I’ve gotten my 3rd email from FFL in the series “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” and it’s almost too depressing to blog it. As in prior installments, I’m still waiting for FFL to get around to what should be the number one priority of a “feminist” organization that is anti-abortion, which is reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies in the first place by advocating for free contraception and plenty of sex education. As you can imagine, the 3rd version is more dithering and avoiding this issue. Instead, they want to talk about the question: What about “the life of the motherâ€??
Why the scare quotes around “the life of the mother”? Good question. My theory is, after reading this horrible email, that they don’t think of pregnant women as having “lives”. They don’t want to screw up the precious word “life”, which is code for Sperm Magic, by mucking it up by insinuating that the incubating devices for the children of men have anything resembling “life”.
Since we are both pro-woman and pro-life, we refuse to choose between women and children.
So if you’re going to die, too bad. FFL refuses to choose. Luckily, I’m here to remind you that currently it’s not their fucking choice to make. It’s still yours.
Since they can’t just write women off completely (stupid “feminist” in the name), they do address the actual issue. Their answer to the question of what about the life of the mother is the same as Bill O’Reilly’s: Pregnancy isn’t dangerous and dead women tell no tales. Also, while they’re no doctors, they know better than your doctor. He may tell you you’re going to die, but FFL knows better:
Thankfully, medical advancements continue to save more lives. Situations in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother are extremely rare. Late-term abortions are never medically necessary. Emergency C-sections are often the medically appropriate response to save both mother and child. Viability at this stage of the child’s development is generally very good, especially with advances in neonatal care. Babies who weigh just under a pound are surviving!
As for first-trimester scenarios, most are to save the mother from ectopic (“out of place�) pregnancies, which typically occur in the Fallopian tube. Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions. Since the child has no chance of survival, and the mother can survive if the pregnancy is ended, we must do what we can to save her. To let both die would not be pro-life. At this time uterine transplants to re-implant the baby into the womb are not possible.
I’ve got no answer on why they didn’t just lie ectopic pregnancies away or pretend they have “uterine transplants” while they’re lying about other things like how super-safe C-sections are and the non-existence of pre-eclampsia.
Now that there’s a chance of Roe getting overturned, the anti-choicers are showing their true colors more and more all the time. Lying is just a way of life for them, I suppose. This is how low they’ll sink, feeding women medical disinformation that, if women fall for it, could actually kill them one day. “Pro-life” my ass.
Since this one is a depressing vat of irresponsible and dangerous lies, I’m going to just provide you with an antidote of link-farming:
Adele M. Stan at The American Prospect is also smoking out FFL as the anti-feminist organization it is.
Tbogg is hashing it out with the Casters of Shame, who’ve called him “intolerant” because he correctly noted that they’re liars.
From Feministing, an article about the genuinely pro-woman atmosphere at the profiled abortion clinic.
44 Responses to “Shorter Feminists For Life: Bill O’Reilly is your new doctor!”
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Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
And we all know that FFL’s policies on abortion are driven by scientific consensus. Snerk.
What they’re advocating is killing the fetus to save the mother. But that’s okay because, you know, you just can’t score PR points if you insist that women with ectopic pregnancies can’t terminate until their Fallopian tubes actually rupture.
Late-term abortions are never medically necessary
I was under the impression that they were only performed when medically necessary, and usually when the fetus is dead, dying, or so damaged that it will die within a few days of birth. But maybe these ‘aren’t medically classified as abortions’ either?
Killing a viable premie isn’t something that any obgyn is going to do.
One of the things I’ve noticed that seems to be missing from the whole discussion of abortion is women being seen, treated and talked about as sentient human beings.
When the abortion issue is discussed most of the time it’s down to keeping her alive. I think a lot of people fall into this because it’s expected that all women should be absolutely delighted and breathless to put everyone else before them because there is an expectation that she is suicidal and/or expendable.
Sentient human beings make decisions, hard and easy decisions, on how best to live their lives. It’s not always pretty, sexy, pleasant and dainty. It certainly does not always weave into the fairy tale beliefs many seem to believe in about life.
