Last year, Amanda Marcotte said that she doesn’t consider “Feminists For Life” and similar groups to be feminists. Cathy Young (who is pro-choice), disagreeing with Amanda, wrote:
But that doesn’t mean there should be no place at the feminist table for women who genuinely believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, no dialogue or search for compromise. Yes, even the biggest tent must have some boundaries: to expand “feminism” to include advocacy of male superiority or female submission would strip the concept of all meaning. But, last time I checked, women who held such views were in no rush to appropriate the term.
I have no problem accepting that women (or men) “who genuinely believe that abortion is the taking of a human life” can also be feminist. But at the same time, to be a feminist, one should consistently oppose policies that damage women’s well-being, autonomy, and equality. ((This is not the definition of “feminist” I’d use generally, but it’s functional for the purposes of this post.)) Otherwise, being “feminist” would be meaningless.
So, can a pro-lifer be feminist? I think so, if “pro-lifer” is defined as “one who believes that preserving fetal life is essential.” ((I’m not sure I’d use that definition generally, but it’s the one I’ll use for purposes of this post. I’m very skeptical about the motivations of the major pro-life groups and leaders, but I’m sure some individual pro-lifers are genuinely motivated by a desire to preserve fetal life.)) Let’s look at a Venn diagram:
The diagram shows two areas, labeled “Feminists believe that preserving women’s autonomy is essential” and “Pro-lifers believe that preserving fetal life is essential.” Where the two areas overlap is labeled “Feminist and pro-life.”
So a feminist pro-lifer is someone who considers both women’s autonomy and fetal life essential to preserve. So this person would be dedicated to lowering the abortion rate — but would want to do it through means that value women’s autonomy, by using non-coercive means of reducing the demand for abortion.
This doesn’t mean that they’d have to accept high abortion rates. In the real world, countries that practice such policies — Belgium and Switzerland, for instance — have incredibly low abortion rates. There is no conflict between wanting freedom for women, and preserving fetal life.
In contrast, a “feminist” pro-lifer who favors banning abortion — with all the enormous harms an abortion ban has on women’s autonomy, freedom, and equality, and despite the fact that bans don’t preserve fetal life any better than other policies do — is treating women’s autonomy as if it’s not essential at all. In my view, that person isn’t being a very good feminist.
(Similarly, someone who is entirely dedicated to preserving women’s equality, but is indifferent to preserving fetal life, isn’t being a very good pro-lifer. Not even if they say they’re pro-life.)
If people who throw women’s autonomy and equality out the window as soon as another priority comes up are feminists, that would, as Cathy says, strip the term of all meaning.
I think you CAN be feminist and pro-life. Or at least feminists may be able to view fetuses as humanb eings without denying women’s autonomy. Although the belief that a fetus deservees human rights creates and awkward and difficult to untangle conflict of interests, but there are many situations in life when two beings seen as possessing autonomy and rights have conflicting interests.
You could, for instance, belive that the fetus is a living person, but that it is using the woman’s body against her will to sustain its life, and does not have the right to do so, and the woman may remove it from her body in self defense. That the fetus is killed prior to removal generally could be construed as a mercy killing, since it will inevitably die n a more drawn out fashion if removed while alive.
Gruesome, yes. But it still allows one to protect and support a woman’s autonomy without denyingt he life of the fetus, if that’s how you feel about it.
A more pro-life stance that respects women’s autonomy somewhat is the “responsibilty” model, wherein women who are raped, or whose lives are put at stake by the pregnancy may still have the “self defense” option, but that women who willingly and knowingly engage in sex that may result in pregnancy and who then get pregnant are responsible for the consequences of their actions (though I cannot stress enough that this is not MY stance on the issue; please don’t attack me ont he gourn ds that Ithink this.) I just feel like IF a person does believe in the life and right sof the fetus, this might be a reasonable stance for them to take.
And it wouldn’t mean they weren’t really feminist, I don’t think.
First of those is definitely compatible with feminism; second is definitely not. In fact that second one is one of the least feminist-compatible flavors of pro-life there is. Only outright “we’re punishing women for having sex” beats it, because it’s essentially a hidden “we’re punishing women for having sex”.
I have a couple of observations. Even though I don’t disagree with your politics, I’m not sure your logic here is sound.
It is entirely possible for a person to look at that passage and think that it is reasonable, but be honest: you are saying that a person can be “pro-life” and still be feminist as long as their political views, for all intents and purposes are exactly like yours. That’s not quite a “big tent” philosophy, and your reasoning would be exactly the same if you had started with your premise and worked your way backward.
Isn’t it possible for someone to hold both views (that preserving women’s autonomy is essential, as is preserving fetal life), and to examine the evidence, and conclude that different policy decisions will lead to better outcomes? That wouldn’t be a contradiction or failure to support both values; it would simply be disagreement about how to analyze the facts and predict future events.
The problem is that you are defining “women’s autonomy” to include “women’s autonomy to terminate a fetus.” You might not necessarily arrive at that definition if you were starting from scratch. You certainly wouldn’t expect feminists to include “women’s autonomy to steal a car” or “women’s autonomy to smother a baby” or even “women’s autonomy to contaminate prepared food products with female bodily excretions.” Such definitions would be ludicrous, because curtailing a woman’s autonomy to do these horrible things would be reasonable and just. As such, all one has to do to be both a feminist and a pro-lifer is hold the belief that terminating a fetus at least as horrible as stealing a car or smothering a baby, etc.
