Abortion. No specific circumstances needed. If a woman wants an abortion, it should be allowed. There is no one getting late term abortions that didn’t want the child and something tragic happened and now they need one.
That’s not a gotcha, it’s very simple. Doctors decide whether a fetus is viable outside the womb, and if it is, then it’s a birth. The line for this keeps shifting earlier as neonatal medicine improves. Doctors aren’t going to destroy a child that can live, they took a hypocratic oath. Once it’s outside on its own, “my body my choice” no longer applies.
In fact, the opposite is frequently a problem, where enormous intervention is given to keep an extremely premature child alive when all you are doing is guaranteeing them a lot of suffering. There are plenty of parents who wish in retrospect that the option to simply not intervene had been offered, because they see how much pain their child goes through. It is already perfectly fine, legally and ethically, to decide that a child is simply too weak to have a good quality of life. You can offer them milk (if they feed on their own that is a sign of good health and probably won’t ever happen with a case like this), but after that hold them and say goodbye.
People talking about late term abortions and killing babies after ripping them out of the womb at 40 weeks are completely divorced from reality. That’s Alex Jones level bullshit.
As a caveat to the last sentence, it’s definitely possible for women to not know they’re pregnant until very late in the process. There have even been women who only found out they were pregnant when they went into labor.
I know a family that had 6 hours of pregnancy, and they, like most in the same situation, did not seek a late term abortion. By the time labor sets in, the fetus is developed enough to survive outside the womb, so anyone seeking to end the pregnancy without taking possession of a child, should be allowed to simply demand that the fetus be removed. It should be up to the medical staff to decide how.
Abortion. No specific circumstances needed. If a woman wants an abortion, it should be allowed. There is no one getting late term abortions that didn’t want the child and something tragic happened and now they need one.
At what point is it no longer an abortion, though?
That’s not a gotcha, it’s very simple. Doctors decide whether a fetus is viable outside the womb, and if it is, then it’s a birth. The line for this keeps shifting earlier as neonatal medicine improves. Doctors aren’t going to destroy a child that can live, they took a hypocratic oath. Once it’s outside on its own, “my body my choice” no longer applies.
In fact, the opposite is frequently a problem, where enormous intervention is given to keep an extremely premature child alive when all you are doing is guaranteeing them a lot of suffering. There are plenty of parents who wish in retrospect that the option to simply not intervene had been offered, because they see how much pain their child goes through. It is already perfectly fine, legally and ethically, to decide that a child is simply too weak to have a good quality of life. You can offer them milk (if they feed on their own that is a sign of good health and probably won’t ever happen with a case like this), but after that hold them and say goodbye.
People talking about late term abortions and killing babies after ripping them out of the womb at 40 weeks are completely divorced from reality. That’s Alex Jones level bullshit.
As a caveat to the last sentence, it’s definitely possible for women to not know they’re pregnant until very late in the process. There have even been women who only found out they were pregnant when they went into labor.
I know a family that had 6 hours of pregnancy, and they, like most in the same situation, did not seek a late term abortion. By the time labor sets in, the fetus is developed enough to survive outside the womb, so anyone seeking to end the pregnancy without taking possession of a child, should be allowed to simply demand that the fetus be removed. It should be up to the medical staff to decide how.