On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, 53% say abortion access nationwide has become too difficult, a new NBC News poll finds.
On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, 53% say abortion access nationwide has become too difficult, a new NBC News poll finds.
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Genuinely curious as to why.
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In my experience, people with perspectives like yours tend to drastically overestimate how many abortions happen later in pregnancy. Nine out of ten happen before 12 weeks. And of those that do happen afterwards, the vast majority are due to the discovery of medical risks to the mother or fetus. Very very few people are just casually waking up and deciding that an abortion sounds like a fun way to spend the afternoon. I’d also remind you that a good 20% or so of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The Right likes to spin up this twisted fantasy of women and doctors going on baby killing sprees for fun and profit, and it’s simply not the case. “Post-birth abortion” is not a thing to any remotely significant degree. As I understand, there are some exceptionally rare cases where, upon birth, it’s discovered that the baby has an immediate severe health disaster that will result in it having perhaps a few days of miserable suffering before dying, and in those situations, it’s instead euthanized in what is naturally a life-defining trauma to the mother. To take one of the most tragic experiences a hopeful parent can possibly imagine and pervert it into a shallow political talking point is something that I will not dignify with any additional response.
It sounds like you do acknowledge that there’s a lot of nuance and complication here, and that there are legitimate reasons for abortion. Given that, I don’t see why there’s a compelling reason for the use of government power (amusingly, from people who claim to be for small and limited government) to interfere in complicated medical decisions between parents and their doctors.
It has nothing to do with frequency. I oppose elective late term abortions because I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unethical even if it only happens once. The polling on this is clear: most Americans oppose elective abortions in both the second and third trimesters. However I support late term abortions for medical reasons like saving the life of the mother.
The problem is with defining what “elective” is. Defining in legal terms, a “necessary abortion” is also equally difficult.
The best way to safeguard medical professionals against career, even freedom threatening legal battles, is to leave the discretion to medical boards who know ultimately better than anyone what they are dealing with.
This is why it’s dangerous to meddle in something like this. We can’t go on legislating depending on our personal morals and understanding of ethics. We can’t legislate from a position which assumes medical professionals are profit driven, soulless devils who’d do wrong unless prevented from doing so by the strong hand of the general society through government intervention.
This same principle is valid in both gender affirming care -yes, for minors too- and for access to abortions.
We legislate morality all the time. It is the premise of democracy. We ban murder because we believe it’s unethical.
I’m perfectly happy for medical boards to decide whether abortion is medically necessary. I also believe they are best suited to decide that. The issue is that activists are arguing for no such oversight. They want the mother to decide, not said medical board.
This is not actually the case. All medical procedures have to be signed off on by the doctor performing them. Maybe someone shops around for a doctor with a more accommodating perspective but it will always need to be signed off by a doctor. if done in a professional medical environment.
The entire point is that the government shouldn’t be deciding what medical procedures are necessary for you. The decision is between you and a doctor.
This is very different to “medically necessary.” What you are describing is a doctor assessing that the mother is physically capable of enduring the procedure without undue risks. What we are describing is assessing wether the procedure itself is medically necessary.
I generally support the premise that people should be able to do what they like with their bodies. Most people do. The issue is the ethical status of the fetus. Many people believe it to be alive and deserving of legal protections. There isn’t a clear method for delineating that, so we make a moral judgement. For most Americans, that is after the first trimester.
So the problem with a board is… Who is assigned that position? Elected? Chosen by the medical professionals at that hospital? Chosen by a single medical professional in the state? Who is allowed to be picked to that board? Only doctors? Admin? Hospital ownership? Licenced doctors that are not currently practicing, like the ones hired by insurance companies?
If you have the wrong set of people on that board, you can have a de-facto abortion ban in that area. Or a lot of expensive oversight on these boards.
As long as the law clearly defines “medical necessity” I think it takes a lot of the risk out of the selection of the board.
I’m kinda splitting hairs here, but you seem to be using the terms “morality” and “ethics” interchangeably when they don’t mean the same thing.
Ethics are social norms. Morality is personal. You cannot legislate morality because everyone makes those individual decisions anyway, and we will all rebel against rules we consider immoral. Ethical practices are those that balance everyone’s divergent senses of morality in ways that allow us to actually function as a society. All legislation is ultimately legislating ethics.
Murder is unethical because we ban it. We ban murder because we believe it’s immoral. But at least where I live, we can have a little ethical murder sometimes, as a treat – if you call it capital punishment first. Many people, including myself, consider this immoral and would support changing the laws which inform (but do not define!) our system of ethics.
Also, I don’t think you understand that abortion clinics are run by groups of physicians who are playing the role of this “medical board.” It also seems you don’t understand that limiting the incidence of DIY/back alley abortions is [the] major reason for making abortions accessible/legal. Telling someone they can’t get an abortion in a clinic won’t stop them from getting an abortion. It’ll just stop them from getting an abortion in a clinic.
I think my use of ethics and morality are all correct. I don’t see any incongruence. To also split hairs, we legislate morality by voting. That act is how we affect moral legislative change at the state or national level. Further, you seem to be conflating ethics with laws. Laws can be unethical, such as the death penalty you mention. There are different ethical schools and they are often in stark disagreement with each other.