Keeley:
It is possible to believe that a fetus is “using a woman’s body against her will,” but that reasoning implies intent. One could also view that belief as ageist and ableist: the body and its structures belong to the woman because she was born first and she is physically capable of using them without the other. But why isn’t it possible to hold the belief that a woman and a fetus have exactly equal rights to any and all of the shared structures that keep them alive?
What if you were to analogize them to conjoined twins, say, where one twin’s body is currently dependent on the other twin’s organs, but every reputable doctor in the world concludes that their bodies will separate naturally or through routine surgery in 8-9 months?
Would we really say that the less healthy twin has zero rights to their shared bodily structures? And even if you would personally hold that belief, couldn’t a person at least reasonably hold and defend a conflicting belief?
Would it not be at least ethically possible to hold that each conjoined twin has exactly equal rights to the body parts that they share, through no fault of either individual, and that the only entity with the moral right to make a medical decision that would result in the loss of one twin’s life would be both twins, in consensus? (Or perhaps, the only one who has the right to make a medical decision that would result in one twin dying would be the twin whose life is at stake?)
The issue with presumably then, pro-foetus feminists is where they stop. If they are dealing only with what tends to be the outcome of sexual intercourse, why so coy?
If you are okay with sex as default intercourse and pro foetus and at the same time, pro-female autonmony, then the place to make an adjustment would seem to be the design of sex between men and women.
It is possible to believe that a fetus is “using a woman’s body against her will,” but that reasoning implies intent. One could also view that belief as ageist and ableist: the body and its structures belong to the woman because she was born first and she is physically capable of using them without the other. But why isn’t it possible to hold the belief that a woman and a fetus have exactly equal rights to any and all of the shared structures that keep them alive?
There are several problems with this line of reasoning. First, perhaps trivially, it’s not ageist. In the scenario of twin-twin transfusion, in which one twin is “stealing” blood from the other, abortion of the less healthy twin to save the more healthy twin is sometimes recommended. So we do, in other contexts, acknowledge that sometimes fetal life may be sacrificed for the good of others, including other fetuses. And in any given pregnancy, the pregnant woman is the “healthier” one (the mortality of a pregnant woman is measured in the per 100,000s, the mortality of a fetus that makes it all the way to birth is measured in the per 1000s. So clearly the woman is far healthier, i.e. less likely to die.)
Second, “ableist” or not, we must have a division between alive and not alive. A person who is brain dead (note: this does NOT mean in a coma or persistent vegetative state, both of which can sometimes reverse-very rarely for PVS-brain dead means no brain activity at all) is dead. A person without a heartbeat…may or may not be. So the “abortion stops a beating heart” crap is just that: crap. It is irrelevant. Most abortions occur before there is enough neural development to have brain activity of any sort. Therefore, they are being performed to remove an embryo which does not yet fit the definition of a living human being and thus they have no rights to be concerned with.
Third, we don’t ever require men or non-pregnant women to allow their bodies to be used by others without their consent. Blood donation is not mandatory. And to avoid the “but she had sex willingly” (not that this is always true, but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend rape and coercion don’t exist for the moment) argument, let me point out that the following: I am listed in the bone marrow donation registry, meaning that I have intentionally and without force or coercion allowed my name and genetic information to be registered. If a person who matches my genetics well enough is in need of a transplant, I would be called and asked to donate marrow. I could say no. I wouldn’t, unless I was in bad physical shape or had reason to think that my marrow wouldn’t be healthy enough to help the potential recipient, but I could. Likewise, a person who volunteers to donate a kidney can, if they chose to, say, “I’ve changed my mind: I don’t want to do this” on the operating table just before they go under. So, if a person who, with understanding and intent, volunteered their body’s use can back out, why not a person who just had sex? Sex does not usually lead to pregnancy, especially if you take precautions to avoid it doing so. Why should that be considered an implied irrevocable consent when the whole concept of implied irrevocable consent is considered abhorrent in any other situation in which bodily autonomy is violated?
Isn’t it possible for someone to hold both views (that preserving women’s autonomy is essential, as is preserving fetal life), and to examine the evidence, and conclude that different policy decisions will lead to better outcomes?
It would be pretty hard to come to that conclusion, give that the maternal mortality rate is higher everywhere and whenever abortion is illegal.
The problem is that you are defining “women’s autonomy” to include “women’s autonomy to terminate a fetus.” You might not necessarily arrive at that definition if you were starting from scratch. You certainly wouldn’t expect feminists to include “women’s autonomy to steal a car” or “women’s autonomy to smother a baby” or even “women’s autonomy to contaminate prepared food products with female bodily excretions.”
It’s also illegal for men to steal cars, smother babies and contaminate prepared food products with their bodily excretions. Men don’t get pregnant.
Analogies always fail because NOTHING is like pregnancy.
Keeley @1: That’s not a “self-defense” standard. Mapping that standard to real life, it would be wrong for me to defend myself from harm if I knew there was a risk that, say, I might be physically attacked, but did it anyway – I lose the right to fight back. This is obviously ridiculous. As applied to pregnancy, “self defense” would mean that a woman has a right to end a pregnancy if it’s going to result in great bodily harm or death, regardless of how she got pregnant.