O’Reilly is such a joke. He’s pretty damn comfy and cozy with others going through “heroic suffering and sacrifices for others” because he wants them to, but always seem to be on the outside looking in. How totally convient for him.
“Late-term abortions are never medically necessary.”
As long as the pro-lifers control the definitions of “medically necessary”, anyway.
One reason for a late-term abortion is that the mother is discovered to be carrying a baby with a medical condition incompatible with life, and chooses to deliver the baby as early as possible. This would be made illegal under many proposed laws.
This article neatly glides over conditions like HELLP, a life-threatening variant of eclampsia. In the easy cases (ha!), physicians immediately deliver a viable baby ahead of term and everybody wins. When HELLP strikes near or before viability, life isn’t easy. You have to deliver the baby before it can survive or watch the mother die; no third option. Pro-lifers try to talk that one out of existence. One of the more famous infertility bloggers was struck with HELLP and had to abort a desperately-wanted baby. The pro-life trolls came out of hiding and assured her — against all medical evidence, which she had posted as she came to her agonizing choice — that the baby’s life could have been saved. It didn’t matter what the evidence said. No, the baby’s life *could* have been saved, because… er, it could.
Approximately 2% of women with HELLP syndrome and 8% of their babies die as a result of HELLP. But they don’t exist, apparently.
Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
Whaaaat? These people won’t even take a position on regular contraception, let alone Plan B, and they’re happy to rely on medical classifications to argue that killing fetusbabies is just fine if the fetusbaby doesn’t happen to be inside a womb? WTF?
Isn’t there an elephant in the room here that no one’s mentioning? Homicide is one of the leading causes of death during and immediately after pregnancy. So if you’re going to talk about the life of the pregnant woman being in danger, it’s not just medical dangers you have to talk about. Oh, wait, I’m sure FFL is a leader in the funding of shelters for abused women and in funding training and education so that women don’t have to stay in potentially murderous relationships while pregnant. What, you say they’re not?
(Meanwhile, “viable preemie” isn’t really a meaningful term unless you can specify the kind of hospital care you have available, and even then “viable” doesn’t mean “is actually going to survive” or “might have more awareness than your average fish”. There’s a period from somewhere around 23 weeks where mortality slowly drops from 99.99% to 10% or so at 30 weeks, but all of that is with heroic ronud-the-clock nursing care and really terrifying medical interventions. I was also under the impression that a fair number of late-term abortions were done for women who had spent the first couple of trimesters trying to get earlier-term abortions and being unable to do so.)
I’ve been waiting for this since I got the piece of drivel in my e-mail a few days ago. I’m still astonished at how they’ve managed to convince themselves they know more about saving lives than all the doctors who perform late term abortions. It shouldn’t, though, seeing as they also know more about cancer than all the cancer research groups and scientists who pass scientific muster combined.
That whole “abortions aren’t used on ectopic pregnancies” thing is pretty old meme, though. Tsk, tsk. Maybe if we just start redefining what abortion is, and classify abortion surgery as “not abortion,” they’ll leave us all to it.
Feminists for Life:
Hypocrites. Survive? None of us survive. We all die in the end. Just because the preborn is in your tube instead of your uterus doesn’t mean its life is worthless does it FFL?
I thought life began at conception, not survival until childbirth. Isn’t that the argument given against birth control that might stop implantation? Kill the egg after fertilization and you’ve killed one of god’s children. Hypocrites. So if someone only has a few weeks to live, it is OK to kill them?
Ah, the smell of hypocrisy in the evening. So, if a fetus that has Tay Sachs, and thus is doomed to die a horrible death shortly after birth, has taken up residence in a woman with a lymphoma who will die if not treated, then it is OK to abort the fetus and treat the woman? Yes or no FFL?
However rare they think fatalities from pregnancy are (in the last 6 years about 3,000 Americans here were killed by terrorists, in that time almost an equal number of women have died as a complication of pregnancy) the question is when do they think murdering a fertilized egg is OK?
Once you start making exceptions then it becomes an issue of who gets to decide when to abort, not if it is immoral per se.
