This is an EXTREMELY different statement from your previous claim that third trimester abortion was illegal under any circumstances in Scandinavia. Although I think that one can make a reasonable theoretical ethical case for abortion on demand up until the second stage of labor, based on either the unlikelihood of the fetus having any meaningful awareness or the lack of precedent for demanding that one person risk his or her health to save another in any other cirumstance (using the assumption that the fetus is a person with human rights)*, in practical terms I don’t see any problem with limiting third trimester abortion to cases of fetal non-viablity or risk to the mother’s life or health, as long as 1. there are no barriers, legal or de facto, to first trimester abortion and 2. the health and viability exceptions remain in place. In short, the Scandinavian laws sound fine to me. I particularly like the Danish one, with its requirement that women who have abortions be told about the availability of government help if she decides to have the baby instead. Seems like a likely way to cut down on the poverty-desperation abortion rate.

*Though, in fact, I would argue that, in the absence of barriers to abortion in the first and second trimester (exhorbitant cost, few or no clinics, illegality, etc), not having an abortion for 6 months is an implicit statement that the pregnant woman intends to bring the pregnancy to term and in the absence of new information (ie newly discovered problem with the fetus or the woman’s health) then a third trimester abortion violates her implicit contract with the fetus and is therefore unethical. But, as I said, this is pretty much a theoretical question, since women who would have a third trimester abortion when they were healthy, had a healthy fetus, and had not been forced or coerced into continuing the pregnancy thusfar must be extremely rare to non-existent.

In liberal european countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark there are no third trimester abortion.

The reason is quite obvious. Scandinavian girls don’t require late abortions to fit in their prom dresses, since proms are not a common tradition here.

Y’know, I used to wonder where the pro-lifers got all that stuff about the multi-million-dollar abortion industry, but now it’s starting to make sense.

It’s always projection with the wingers, isn’t it?

I think there’s a pretty decent divide between the womb-envy of men who have a very positive view of pregnancy and would love to experience that particular sort of physical closeness with their children and the womb-envy of men who resent needing women to have offspring of their very own and view them as some sort of interfering, competitive agent, without whom they’d have their children’s undivided attention, love, and worship. Most guys with the former would like to be able to carry children themselves. Most guys with the latter would be just fine with an artificial fetus-incubator seeded with a cloned embryo, tucked away in their closet, and set on a nine-month timer.

I used to have a neighbor who for some reason assumed I was a con-job (maybe because I was staying with my con-job father at the time, who knows?), and this neighbor happened to be an adoption lawyer, or at least handled a lot of adoption cases.

He instructed me to go to law school and “get into the adoption arena” because of the under-the-table and unreported payments made between all the parties available in an adoption (he was working on his third or fourth summer property if I recall correctly). He said “all you have to do Laura is place your business card at some local churches who then guilt some local pregnant teenagers into having the kid and giving it away”. He said he kicked back some of the illegal payments by these desperate-to-adopt parents (some are willing to pay in the hundreds of thousands, though this is not what the “books” will say) to these churches in return for their “help” in bringing him some cheap baby-production facilities (iow, girls), in the form of “donations” to these corrupt churches.

It became obvious to me at that point that this “pro-life” movement is in on this with the adoption agencies (just look at who runs most adoption agencies–right-wing Christians–big $$$) and that their “sanctity of life” bullshit is all about money, as usual. Seriously, like anyone would believe the US was “for life” in any way–give me a break!

I then told my friendly advice-giving neighbor that I would be sure to tell everyone how this all works at my next volunteer shift at Planned Parenthood, and his head just about popped off. Seriously, I wish it had–one less mysogynist banking on the wombs of young girls under the guise of so-called “morals”.

The only “morals” these assholes care about are the ones that fit into their wallets.

When a pregnancy becomes a serious threat to a womans life in the second or third trimester in Scandinavia, shes got the right to terminate it, thats true, but the doctors goal is always to save both her and the unborns life, even if the womans life of course is rated higher. Its not excatly an abortion with other words. Its true that you can have a later abortion if the fetus is nonviable and very disabled.
But that almost never happens.
The fetal dianostic and ultra scans are very safe, taxfounded and done early in the second trimester.

Btw: Over 50% of all abortions here are done with RU-486 or any other abortion pill.Women can choose between medical and surgical abortion in the first 9 weeks and most of them prefer the pill.

Yep, by my thesis Neanderthals would indeed be geniuses compared to the self-blinded victims of a rigid and malicious ideology.

And let’s not slander the “cave men;” as far as we can tell the ones in Lascaux and places like that may or may not have been men, but men or women they were basically artists. But as with James Kirk and space, they only worked in caves–though the analogy breaks down when we realize those particular folks weren’t fromIowa but rather Southern France…sigh, how can I compete for nerd points with entire threads devoted to Spiderman when I can’t even work in a good Trek analogy in a borning disjointed treatise on speculative anthropology/grand social history narrative?

Dunc, I think the main reason anthropologists don’t report the sort of intergender violence we are used to is that people generally cooperate, and specifically GH people are known to intelligently enforce social norms of cooperation on individuals who stray too far in the direction of personal greed/aggrandizement. By analogy, I suppose a GH man who gets arrogant and violent with physically weaker people like wife or children gets criticized, shamed, ultimately shunned if he won’t change his ways. We get patriarchy if and only if a bunch of men agree not to restrain each other from abusing “their” women at the behest of the latter or the women collectively. It would be dysfunctional for GH people to do that since their best bet for survival is mutual trust.

I don’t think, for the reasons I listed above, that we drifted directly from GH conditions into militarism and patriarchy. Rather, I suppose the group norms against violence and engrossment individuals were extended for some time, even when it became a social strain, allowing a large surplus to be developed, before some socially mutant group discarded those norms and went over to plunder. That is, societies got into something like the supersaturated state a solution of salt or the like can get into, where there is more than enough to crystallize out, but it doesn’t until there is a shock. The shock is not really the “cause” of the sudden crystalization of a huge chunck of solid salt in such a collapsed metastable state, and I suppose the transition to patriarchy was a kind of chain reaction across societies that could have started for any goofy reason at all–who knows, maybe a cult of womb envy after all. But what enabled such a basically wasteful mode of living to prevail would have been that technologically, people knew how to make surpluses to waste already, and to do that I think that for some time they would have had to solve the basic problems of scarcity and bottlenecks in processes by other means than violence, or the higher-tech way of living would not have recommended itself. I suppose if GH populations faced severe Malthusian pressure, they might have been forced gradually into agriculture and increasing social thuggery, but this commonsense theory has not been borne out by evidence. Perhaps if we had not freely chosen to develop agriculture and other productive sedentary technologies, these would have been forced on us eventually by necessity, but in fact it seems that people chose to develop the arts of civilization without such guns to their heads.

Once we went over to higher-intensity modes of production like that, of course, population rose, and then we were trapped. This too may have been background for the transition to patriarchy.

And, for all that, every once in a while you could do something really incredible with it, but you also expect it to cause you plenty of trouble–and possibly kill you in a spectacular fashion–until you finally retire it.