Amp, the piece of the puzzle I think is missing here is how “feminists for life” approach women’s sexual autonomy in general. For example, someone who is genuinely concerned about fetal life as well as women’s autonomy would be strongly in favor of educating women about sexuality and making sure they had access to safe and effective contraception, so that women aren’t having unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
For example, someone who is genuinely concerned about fetal life as well as women’s autonomy would be strongly in favor of educating women about sexuality and making sure they had access to safe and effective contraception, so that women aren’t having unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
On the other end, a feminist concerned about fetal life would advocate for a greatly expanded social services system. A large percentage of women getting abortions cite concerns about money, jobs, education and caring for their existing children. There isn’t always one easy fix for those things, but to the extent that women who would have rather carried to term and added another child to their family end up getting abortions out of economic necessity, well, that’s not a good or happy thing. That women get to make the ultimate decision is good for women’s autonomy, but that those choices might be so constrained by external factors is not.
You seem to posit that government interventions regarding education and contraception are ok, but prohibitions and punishments for violations cannot be. A pro-lifer believes that (at some point) the life of the unborn child becomes a very important moral factor in the analysis. For issues where two different lives intersect, education and prevention aren’t the only tools because we understand that lots of people are willing to put their own wants above the much more serious needs of people other than themselves.
You would never say that rape prevention classes and education are the only legitimate tools in a government’s toolkit. Prohibition and punishment are government tools against rape in addition to any others. Why is that? Because people who want to have sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them will often be tempted to ignore consent and instead indulge their personal power gratifications at the expense of others. Human beings are inherently quite selfish, and one of the things we do with government is restrict through prohibition the amount of harm that one person can do to another.
Pro-lifers who are feminists see the woman’s right for autonomy and the unborn child’s right to live as being *in tension* in ways that non pro-choice feminists do not. They see a conflict of desires and needs. Sometimes on inspection, they turn out not to actually conflict. Sometimes even a late term abortion ends up being justifiable (from their perspective) because the unborn child is not actually viable (will die upon birth so abortion is safer for the only party that will live) or because of self defense reasons (the mother’s health is seriously threatened and nearly every moral structure allows for self defense). Sometimes they don’t (recent Utah case where woman sought post-viability abortion because her boyfriend was going to break up with her, or apparently the Kermit Gosnell abortions).
You seem unfairly framing the issue as if “self-autonomy” were actually the only moral value there is. But clearly we, as a society, interfere with people’s “self-autonomy” all the time. Feminists even support that in many cases. And one of the many, many, many times we do so is when exercise of self-autonomy seriously injures someone else.
Pro-lifers believe that (at least at some point–much contention about exactly when exists) a fetus *is* a someone else. And clearly terminating a life is about as serious an injury to someone else as you can get. The exact contours of how that balances out against other rights is the source of much wrangling, but the key moral difference in analysis centers on whether or not there is a someone else.
Dianne:
This seems to be the exact opposite of how we decide the conjoined twins question. There is almost always one twin which is healthier than the other. You don’t measure from the point of view of the healthier twin *unless even the healthier twin’s life is in serious danger*. If the healthier twin is not in danger than it is much more difficult to justify separating the twins if doing so will seriously endanger the weaker twin much less kill it outright.
SebastianH … They pretty much always separate conjoined twins, even when doing so will almost certainly kill the weaker twin. There are a few medical ethicists out there arguing that separation shouldn’t be seen as such an unmitigated good that the operation must proceed in the face of this reality, but right now, that’s a fringe position.
I have identified as a “pro-life” feminist in the past. I’ve only given up the label in the past few years because there’s too much baggage that goes along with it, and it ends up misleading people about my actual views. I’m strongly in favor of sex education, access to birth control, and social support systems, so that’s out of the way. :) Practically speaking, I support pro-choice candidates (if only because the pro-lifers seem off the deep end and really do seem to have an anti-woman agenda).
But if it were an option, I would support policies that discourage abortion, if not outright ban it. Sort-of like the way a policy might discourage smoking (or encourage blood or organ donation). The earlier in the pregnancy, the less intense the measures. And of course, the policies would be applied evenly, not like our current system where some women have fairly free access and others (e.g. Kansas) have practically none.
I really like the analogy of the conjoined twins, mainly because it pulls sex out of the discussion, which always muddies the issue. I mean, reasonable people can disagree about the moral nuances of removing a conjoined twin without anyone being accused of “hating sex” or “wanting to punish women for enjoying sex”, or “wanting to have a sexual free-for-all”, or whatever it is people get accused of.
It’s nice to say “Hey, these two beings are now joined together. Without focusing on who’s to *blame* for this state of affairs, what do we do about it now?” You can legitimately ask “to what degree is the ‘fetal’ twin a person”? And even when it’s arguble that there might be some level of personhood at some stage, what does one twin owe another? Certainly not their life to the point that both die. That’s an easy one. Some might be not so obvious. (Like, if it’s a healthy situation only weeks away from the “natural separation”.)
That said, if you had millions of conjoined twins being removed every year and more often than not the surviving twin said “it’s not that they really wanted the other twin removed, it was a lack of money to support him/her after natural separation”, or “it was due to shame for having a conjoined twin” we’d see this as the societal moral failing that it is. And what I mean by societal moral failure – that one way or another we (all of us) are not protecting the weakest and most vulnerable. It’s the high numbers and the most common reasons for abortions that bother me, not the more unusual cases. This is not a feminist belief per se, but I care about feminism because I care about fairness, and I care about protecting the vulnerable for the same reason.
I think the initial Venn diagram is misleading here. Only by beating the heck out of definitions can you get to “essential” on either side. If you substituted “is a very important moral/ethical goal” you’d see an entirely different set of arguments, in which it would be harder to use straw figures.