I am quite aware of how abortion clinics operate in the US. There are rarely boards. In states which permit elective late term abortions, there is generally one or sometimes two physicians who assess the medical fitness of the patient. They are not assessing the need. I think you are confused about the premise of the discussion. The number of physicians is immaterial to the standard by which they are assessing the patient.
I am also aware that one of the arguments from activists for legal elective late term abortions is that women will use coat hangers. I have not seen any convincing evidence of this and I think the risk is low. By keeping first trimester elective abortion legal, I believe almost all risk is eliminated. It is further reduced by criminalising the murder of fetuses. Studies reveal that harsh penalties work very well to reduce crime (I’m happy to cite studies if you like).
That’s not the only reason; a society where murder is legal wouldn’t just be unethical, is not tenable. It would quickly fall apart as every minor dispute is solved by killing those who disagree.
Unlike murder, there is no ethical cost to terminating a fetus <24 weeks, when it is not yet capable of sentience. There is no need for a medical board to intervene before this point. Allowing abortion access leads to a better society, not a worse one, in terms of crime, generational wealth, resources and attention per child, and the obvious benefits of simply not having a society filled with unwanted, unloved, and resented children. Forced-birther moralistic arguments rely on ignorance regarding fetal development and apathy regarding outcomes of both mother and child. They are not comparable, morally speaking.
There are many more factors to consider than sentience when assessing the value of a human life. It is illegal for me to walk into a hospital and murder a brain dead patient on life support.
While I agree that the evidence seems to suggest that legal elective abortions affect some positive social outcomes, I am not convinced that that alone is a sufficient argument to permit legal late term elective abortions. Eugenics also produces desirable social outcomes, eliminating genetic diseases and improving overall intelligence and physical health. This alone is insufficient to validate the practise.
When you legislate what is and what is not “elective” you tie doctors hands. Politicians are not medical professionals, and laws are rigid. When laws restricting abortions to emergency/ saving the mothers life are put in place, doctors have been forced to wait even when they knew that an emergency was inevitable. Women have died because the doctors had to wait until the legal department was satisfied that the mothers life was in danger.
We tie the hands of doctors in many ways. There are literally millions of lines of laws and codes of ethics by which doctors are required to abide. I agree that there is the risk of edge cases where life saving medical care could be withheld. I do not consider that a good reason to make elective late term abortion legal. Instead I believe that risk can be overcome with better training.
That makes an assumption that the person is aware they are pregnant the entire time.
I didn’t know I was pregnant until I was roughly 11 weeks because I was using birth control. Except this was before the more recent shouting-from-the-rooftops news that antibiotics can render birth control pills ineffective. I’d been on antibiotics for two weeks around Christmas time and here I was in March, at my doctor, trying to figure out why I was sick when he asked me to do a pregnancy test.
I didn’t get 3 months to decide. I had to wait 2 weeks before I could get an appointment for an abortion for a pregnancy I absolutely did not want and had been doing my best to avoid by being on birth control.
I’m not the only woman with this story or a similar one. Many women simply don’t know they’re pregnant until several weeks in, especially when they are using birth control and don’t have an abundance of symptoms.
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Here’s the thing - I am not a special case or circumstance. This happens with some regularity and I’m someone who has chosen to share these intimate details with you to convey that an arbitrary date line isn’t helping anyone. At the end of the day, the discussion and decision should be between the pregnant person and their medical provider, and the pregnant person’s partner, if applicable and requested. It’s literally no one else’s business or concern.
Fetuses are not capable of sentience until ~24 weeks. There is no ethical cost to abortion before this point. Forcing them to give birth to unwanted children only serves to make both mother and child suffer. It is incredibly unethical.
Fetal person hood is a red herring anyway. Should you be forced to donate blood to keep another person alive? What about organs? Is not giving your kidney to someone murder?
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Until a fetus can live outside of the mother, then any anti-abortion legislation is objectively cruel.
The actual human that is living and 100% exists should take priority over the potential human.
When people seek an abortion after 3 months it’s almost always not by choice. And it’s almost always not done lightly.
Where do you draw the line on “health of the mother ”?
Perhaps you mean a mild cold? Or perhaps you mean that it’s likely there will be extreme complications? Or perhaps you mean they should wait until those extreme complications crop up?
Or do you mean that the mother must be literally fucking dying on the operating table? Because that’s what a lot of people mean by it.
It is impossible to ethically legislate abortion, because any law that is able to accommodate every justifiable and in fact ethical abortion is going to be too complicated and too unwieldy. It will have the same chilling effect as any blatantly restrictive law.
For one to thing, the ethics are not at all clear, especially when you take into consideration social and economic impacts of a child (or indeed, another child.) or that there is broad disagreement between religions (and indeed, the christian scriptures flatly disagree with the belief that is a human inside you- scriptures say the soul enters on the first breath- a child who has never taken that breath has no soul to worry over. Further, OT, includes directions to abort a pregnancy resulting from infidelity- and the recipe for abortion.)
Finally you begin to see the disingenuousness in these arguments when you consider that that most effective way to prevent elective abortions is to provide broad access to contraceptives- something that the same people who are apposed to abortion are equally apposed to. I can only assume the suffering is the goal.