinative. Which means that a prosecutor can supply their own opinion of how to treat a medical emergency. On top of that, some red states allow these exceptions not as part of the definition of an illegal abortion, but only as an affirmative defense, meaning the doctor is guilty of the crime, but once present in a court, can raise this as a defense; that increases the cost of defending oneself significantly.
As for fetal heartbeat bills, there are two problems. First, they frequently require a decision by 6 weeks, which is before many women know they're pregnant. More importantly, a fetus has a heartbeat way before it is conscious or has any real brain activity. And while a heartbeat *sounds* vaguely like an interesting developmental stage, it really has no connection to anything like feeling pain, being conscious, or having high level brain activity. After all, when someone has a heart transplant we don't treat it as assisted suicide. The heart is just one more organ, although an important one.
It seems reasonable to me to allow elective abortion until coordinated brain activity can be detected in a fetal brain; this is apparently around 20 weeks in.
That's for completely elective abotion. But critically, continuing even a wanted pregnancy can sometimes endanger a woman's health, so permitting abortions to preserve the health of the mother throughout pregnancy is important.
AFAICT, once viability is reached, at 24 weeks or so, healthy fetuses don't get aborted, they get delivered. All this talk about aborting babies 5 minutes before their due date is just made up BS.
IOW, there are reasonable compromises, which actually don't look very different from Roe -- elective abortion is OK in the first 4 months, or to preserve the health of the mother. If something goes wrong with the pregnancy and the fetus is past viability, deliver the baby (unless this is impossible, which I've never heard).
It is important when writing laws that a doctor performing a medically necessary abortion is protected if *the doctor* believes that an abortion is necessary. Some red state "exceptions" don't specify who makes this determination, allowing prosecutors to second guess doctors. This is how the anti-choice legislators make exceptions that look good on paper but that doctors can't actually make use of.
"That's for completely elective abotion. But critically, continuing even a wanted pregnancy can sometimes endanger a woman's health, so permitting abortions to preserve the health of the mother throughout pregnancy is important."
Oh yeah, absolutely. Life-of-the-mother and foetal abnormality exceptions are just no-brainers as far as I'm concerned. It's shocking to me that anybody would argue otherwise.
I think there's lots of room for good-faith disagreement around viability vs brain activity vs foetal heartbeat. That could be a sane, science based conversation. The problem is the people who think their subjective feelings should be allowed to govern other people's lives.
The problem with those who don't support "health of the mother" exceptions is that they claim that they *do* support those exceptions, but when you read the text of the laws, you find that instead of a doctor's being able to rely on their own best judgement, the laws in the red states leave out exactly who's judgement is determinative. Which means that a prosecutor can supply their own opinion of how to treat a medical emergency. On top of that, some red states allow these exceptions not as part of the definition of an illegal abortion, but only as an affirmative defense, meaning the doctor is guilty of the crime, but once present in a court, can raise this as a defense; that increases the cost of defending oneself significantly.
As for fetal heartbeat bills, there are two problems. First, they frequently require a decision by 6 weeks, which is before many women know they're pregnant. More importantly, a fetus has a heartbeat way before it is conscious or has any real brain activity. And while a heartbeat *sounds* vaguely like an interesting developmental stage, it really has no connection to anything like feeling pain, being conscious, or having high level brain activity. After all, when someone has a heart transplant we don't treat it as assisted suicide. The heart is just one more organ, although an important one.
90% of "pro-life" women will have a Down Syndrome fetus aborted.