People are entitled to make up their own minds, without regard to the various orthodoxies which contend for our allegiance.
I am a pro-life feminist. However, I am not particularly interested in the opinion of (1) self-declared feminists, or (2) self-declared pro-life people, on my position. Surprise, I’m entitled to make up my own mind on these and other issues. I don’t feel at all constrained to line up with any party line on this or any other issues.
Sebastian @11: The scenario I wrote about was not conjoined twins but twin-twin transfusion in utero. This can happen when identical twins share a placenta and the blood supply is such that one twin is “transfusing” the other. The donor ends up hypoxic and the recipient volume overloaded. If the transfusion is severe, both will die before birth. There are treatments that can-sometimes-save both twins but in extreme situations, the umbilical cord of the more affected fetus may be embolized to prevent the death of the healthier twin.
But any time “both will die before birth” is part of the equation, we can get into normal self-defense principles.
According to Naomi Wolf, yes, you can :
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011827168800963.html
“But these women [Palin and Bachman, of which Bachman is undoubtly pro-life] are real feminists – even if they do not share policy preferences with the already recognized “sisterhood,” and even if they themselves would reject the feminist label.“
But any time “both will die before birth” is part of the equation, we can get into normal self-defense principles.
Not at all if we’re talking about both fetuses dying before birth. No fetus has ever acted in its own protection or shown any signs of being able to. If we’re talking about the mother, then we start to get into questions of how probable does death have to be to justify abortion. What if the odds are essentially 100%? My understanding is that the Catholic position is that you still don’t do an abortion because that would be depriving god of a chance to work a miracle (or something like that). Assuming you’re not that hard core, where do you draw the line? What if the condition is usually fatal but there is one case report in the literature of someone with a kind of similar problem surviving? What about a 50% chance? 10%? 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than average risk (i.e. about 0.1-1%)?
Can someone be both prolife on abortion and feminist? This is exactly the approach our organization takes, every day of the year:
All Our Lives, http://www.allourlives.org
“What if the condition is usually fatal but there is one case report in the literature of someone with a kind of similar problem surviving? What about a 50% chance? 10%? 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than average risk (i.e. about 0.1-1%)?”
But the current regime isn’t anything like that. In most states *any risk whatsoever, even if less than normal pregnancy risk* is enough. In fact the risk doesn’t even have to include any chance at all of death. In fact the risk doesn’t even have to include any chance at all of physical injury in most states. In fact the risk doesn’t even have to include any chance at all of permanent or long term injury in most states. Wherever you want to draw the ultimate moral line, the current location of it in the law is crazy.
Is there some way of getting a baby out of a woman’s body that does not cause any physical injury or entail a risk of long term injury? Because I’d be really intersted to learn about that. When I gave birth, all the options presented to me involved lots of blood, were really painful and carried significant risk of permanent damage to my body. Has something new happened in the past ten years?
Sebastian, you’re avoiding the question. At what level of risk would you permit abortion to be performed? Current law doesn’t talk about risk at all, except in the context of restrictions on later abortions, which are already a tiny minority of all abortions performed. Where would you draw the line? Would you support a policy that drew the line at 100% certainty of death only? At greater than 50%? What is a “reasonable” amount of risk to force someone to take?
Is this wandering too far off topic? I’ll drop it if so.
There is no method of late term abortion that doesn’t entail a risk of blood and long term injury. So your choices all involve levels of risk.
I’m not avoiding the question, I’m talking about the real world of late term medical abortions. Why do you want to talk about 100% certainity of death hypotheticals when the laws in question allow for vanishing to nil chance of death late-term abortions and many states allow for vanishing to nil chances of physical injury justifications for late term abortions?
That is the state of play right now. That is what pro-lifers are talking about wanting to change.
I’d say the reasonable risk is more in the 0.5% range. That certainly jibes with the self-defense idea. If someone entered your house and presented a 0.5% risk to you, you wouldn’t normally be justified in killing them. If a burglar was running away but you thought there was a 1% chance that he’d be back with friends to kill you later, you wouldn’t be justified in killing him.
As for off topic, forcing me to put a number on it has a more than 1% risk of now diverting all the other points i’ve made into a discussion of how much is appropriate even though you were talking about crazy numbers like 100% or 50%. It seems unlikely to be productive unless you’re willing to admit that SOME number might be appropriate. If not, please go on record justifying that ANY risk no matter how trivial, and ANY injury no matter how trivial, requires that we allow the killing of the unborn child. Let’s be clear about the positions. THAT is the position of NARAL and the other pro-choice lobbies.
If not, please go on record justifying that ANY risk no matter how trivial, and ANY injury no matter how trivial, requires that we allow the killing of the unborn child.
That’s easy enough:
1. Much as the anti-abortion rhetorical phrase “unborn child” makes it sound like you’re offing a 3 year old, even a very advanced fetus is very immature and has relatively little brain development. An 8 week old embryo, for example, is only just developing stationary neurons. Clearly, not a sentient being. Most abortions occur before 8 weeks. A 12 week fetus has a little more, but we’re still not talking more than brainstem. “Pulling the plug” on a person in a similar mental state would be uncontroversial unless her name is Teri Schiavo. The vast majority of abortions and virtually all elective abortions take place before 12 weeks. Most of those that happen later are performed because of barriers put in place by the anti-abortion movement. It is unlikely that a 9 month fetus is self-aware in any way because of its hypoxic environment. Adults or children placed in a hypoxic environment similar to the O2 sat in the uterine vein are not conscious. It is unlikely that the fetus is different. So in the end, the “child” you’re talking about has never been as a conscious entity any more than a sperm has ever existed as a conscious entity (but could become part of one under the right circumstances. Just like a fetus. A fetus is just a little further along that path.)