And just because doctors don’t call it abortion, doesn’t mean it doesn’t kill a fertilized egg. Doctors call miscarriages spontaneous abortions. I dare them to start using our terminology. Because the vast majority of sexually active women will have an abortion at some point. Is it OK to kill a fertilized egg or not?
A simple question for the FFL, Amanda: Does a fertilized egg in the Fallopian tube have a soul or not?
Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
Actually, they are. Have these people no access to ob/gyn textbooks?
I think they have long ago decided to rewrite the ob/gyn books, despite knowing nothing about the field. It’s like how they worry about all these mysterious “health risks” involved with contraception (uh, hello, pregnancy = much more dangerous than the pill, and you’re A-OK with women being forced to carry unwanted and unintended pregnancies). Or how they dig up old and inaccurate studies on links to abortion and breast cancer and try to scare the hell out of any woman contemplating having an abortion. Conveniently not looking up more recent studies, or even the National Cancer Institute’s science-based conclusions (that is: no such link in any respected studies). And I agree with all the previous posts about late term abortions — the FFL is willfully blind.
I have a very pro-life friend who got upset with me for criticizing the FFL. I repeatedly argued that if the FFL actually cared about women’s health, they’d be all over sex ed and contraception. That they’d want to prevent the terrible situation of being pregnant against one’s will in the first place, not just try to change women’s opinions on that situation after the fact. She seemed to have a mental block — could not understand why the FFL needed to take a stance, and argued that it was “outside of their domain” (huh?!). I took this as indicative of the story-telling that pro-life women must do in order to try to reconcile the “feminists” claim with “for life.”
speaking of “life of the mother”
amanda, i am gonna blog about the following tonight but i can’t really think of anything to say other than “sometimes the news makes me want to die”, so if you have any thoughts i’d be happy to read them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6072092.stm nicaragua considering removing the “life of the mother” exception on its abortion ban
i’ve been reading more about it and i’m feeling so sick.
Paul- As far as I know, and I may be wrong so someone can feel free to correct me, late term abortions are not legal unless for medical reasons so I would doubt that any substantial number of them are performed because of lack of early access. For example, I live in a fairly liberal state with an A grade from NARAL, and abortion for reasons other than the life or health of the mother are illegal after 24 weeks. I do know a great deal of second trimester abortions are because of lack of access during the first trimester, but when we get to the realm of third trimester abortions, they are almost exclusively done because the fetus has no, or next to no chance of survival or the life and or health of the mother is at stake.
Have any of those women ever *had* an emergency C-Section? I have. At age 41. Not something I would recommend unless there is absolutely no other option.
Feminists for Life should change their name to Feminists till Birth. After that, you’re on your own.
Have any of those women ever *had* an emergency C-Section? I have
Me too. At 35, not 41, but still. Not fun and I am not at all thrilled with the peritoneal scar. But since the labor was killing me and the fetus, it beat the alternative. We might both easily have died if we had had less competent medical care. For example, if my ob, who includes abortion in his practice, had been shot by “pro-life” fanatics, as they periodically threaten to do.
Late-term abortions are never medically necessary.
How can you lie like that without your fingers shriveling up? I must know.
She seemed to have a mental block — could not understand why the FFL needed to take a stance, and argued that it was “outside of their domain� (huh?!)
This is a bit like saying “I am utterly opposed to children drowning, but the issue of whether children should be taught to swim is outside of my domain.”
What, exactly, is “feminist” about these people?
Bitter Scribe: It’s on their letterhead. That makes it official.
Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
From Williams 21st ed p888, under the heading “NATURAL HISTORY OF TUBAL PREGNANCY”:
TUBAL ABORTION. The frequency of tubal abortion depends in part upon the implantation site. Tubal abortion is common in ampullary tubal pregnancy, whereas rupture is the usual outcome with isthmic pregnancy.
An interesting aside: The majority of abdominal ectopics are the result of a tubal abortion into the peritoneal cavity.
Regarding the (?)medical classification of surgeries for ectopic. The definition of abortion is the termination of pregnancy; it’s independent of the location of the pregnancy (p856). Surgeries for ectopics remove the pregnancy (p894). They are, by definition, abortions. Now, the classification of ectopic surgeries has nothing to do with the pregnancy. It has to do with the implantation site. For example, tubal surgery can be conservative–tube is salvaged (salpingostomy=small incision in the tube, POCs extrude, incision left open; salpingotomy=same, except incision is sutured), or radical–tube is removed (salpingectomy).
