Do people revert to being blobs when they go to sleep, become comatose, disabled, or otherwise under the care of another person? The fetus/baby is guaranteed to leave the mother at some point, and evicting it prematurely without a very good reason or regard for its safety would end its life. That is murder. Your argument would justify cutting people off from disability benefits.
Your claim is wrong. Parents and guardians are forced to use their bodies to provide for children after they’re born. They may not be inside the mother any longer, but if the child is harmed or killed, they’re liable for child abuse, manslaughter, murder, etc.
The fetus has bodily autonomy as well. The woman’s body is made to accommodate the fetus, while no human being is made to accommodate organ harvesting. It is, by definition, a human organism, and thus a human being. A fetus is not a “thing.”
People are gambling on it every day. There have been hundreds of abortions in Missouri alone since Dobbs. The threat is not real because it isn’t in the books. If it was, a doctor would have been prosecuted by now. If Republican DAs were so thirsty for a legal victory that they were willing to disregard a doctor’s opinion that there was an emergency, one of these doctors would have been prosecuted by now.
So why do you believe murder is wrong?
The doctors stated that if she didn’t receive immediate treatment, she was at risk of death. Similarly, if someone was stabbed and at risk of death, they would receive treatment. She should have received treatment.
If every doctor decided that every pregnancy was a severe, immediate enough risk to warrant an immediate abortion, those people should be prosecuted. That would be a grave medical error. This has not happened, and for the sake of society, I hope doctors do not come to that conclusion.
Your entire argument is founded on paranoid conjecture.
She was admitted to the hospital ER, kept overnight, and released without treatment. She was at risk of severe injury or death if she didn’t receive appropriate treatment. Per the HHS secretary, “While many state laws have recently changed, it’s important to know that the federal EMTALA requirements have not changed, and continue to require that healthcare professionals offer treatment, including abortion care, that the provider reasonably determines is necessary to stabilize the patient’s emergency medical condition.” Therefore, the hospitals are liable for not providing essential care.
“Life-threatening” is somewhat subjective, and doctors can be charged for providing non-emergency abortions. However, no doctors have been charged post-Dobbs with providing any abortions at all, therefore there is no meaningful risk of prosecution in emergency cases. If I was a doctor in such a situation, I wouldn’t hesitate to provide the necessary care if I believed there was an emergency.
Nobody has been charged in post-Dobbs Texas for providing emergency abortions, or any at all. The law is working as intended.
The medical error is in believing that the law restricts doctors from performing life-and-limb-saving procedures. That leads to negligence, as in this case.
The laws on abortion say you can do them in an emergency, though. You’re arguing something about them that is literally untrue. You are also imagining a legal threat that doesn’t exist, because the law is written the way it is. Your wild speculation is doing you no favors. No doctors have been charged, No post-Dobbs ban state bans emergency abortions. Now, why do you believe murder is wrong?
If someone was stabbed and at immediate risk of bleeding to death, by your logic, immediate treatment would be “preventative care” and therefore not necessary. There’s a league of difference between taking a pill to stave off a death that will happen within a few years, and receiving physical intervention to stave off a death that will happen in a matter of days.
“It’s irrelevant because it is” is just an assertion with no evidence to back it up. You’ve yet to provide evidence or argumentation to counter what I’ve provided. But if you don’t want me explaining what you believe, please tell me: why is murder wrong? If you want to complain about bad faith debate, then why will you not provide evidence (that we haven’t already discussed and disproved) to back up your claims?
Texas disagrees.
Texas abortion law protects emergency abortions. The lawsuit was about an expansion of the definition of “emergency” justified by EMTALA. From the decision, quoted from the article:
Judge Leslie Southwick said there were several “extraordinary things, it seems to me, about this guidance,” and said it seemed HHS was trying to use EMTALA to expand abortion access in Texas to include “broader categories of things, mental health or whatever else HHS would say an abortion is required for.” Tuesday’s ruling, authored by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, said the court “decline[d] to expand the scope of EMTALA.” “We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child,” Englehardt wrote. “EMTALA does not mandate medical treatments, let alone abortion care, nor does it preempt Texas law.”