2. Even if we assumed that the fetus is an independent person, we do not allow people to use the bodies of others to keep them alive in any other situation, so why grant a special privilege to the fetus. Donors-people who have already volunteered-are allowed to back out of organ donation at any moment. Babies have no right to breast milk, only to being fed somehow. Why grant fetuses more rights than babies?
3. In fact, we don’t even allow people to use the property of others in most circumstances. Whatever the morality of the situation, the law, as far as I know, is that you are within your rights to shoot a person who is on your property without your permission. You do not have to calculate the probable risk of his or her doing damage to you and determine it to be over 0.5%. There was an infamous case in Texas in which a man shot a (black) friend of his son’s when he came to his doorstep. He got away with “self-defense” by stating that the friend was an intruder on his property without his permission. (Sorry, no link: I read about it in an old fashioned print paper.)
Finally, the “crazy numbers” of 100% or 50% are things that the “pro-life” movement bat around all the time. Remember the case in AZ where the bishop censured the hospital staff for saving a woman nearly certain to die within hours because of a pregnancy gone wrong? And there was another case in Louisiana in the 1990s of a woman who was denied an abortion despite a heart defect that made her risk of dying about 10% and for which she was taking a drug that had a virtual certainty of causing profound fetal defects. She was denied an abortion on medical grounds because her risk of dying was less than 50%. (She went to Texas and had it done there, thankfully, and lived.) These are the numbers the leadership of the “pro-life” movement want discussed. They aren’t necessarily the numbers the average pro-lifer wants, but they’re what they’re effectively voting for when they chose a “pro-life” politician or contribute to a “pro-life” organization.
I think we have ample evidence that the “pro-life” movement in this country is not only or even primarily concerned with late-term abortions. Some of them want to ban the pill, fercrissake! I understand that late-term abortion concerns you deeply on a personal level, Sebastian. I certainly have a very strong preference that women having elective abortions get them done in the first trimester, the sooner the better. But what really concerns me on a personal level is being able to increase the likelihood that I get to see my living children grow up and that they get to grow up with a mother, should I develop a serious complication in a future pregnancy. If you can worry so much about abstract fetuses, I hope you can spare a little bit of your heart for woman, as well.
If the unborn child is viable, the question of whether or not she gets to ‘use’ the mother’s body against the mother’s will does not inexorably lead to abortion. Insisting that the child be expelled from the mother’s body is not the same as insisting that it end up dead. Your trespassers analogy confirms this intuition. You can expel someone from the use of your property. Your right to do so does not mean that you can insist that they be killed, even if removing them from your property turns out to be troublesome.
“Some of them want to ban the pill, fercrissake!”
So what? First, it is *some*. There can be lots of restrictions on abortions before we get there, and the American public seems by vast majorities to want more restrictions on abortions *without* having the slightest desire of getting there.
The pro-life movement gains power because the actual practice of abortion laws (which is to say that in practical effect fully viable fetuses can be aborted for non-serious reasons) is well out of step with the American public. This allows them to leverage the practices which are well out of step with American moral understanding into a movement which also has ideas which are well out of step the other direction.
Constitutionally we aren’t going to be allowed to ban 1st trimester abortions without an amendment. If an amendment process looks like it is actually get anywhere *then* you might be justified in using scare tactics about early abortions. Until then, late term abortions are the topic especially for a pro-life feminist. So let’s return to it.
Chingona, are you ok with Dianne’s (and also NARALs) any abortion, for any reason, no matter the fetal viability stance? Amp? That is a stance which can be put into law (unlike an early abortion ban), and in many cases has been.
Can you give a reliable reference to this ever having happened? I’ve never seen a documented case.
I’m not using scare tactics about early abortions. I’m using scare tactics about late abortions. I don’t want to fucking die if I develop a serious complication late in pregnancy, and I think that you are in a very poor position to decide for me and my family how much risk of death or disability I should accept.
I’m fine with limiting third-trimester abortions to life or health but I am absolutely not fine with legislatures deciding how much risk of death or disability I should have to face. I’m also fairly persuaded by the example of Canada that we don’t actually need lots of rules to prevent late-term abortions.
And like Jake, I would very much like to see you produce evidence that late-term abortions are being performed willy-nilly in this country. So far, the only example you came up with was a woman who was prosecuted for asking a guy to beat her up. Meanwhile, as we speak, women are sitting in jail on child abuse charges because they tried to commit suicide while pregnant or because they were using drugs while pregnant. Women have had their children taken away from them by protective services because they refused a c-section (a c-section that ultimately was not even necessary, given that the babies were born alive and healthy without it). The law is very much in favor of fetal rights over the rights of pregnant women.
There are many methods of killing infants before birth that are not measured into what you are referring to as the “abortion rate.” One of the methods by which the birth control pill works is through artificially preventing newly conceived infants from implanting on the uterine wall, thereby bringing about their deaths. But these killings are not counted into the “abortion rate.” The countries that you mentioned have “reduced the abortion rate” by replacing “abortion” with a method of infanticide that they just don’t call “abortion” and is not factored into their abortion rate.