Since the child has no chance of survival, and the mother can survive if the pregnancy is ended, we must do what we can to save her.
That’s incorrect. For example, an extensive review of abdominal pregnancies since 1809 found that survival of infants born after 30 weeks was 63%. Moreover, fetal malformations and deformations were only 20%. The main problem with abdominal pregnancies isn’t the pregnancy survivability, it’s the maternal one. Expectant management carries a risk of sudden, life-threatening, intraabdominal bleeding. Because of this risk, termination of pregnancy [aka abortion] is generally indicated when abdominal pregnancy is diagnosed.(p900)
Last, but not least, we have this:
At this time uterine transplants to re-implant the baby into the womb are not possible.
Nor will these transplants (and I use the term loosely) ever be possible, for the simple, yet stubbornly ignored fact, that “the baby” doesn’t implant anywhere. It’s the, you know, placenta that penetrates and invades the implantation site.
Bottom line: The FFL people can’t be bothered to open a book and look up basic facts. I think that says it all. [Why lying is a way of life for these people remains a mystery.]
Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
Those commenting on the cluelessness of this statement are missing something significant. FFL is saying that SURGERIES for etopic pregnancies are not abortions. However, this implies that their stance is that methotrexate (which is far more likely to save the woman’s fallopian tube) is still an abortion and thus immoral.
I believe (though I may be incorrect) that this is the stance of the Catholic Church. Surgery to remove the tubal pregnancy is acceptable, because the purpose of the surgery is to save the life of the mother, and the death of the fetus is a side effect rather than the purpose of the surgery. Methotrexate use, on the other hand, is still forbidden, because its purpose is to kill the fetus. (It’s a pretty razor-thin distinction, and I am not explaining it particularly well.)
Anyway, to my mind, this is kind of like saying that women with HELLP can have a c-section to deliver their non-viable baby. Yes, you can terminate the pregnancy, but you can’t have something we think of as an “abortion” even though (a) it would be significantly easier on you physically and (b) the end result is exactly the same.
One of the things I’ve noticed that seems to be missing from the whole discussion of abortion is women being seen, treated and talked about as sentient human beings.
Of course they avoid that– their whole “pro-woman” schtick is roughly analogous to MRAs’ “I love women, but…” in that they are only supportive of women who are lesser beings in some way. Victims, or fools, or floating-womb hysterics, or servants, or placid gestators, and so on are all great and worthy of their
protectionsupport. Women as actual people… eh, not so much. Too complicated and unpredictable and challenging, and we all know how uncomfortable that makes those who judge women.And regarding late-term abortions– not only are they often medically necessary, they’re also frequently medically desirable, like it or not. There’s probably some percentage of women whose pregnancies are doomed, but who could theoreticaly slog through another couple of months waiting for the inevitable, but why?- well, because suffering is so damned appealing– inspiring, even– when women experience it. Makes them even better woman-people, you see. The fact that shortening a nonviable pregnancy by even a matter of weeks is possibly easier on a woman’s body and almost certainly easier on her mental & emotional state– not to mention possibly allowing her to try again sooner– is hardly worth considering for these FFL types, because for them women are (or should be) merely reactors bound by the old feminine stereotypes, not actors who make (and willingly bear the burdens of) tough decisions.
Or, shorter version: women who think of themselves as people first are so… unwomanly.
This just makes me so angry. Every single anti-choice group is now going extreme (aka revealing their true colors). Health and life exceptions? That’s sooo last year. Fuck those women, save the baybeeeez.
Why can’t we hold up these boldfaced lies to the “abortion moderates”? Surely this is finally proof that these groups just plain hate women and want to see their uteruses under lock and key?
Also, I posted this on another thread but I doubt anyone read it:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061009fa_fact
If anyone tells you that gestation is easy.
Ema: Bottom line: The FFL people can’t be bothered to open a book and look up basic facts. I think that says it all. [Why lying is a way of life for these people remains a mystery.]