Nobody is risking their livelihood by performing abortions because there is no legal risk for performing them in emergencies. How many prosecutions of emergency abortions since Dobbs - not threats of prosecution, because those have no teeth - can you find? Or any prosecutions at all? And here is my source for the hundreds of abortions figure.
Hospital management was 100% wrong in this case, but sure, let’s put that aside. Yes, 10,000 times out of 10,000, I would prematurely deliver a baby if it was necessary and I had the means to do so, or do any other procedure that wasn’t meant to explicitly kill the fetus. If it was already dead, there would be no distinction there. If I had no moral compunction with abortion in general, 10,000 times out of 10,000, I would perform an abortion if I believed it medically necessary.
What’s the difference between a “blob” and a “fully formed individual” and why is killing one acceptable while killing the other isn’t? You also missed the “mother’s body is made to accommodate the child” thing, too. That’s what the uterus is for. If there was no such thing as a uterus and the fetus was a different species, then it would be a parasite. As it is though, a fetus is no more a parasite than someone living at home with their parents.
It’s irrelevant because nobody has been prosecuted. You’re imagining a legal threat that doesn’t exist for the sake of pushing your ideology.
Case in point: you’re willfully confusing definitions to claim it’s okay to kill people. Everyone is composed of cells, therefore everyone is lumps of cells, therefore, according to the “lump of cells” logic, it is okay for parents to kill their offspring at any time. You’re dehumanizing human beings to justify killing them.
The doctor can determine what an emergency is. Nobody has been prosecuted for performing an abortion since Dobbs. The “grey area” you’re arguing for, if it exists, is irrelevant.
A fetus is the offspring of two parents. You’re confusing the definition of child as in “adolescent animal” and the definition I’m using, namely “offspring”. A fetus is an organism composed of human cells, therefore it is a human being, therefore killing it without a critical reason is murder.
The law on the books is that a doctor can legally perform emergency abortions. Nobody has been prosecuted on the claim that the abortion wasn’t an emergency, or even for performing an abortion at all.
The fetus carries its parents’ DNA, is created from their intercourse, and is descended directly from them. They may not have reached adolescence, but in terms of genetics and biology, it is still their child.
Nobody has been prosecuted for this since Dobbs. Your alleged legal threat is barely even fiction. The lawyers were wrong in this case, and those who judged it legally acceptable to provide emergency abortions in ban states are right. You are ignoring these obvious facts to hold onto the nonsensical belief that these laws are unjust.
Literally nobody has been prosecuted for doing an abortion in a ban state since Dobbs. The threat you’re asserting doesn’t exist.
It’s not a false equivalence because, in both cases, the parent is killing their child.
Nobody is forced to carry a fetus any more than they’re forced not to shoot their born children in the head.
EMTALA supercedes state law because it is federal law. This is standard legal doctrine.
Nobody has been prosecuted for performing an abortion since the Dobbs decision. Hundreds of abortions have happened in Missouri since Dobbs, and nobody has been prosecuted there.
There’s literally less legal danger in performing an emergency abortion/premature delivery in a ban state than in shoplifting $500 of merchandise in San Francisco. The doctors who have done the post-Dobbs abortions have clearly done the calculus and found this to be the case. Nobody has been or needs to be “sacrificed.”
You skipped over the “if she does not receive immediate medical treatment” part. Normal pregnancies, outside of giving birth, do not require immediate medical treatment at all times to avoid the risks outlined above. When you’re giving birth, you then receive the medical treatment you need.
Providing a legal service is no more gambling than selling food is. Doctors who refuse are clearly wrong about the risks, as evidenced by the lack of post-Dobbs prosecutions. Mothers are dying because doctors and hospitals are more interested in covering their butts than in providing healthcare.
If society decided that it was acceptable to kill people for having a slightly offensive odor, would you agree? Society used to believe slavery was okay, would you agree with them if you were in that time period? I sure wouldn’t. Fetuses are human beings, and the most sensible definition of person is “human being,” so killing them without a grave reason is murder.
No, babies who are conceived because of rape shouldn’t be aborted. That would be giving the child the death penalty for its father’s crime. You wouldn’t accept that in any other circumstance, why would it accept it here?