And I don’t see why believing that there are no differences between born and unborn infants is incompatible with feminist values. In fact, I would argue that, if anything, drawing this distinction between born and unborn infants conflicts with those values so deeply and so profoundly that one who supports it really ought not to call oneself a feminist.
Is, “Pill as abortifacient”, the 5th or 6th level of abortion debate hell?
I’d also like to point out that there is no such thing as a “newly conceived infant” by the accepted definitions of, “newly,” “conceived,” and ,”infant.” You lost your audience there, I think.
Sebastian and his allies here are beating a straw man. Since Dr. Tiller’s death, there is now only one abortion clinic in the U.S. which performs third trimester abortions. One. For the whole U.S.. Legal, elective abortions in the third trimester do no happen in the U.S.. There must be a proven danger to the life or health of the mother.
Austin, on the other hand, is at least admitting his real agenda. But, he links to lies. In fact, the birth control pill works by preventing ovulation. No egg is released. So, if the medication is working properly, the question of implantation is moot – there is no egg to be fertilized. Although, the packages say that the pill “may” prevent implantation, this has not been proven. Read the fine print and you’ll find that instructions to not take a medication when pregnant or trying to become pregnant without consulting your doctor are standard boilerplate. When I was pregnant, my doctor told me that any medication except Tylonol “may” increase the chances of miscarriage, along with a full page of things listed in small type, including alcohol, caffine, cold meat, sushi, runny egg yolks, soft cheese, hair dye, x-rays, cleaning the cat’s litter box and it’s been ten years so I can’t remember what-else. It is estimated that as many as of 1/3 of established pregnancies end in miscarriage and in the vast majority of cases we don’t know why. Restricting women who may become pregnant from doing anything which “may” prevent implantation or lead to miscarriage would be unacceptably oppressive.
This is an interesting thread. I’d like to combine a few different responses into one comment, but I’ll begin with an overall observation about my previous comment: I was writing about hypothetical scenarios in which a person could hold beliefs regarding both the importance of a woman’s autonomy and the importance of fetal life. I find hypothetical scenarios fascinating, and I enjoy the way they help me understand my own beliefs and, potentially, other people’s. I’m willing to discuss hypothetical situations at length, no matter how grisly or personal.
I understand that some people can’t or don’t do that. If so, please, read no further. If you’re likely to be triggered by dispassionate discussion of beliefs that you personally find repugnant, I don’t want my comment to cause you pain. (Nor do I want to respond to criticisms along the lines of: “You monster! How can you be hypothetical when this affects real people’s lives!” Etc.)
Dianne writes:
Well, as a trivial response–a pregnant woman is always older than her fetus.
You’re talking about something other than what I was writing about. I’m not writing about my own beliefs, I’m writing about hypothetical beliefs that seem, to me, to be defensible. For example, it is possible to hold the belief that a fetus has rights that are exactly equal to a born human.
You can certainly assert that there “must” be a division between alive and not alive, but in this context, you’re arguing with a hypothetical person. Surely, you’re aware that millions of people don’t hold that view, and that millions more say that they don’t hold your view.
That is a perfectly defensible belief, and it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. In my example, I’m taking it as a given that people hold the beliefs that they hold. To assert that those beliefs are wrong is fine and all, but whether that belief was right or wrong wasn’t my point.
If you hold the belief that a fetus has exactly the same rights to the bodily structures that it shares with a woman, then banning abortion doesn’t meet your definition of “allowing your body to be used without your consent” because the body isn’t yours–it is shared. Further, if you hold that belief, then we do, under the status quo, require men and non-pregnant women to allow their bodies to be used without their consent, because we permit abortion and embryonic research.
Clearly, you do not hold the belief that a fetus has exactly the same rights as a born person. But if you’re not willing to consider what the logical implications would be if you held that belief, then I don’t think your response to my comment is really a response to my comment.
chingona writes:
Every analogy ever used will always fail, because, by definition, an analogy is never exactly the same as the thing to which you are analogizing it. If you define “failure” for an analogy to be any situation which is not exactly identical to its referent, then we can never try to understand any situation through analogy.
I was trying not be graphic, but I did bring up the example that a woman’s autonomy does not include the autonomy to contaminate prepared-food products with menstrual blood.
Sure, men have their own bodily secretions, but nothing that men produce is EXACTLY like menstrual blood, so if my analogy fails because your critique is valid, then your critique fails, because you’re not bringing up an exact comparison. So my analogy works. Which means that your critique is therefore valid. Which means my analogy doesn’t work. Which means your critique fails– and so on and so forth, forever.
Barbara P writes:
Thanks; that was my hope. I was trying to think of a situation where it would be reasonable to say that two people have the same rights to the same body parts.
However, I also think that, if we’re trying to genuinely understand the mindset of someone who holds beliefs that approximate the potentially-conflicting beliefs that Amp brought up in the OP, we also need to take “fetus” out of the discussion. If you don’t believe a fetus has rights, or if you believe that whatever fetal rights exist are far outweighed by the rights of a pregnant woman, then it’s going to be impossible to wrap your mind around the idea of complete equality. So, it’s better to make the analogy of two adult (or child) conjoined twins. (If you imagine fetal conjoined twins, but you don’t believe that either fetus actually has human rights, then it’s much easier to construct a hypothetical where one is killed.)