Because the truth doesn’t serve them and heaven forbid that they should serve the truth.
Tubal removal isn’t abortion? Um, misscarriage is called Spontaneous Abortion.
Millions of them happen every year. As many as 1/3 to 1/2 of ‘pregnancies’ end in Spontaneous Abortion. Whether you want to call it luteal phase defect, hand of god, or mother nature’s way of sorting out unviable fertilizations, the fact remains that it is medically classified as Spontaneous Abortion.
Not even ElSalvador can outlaw that, although they seem to be trying.
One more thing on the terminology front: It isn’t a fetus for many weeks. Most spontaneous and induced abortions (and tubal abortions) are, indeed, an embryo. Chicken egg territory. Maybe we all should get medically honest here.
Someone please point them to A Little Pregnant, STAT!
Since the child has no chance of survival, and the mother can survive if the pregnancy is ended, we must do what we can to save her.
All else aside — and “all else” is a massive pile to move, for sure — I rilly rilly love the sudden change from the de haut en bas passive voice here to the “we must.” What you mean “we”? How many of these presumptuous lackeys has ever lifted a scalpel, calculated a dose, washed a patient’s butt, or done a side-to-side bed change? What “we” do about actual medical care seems to consist of telling lies, giving vague orders, and splitting hairs with a hatchet. Unfortunately the hairs they split are still on someone else’s head.
Women as actual people…
We’re not people. We’re peoplettes.
I love it when pro-lifers do this.
“Abortion is NEVER medically necessary!! If it is, then it’s NOT AN ABORTION! DUH!”
I’d like to know what an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy is “medically classified as,” if not as an abortion of a pregnancy? A day at the spa? A sweet potato pie? A broken leg?
A not insignifcant issue associated with the special risk to a pregnant woman’s life when she has HELLP syndrome is that she has severely reduced circulating platelets. The syndrome is partially characterized by this laboratory finding (H = hemolysis of corpuscles, EL = elevated liver enzymes as a consequence of the lysed cells jamming in the liver risking rupture and LP = low platelets). Under these conditions many women are at severely elevated risks of hemorrage and are very poor candidates for emergency abdominal surgery. Shorter version: you don’t want to cut them if you don’t have to. I’m directly familiar with this issue being the recipient of 6 litres of blood while sick with HELLP, not to mention additional treatment with platelet and fresh frozen plasma to supplement my severely depleted soluble clotting factors. It is ironic, but the absence of platelets caused by the syndrome can trigger a further complication where the body has tried so hard to clot that all the other factors involved run out and the whole thing becomes a giant clusterf**k!
However, while HELLP is an excellent example of how pregnancy can kill you; other aspects of pregnancy-induced hypertension can wipe you out quite speedily. Eclampsia, when a woman seizes, can lead to a failure to protect the airway, leading to immediate suffocation with death or severe brain damage. Severely elevated blood pressures in the brain can cause stroke. Both are situations where death can come between heartbeats.
These folk need to quit with their pretense that it’s possible for every pregnancy-related emergency can have a positive outcome. It’s a dangerous lie that’s going to kill someone…… someone female.
“Abortion is NEVER medically necessary!! If it is, then it’s NOT AN ABORTION! DUH!�
This actually does make sense to them. In their sad little minds, there are hordes of women crushing their babies’ skulls on their way to their pedicures every weekend. They don’t want to mix up that perfectly real, not at all imaginary phenomenon with something like a woman aborting a pregnancy that’s actually killing her. Or the abortions that they and their friends have gotten.
Oh, even when you end a pregnancy by their rules, they’ll tell you it’s an abortion. I ended my pregnancy at 27weeks via early induction due to health risks to myself and the fact my son couldn’t survive after birth because of a fatal birth defect. No dismemberment, no skull crushing, no in uterine death, nothing that they like to wave around. Yet, a good majority of “pro-life” people I met online told me that I was killing my baby and how I was choosing death. The fact that I was barely a functioning human being while carrying a child I knew was going to die (which I did for 6 weeks) was completey unimportant. What was important was the fact that he could’ve lived in my uterus for another three months, and I was a horrible baby killer for not giving it to him.
Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.
Medically there is no such thing as ‘partial birth abortion” either. So? That didn’t stop the so-called pro-lifers from endangering the health of women by pushing through a ban on procedures they’ve decided to call “partial birth abortions” even though the allowed procedures are actually more grizzly!
So whether or not the medical community calls surgery for ectopic pregnancy an abortion, it won’t stop so-called pro-life legislatures from trying to outlaw such procedures as part of abortion bans … it’s happened in other countries, after all.
As to the methetrexate vs. surgery option, I cannot quote any specific Rabbinical rulings, but it strikes me that, unless there would be a medical reason to prefer surgery, methotrexate would be considered preferable in Jewish moral law as it would be less damaging to the long term health of the woman. Of course, the Catholic Church would declare someone a saint for giving up her life rather than having an abortion, whereas Judaism would consider such a choice to be immoral, if forgivable.
This is the problem with legislating such narrow morality: one person’s moral choice is another person’s grave, if understandable and hence forgivable, sin.
Most spontaneous and induced abortions (and tubal abortions) are, indeed, an embryo. Chicken egg territory. Maybe we all should get medically honest here. - Ms. Kate
Good point. But I bet these people believe in homonculi: or rather they would if they didn’t hear that word and think immediately of teh hot gay sex and thus explode in a rage of envy under the pretense of moral outrage.
As to the general issue of miscarriage: if embryos (or even just fetuses) are considered human beings from a legal point of view, doesn’t that mean that miscarriages should be investigated to the degree to which any other human death is to be investigated? Either pro-lifers who consider fetuses human want the police terrihootin’ around whenever a woman miscarries a fetus, or they would consider it ok if one person accidently kills another and yet no investigation occured (actually they may very well consider it so ok — many of these people I’m sure would be happy, e.g., to absolve a corporation of responsibility for any wrongful death consequential to that corporations bad actions … maybe the right is more consistent than we give ‘em credit for?). And if they do not consider fetuses to be human, under what authority can the state regulate what a woman does to her body: except to protect her from malpractice, fraud, etc.?
Actually, even if the fetus/embryo is human: under what authority can the state stop an abortion? Certainly if you believe (as some of these righty-tighties do) that you have the right to shoot dead people inside your house ‘cause they’re stealin’ stuff and you don’t know, they might also be there to kill you … you have a right to terminate a pregnancy — ‘cause the fetus/embryo is stealing your bodily resources (and is in your own body) and the pregancy could possibly go bad and kill you …
DAS- when someone made the analogy of abortion being like self-defense against assaulted, some dude wrote “how could you compare a woman’s own widdle baby with a stranger assaulting her! that’s awful! hence it’s a bad analogy, the end.”
that’s the level of response you get when you suggest that maybe not everybody loves their unborn-little-ones quite as much as pro-lifers claim to.
(reading more from the same webpage I linked to before) How would the anti-abortion extremists consider teratomas? IIRC, some of these anti-abortion laws could be construed to restrict removal of fetus in fetu.
If ya ask me, the “pro-life” position is just bizarre …
BTW — roula, I’m aware of that response, but as Mr. Spock would say, the pro-lifers, in responding in such a way, are “highly illogical”.
Does the South Dakota abortion ban agree with that?
omg DAS- i just read up on fetusis-fetu, that’s fucking nuts. i always thought the crazy aunt in “my big fat greek wedding” was just crazy! hahaha. i recommend skimming this article to everyone: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/105/6/1335
in a way (i guess this sounds callous but) it’s too bad these things are never alive by the time they’re discovered. i would LOVE to know what pro-lifers would have to say about a fetus growing in a man’s scrotum (which apparently is one of the recorded non-abdominal instances in the literature).
afk. fetus-in-fetu
roula, from what I’ve heard, it’s not uncommon (for something as uncommon as a teratoma) to have teratomas in the testicles or the scrotum.
That’s not surprising, considering it’s these types of people who go all “how could you leave/file for divorce against/call the police on (insert name of person here) for domestic abuse? He’s such a nice guy and you’re comparing him with some kind of monster” whenever women attempt to leave abusive relationships.
