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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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).

Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions.

Does the South Dakota abortion ban agree with that?

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”.