But if they’re both adults, and every reputable, qualified doctor says that, in 8 or 9 months, the chances are very good that they can be safely separated with a routine procedure, would you argue that one of them has “veto” rights over the body parts that they share? Or that one of them is “using” the body of the other, such that one twin has the right to immediate separation, even if it will kill the other twin?
Let me reiterate: I am not putting forth the argument that a fetus has exactly the same rights as a woman. But I think that, in order to understand what viewpoints and policies a person who believes in a fetus’ right to life ought to support, it is important to actually be able to conceptualize what it means to believe in the full personhood of a fetus. Saying that a woman’s right to autonomy ought to include “a woman’s autonomy to terminate a fetus” can only come from someone who doesn’t grasp the implications of full fetal personhood. As such, it is a straw man.
Chingona,
If you are saying that all pregnancies carry some risk, and that you do not believe the law should decide how much risk you should have to face, then is it accurate to say that you’re actually not fine with limiting third-trimester abortions to life or health?
If “being pregnant” carries inherent risk, no matter what, then “being pregnant” would, under your proposed limit, be suffiicient reason for a third-trimester abortion, wouldn’t it?
If you hold the belief that a fetus has exactly the same rights to the bodily structures that it shares with a woman, then banning abortion doesn’t meet your definition of “allowing your body to be used without your consent” because the body isn’t yours–it is shared.
The only organ that is truly shared between the woman and the fetus is the placenta. The placenta is derived from both maternal and embryonic cells and could therefore be described as their mutual organ. Every other organ is derived from the pregnant woman and being used to the fetus’ advantage and the woman’s disadvantage.
Further, if you hold that belief, then we do, under the status quo, require men and non-pregnant women to allow their bodies to be used without their consent, because we permit abortion and embryonic research.
Huh?
If “being pregnant” carries inherent risk, no matter what, then “being pregnant” would, under your proposed limit, be suffiicient reason for a third-trimester abortion, wouldn’t it?
If the 1 in 4,000 risk of death that adheres generally to pregnancy and birth (1 in 2,500 if you have a c-section) is too much for someone, they can have an abortion earlier. I’m actually not sure what Sebastian is talking about with health conditions that carry less risk than that but would be used to justify a third trimester abortion, so I’ll continue to ask him to provide some actual examples.
But keep in mind that a condition that carries a 1 percent risk of death would increase a woman’s risk of dying from her pregnancy by a factor of 40.
As for the analogy thing, let me rephrase: None of the analogies that I have ever seen have been sufficiently like pregnancy to shed any light on the matter.
I used the term “bodily structures.” You are arbitrarily defining “shared.” One could just as easily define sharing to include all of the bodily structures that are connected to your body, keeping it alive.
You say that because she had them first? Or because they contain her DNA signature? Or some other reason?
Surely, you wouldn’t argue that a person only “owns” the organs and structures that she is consciously aware she has. So, even a person who has never heard of a pancreas, who has no idea that there is a pancreas inside them, that pancreas is still “theirs,” right?
As such, ownership of body parts, in this sense, is independent of choice. You don’t choose whether to own your pancreas, or your duodenum, or your mitochondria. So why is it so hard to conceptualize that a person can co-own a body part through no fault of their own? You didn’t choose to share it, but you didn’t choose to own it in the first place. But things just happened.
You’re envisioning a woman like a landlord. She owns the body, and then the fetus comes into existence, and it uses her property. That’s one way to look at it. But that way of looking at it isn’t consistent with a viewpoint of equality. You don’t really believe that a fetus is choosing to “use” a woman’s body; the fetus doesn’t make that choice. It just is. So how hard is it to wrap one’s head around the belief that a woman just is? A woman is there, and a fetus is there, and a placenta is there, and all of the weird interconnectedness is there, and it all…just…is?
A fetus doesn’t choose whether to exist, or whether to use blood, or the protection of a spinal cord behind it, or the uterine walls around it. So, if you believe in the full personhood of a fetus, then why couldn’t one believe that a woman shares these structures through no fault of her own?
If you believe in the full personhood of an embryo, then embryonic research meets your criteria of “using someone’s body without their consent.” So we do, in fact, use the bodies of men and non-pregnant women without their consent. And if you believe that a fetus and a woman have shared ownership over everything that they share, then abortion is also a form of using another’s body without their consent–because you’re “taking back” shared structures.
phil,
So in the famous violist thought experiment, you believe that you are morally required to remain attached to the violinist, and that you should be legally required as well?
Even so, it seems to me to be an extreme distortion of language to say that your kidney is actually the famous violinist’s kidney (not quite as absurd as calling a fertilized zygote an infant, but still a matter of trying to force your views to be inarguable by changing the language to make your views inarguable).
Phil is plumbing the depths that inspired Raznor, lo, those many years ago, to ask about the womanbabykeet. This thread has degenerated to the realm of either bad faith or absurdist nonsense. Joy.
I miss the womanbabykeet.
Charles S, I think I was pretty clear that I have not been discussing my own beliefs, but rather beliefs that it is possible to hold. As it happens, having dated several members of the string section, I do not believe in the full personhood of violinists.
But if you want to make the violinist analogy closer to the views of a “fetal personhood” believer, you’d need to imagine that the procedure for removing the violinist–in 8 or 9 months–is a procedure that has already been performed on every human being in the world. And also you must imagine that the violinist is your child.
Also, your child is an as yet undiscovered nebula. Does that make my point clearer?
“And also you must imagine that the violinist is your child.”