Its important to realize that pro-lifers will often have unique or misleading definitions for pretty much *all* terms in the debate. For example, when they say “Situations in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother are extremely rare. Late-term abortions are never medically necessary. Emergency C-sections are often the medically appropriate response to save both mother and child” they are more or less correct if by “late-term” they meant the third trimester . . . and this is borne out by the fact that there are only a few hundred 3d trimester abortions each year. Change “never” to “seldom” and there is nothing wrong with what they are saying. Of course, if they were only talking about 3d trimester abortions, they really don’t have a point . . . since there just aren’t a whole bunch of 3d trimester abortions to begin with.
They are playing a shell game, as can be seen by their next lines “Viability at this stage of the child’s development is generally very good, especially with advances in neonatal care. Babies who weigh just under a pound are surviving!” They are clearly talking about embryos early on in the second trimester, not late-term abortions. And when they say “Babies . . . are surviving” they don’t mention important things like the percentage of babies who survive, the amout of pain they go through, or the likelihood that those babies will live normal lives if they survive.
Sure, you can have a c-section to remove a 24 week old fetus, but the odds of it surviving without disability are slim. Some might, but chances are it won’t. In order for it to have any possibility at all of survival, it needs to have invasive medical procedures done. It will certainly undergo a lot of pain. Parents are generally allowed to make medical decisions for their children, and it is a legitimate decision for a parent to say “it is extremely likely that this treatment will not save my childs life. It will cause them to suffer prolonged pain. Let’s let nature take its course.” So, c-section to remove 24 week old fetus, no invasive medical treatment, end result? Same as an abortion except the fetus suffers more pain. Is that really a better solution?
There is no inconsistancy with supporting reproductive rights under Roe v Wade and supporting a more thorough regulation of the extremely few 3rd trimester abortions that occur each year. In those cases, the fetus *does* generally have a high liklihood of survival if delivered via induced labor or c-section. Their rights as a potential person do deserve some consideration in the 3rd trimester. At the same time, they don’t trump the rights of the mother’s health. Having a non-ideological board to review doctors who perform 3d trimester abortions *after the fact*, to make sure that they used proper medical judgement, would in theory be fine and would not deny women access to medical care.
The problem is, pro-lifers don’t care about that. Preventing mothers from getting 3rd trimester abortions on demand is a non-issue because women simply don’t wake up in the 7th month of pregnancy and decide to terminate it for the hell of it. They are just trying to throw up roadblocks to delay women from getting abortions, and then drag the time of “no-abortion” down so low that they overlap. Its a shell game. Force women to wait to decide whether they want to have an abortion, and then tell them “time’s up”.
Yup, and interestingly enough, third trimester abortion statistics INCLUDE abortions where the fetus is already dead. It’s still classified as an abortion even if the woman’s carrying a corpse, and therefore the pregnancy could never lead to a successful outcome in the form of a live birth. Abortions in such cases are done because of the risks to the woman’s health and future fertility of having a bunch of necrotizing tissue in her uterus potentially causing serious infections and other problems. But somehow even if the ‘widdle baybee’ is already dead, the woman’s still a baby-killing bitch because she didn’t want to put herself through that kind of health risk, or if she just wanted it over with as soon as possible now that she knew her fetus had died.
Were I in a situation like that, abortion would seem like a very sensible option. You minimize the chance of your health and your fertility being damaged, and you can try to get pregnant again sooner. Because virtually all third trimester abortions are performed on WANTED PREGNANCIES where the woman would’ve very much liked to carry to term and produce a live newborn. But somehow the pain these parents are suffering is irrelevant.
It’s my impression that a fetus-in-fetu can be technically alive when removed, except that there’s no brain development and no viable internal setup. The show they did on the subject on the Gross Stuff Medical Network showed a baby who was diagnosed, I believe, prenatally, allowing early removal, and one of the doctors mentioned that the foot was moving.
it’s too bad these things are never alive by the time they’re discovered
There was a good horror story called “Brutus”, where the plot twist is that the mysterious goings on were caused by a fetu which survived and woke up one day.