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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US, you could if you were the next of kin making decisions about care, but only by unhooking them and not ending their life in less potentially traumatic ways. Criminalizing euthanasia is another great example of unethical law, and it is legal in many places.
After 24 weeks there is a reasonable case to be made for this, however you might be interested to know that even after that point fetuses are kept anesthetized and sedated in the womb until first breath:
As you mention, eliminating heritable diseases is also eugenics, the kind that few complain about and many people still practice by choosing not to birth children with genetic defects, selecting partners with fewer genetic risk factors, or simply choosing not to reproduce. These practices have not been invalidated and persist to this day. The eugenics that people object to is forced eugenics, which more often than not overlaps with genocide.
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.
And with that comes the responsibility of what to do if the mother’s life is in danger late in a pregnancy but not in a way exactly as defined as “allowed” in the legislation written by non-medical experts? Even medical experts can’t preemptively imagine every possible scenario and write down what should be included in the list.
Here’s something I’m sure you haven’t thought of before when you formed your opinion on which abortions should be legal.
The issue is extremely complicated to think of in terms of prohibitions.
Read about all those recent incidences where women with clear danger to their lives couldn’t receive necessary abortions because their clearly nonviable fetus had a heartbeat while they were bleeding internally.
That’s what tying the legality of abortion to the legally defined status of a fetus does, because it’s quite impossible to legally define viability in a way which accounts for every possible detail where things can go wrong.
When you leave it to doctors instead, they do the right thing for the vast majority of cases, because they actually do have morals, just like you and I.
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 think it is always medically ok for an abortion. Pregnancy is always dangerous, and is always harmful to the mother. If they decide to terminate at any point, that should be ok. No mother takes this decision lightly