I’ve always thought this is one of the places where the violinst analogy breaks down. Nearly every culture believes that parents have some level of responsibility to their children that is more than the responsibility they have to a stranger.
That responsibility invariably requires organ donation from parent to child. Got it.
Nearly every culture also makes a very clear distinction between children and fetuses. Can’t imagine why, but there you go.
Actually, I think most cultures in human history have drawn a bright line somewhere between new born infants and children, with exposure of new born infants being either tolerated or officially authorized.
So I don’t think a universalist anti-choice argument holds any water, Sebastian. The universalist argument is actually pro-infanticide if it is anything.
phil,
I had failed to notice that you were merely arguing that one could believe that a pregnant woman and a fetus are a composite entity, and not actually claiming that you held that belief. Personally, I seriously doubt that anyone actually believes that a pregnant woman and her fetus are a composite entity in which the fetus has a full moral right to the pregnant woman’s kidneys. Unless you can point to an actual person arguing that as their personal belief, I think the fact that you can imagine someone believing that isn’t actually relevant to anything.
Instead of devolving into tired abortion arguments, it’s more productive to think about this from the feminist side. Imagine a country that was 100% antiabortion, where the only abortions ever performed were extreme life-of-the-mother abortions, but even in those cases women (as some antiabortion women do right now) often took the risk and tried to carry their fetuses to term. You go to that country and meet someone who believes in women’s equality and works to improve conditions in her country. Are you going to say “Well, you aren’t really a feminist” to her?
Nearly every culture treats ‘strangers’ very differently than kin.
“That responsibility invariably requires organ donation from parent to child. Got it.”
Maybe I’m confused about what organ donation entails. My concept is something like kidney removal and emplacement. That isn’t analogous to late term abortion. What is the mother donating in that sense?
If you’re taking that analogy seriously, then wouldn’t it be more like: a mother can choose to give up a child for adoption (stop feeding it in the long run) but can’t choose to stop feeding it while in her care?
I’m not taking the analogy seriously because it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. And, no, it wouldn’t be more like that.
A greater responsibility is not “everything you can possibly do, up to and including, sacrificing your life.” Also, see Charles’ comment at #44 and mythago’s comment at #46..
The arguments against abortion that I’m seeing in this thread are either being put forth in bad faith or they’re absurd. At this point in my life I don’t have the patience to kindly explain the gaping chasms of logic fail. I did that 7 years ago. I’m merely able to respond by calling the arguments what they are.
“Newly conceived infant” indeed. Is Austin saying this in bad faith or does he just have no idea what words mean? I don’t see any other options.
(Though I know that wasn’t you, Sebastian H, it isn’t leagues farther into the realm of nonsense than what you’re putting forth).
Your analogy (or the one you’re supporting) requires us to accept that “infant” and “fetus” are synonyms. That’s ridiculous (and something for which you’ve given no support) and I’m not going to accept that. Because of that, I cannot take the analogy seriously.
You have also not responded to my request at #28 for documentation of your assertion that, “… fully viable fetuses can be aborted for non-serious reasons.” When challenged on something that seemed to be important to your argument, you just moved on as if it had never happened and have since made other unsupported and/or flawed arguments. This leads me to take you less seriously than I would have otherwise.
Charles S, the phrase “composite entity” is your own. Are you seriously asking for examples of people who believe that a fetus has a full moral right to the pregnant woman’s body parts that is keeping it alive? Really? You’re saying that of the tens of millions of pro-lifers in this country, not one believes that a fetus has a right to use a woman’s kidneys?
Jake, your critique that “your child is an undiscovered nebula” appears to ignore the belief that a fetus is a full human. As I understand it, the violinist is an attempt to understand what one’s ethical responsibility would be _if_ one held the belief that a fetus is a person.
Phil,
Please define “full human.”
Phil,
So I’ve been reading this thread and I get that you are trying to think and argue your way through a set of beliefs that you do not hold, but what’s your point? Why do you think this exercise is worthwhile? What do you imagine that the rest of us should learn from it that we don’t already know?
Phil,
I believe that there are plenty of people that believe pregnant women don’t have a right to abort, and that fetuses have aright to the use of the pregnant woman’s body, yes.
I do not believe that your comment at 37 is an accurate exposition of anti-abortion beliefs, no.
I’m not going to bother discussing it with you further.
To bring this back (vaguely) to the subject, do Phil or Sebastian* consider themselves feminists? Does anyone else here consider them feminists? If they do consider themselves feminists and support equality and autonomy in other areas (i.e. being pro-access to birth control, pro-equality in work and education, anti-FGM, aware of differences in gender that make true equality complex at times, aware of privilege, etc) does this single position make them not feminists?
*Assuming Phil and Sebastian are arguing their own positions and not the positions of a theoretical pro-life person that they don’t actually agree with.
Richard,
Are you asking me what is the point of trying to envision the implications of other people’s beliefs? I’m intrigued by where one’s thinking can take you if you believed that X were true. In this case, X is some version of “a fetus has the same right to life as a born person.” If one isn’t willing to even _consider_ what it would be like to believe something different, then one hasn’t examined one’s own beliefs very closely.
Your implication seems to be that the rest of us “already know” all of the implications that would or could follow if X were true. Do you really believe that?
The terms pro-life, pro-abortion, anti-abortion…they indicate an absolutism that doesn’t comport with real life. Everyone knows that abortion could be criminalized tomorrow, and women would continue to terminate their pregnancies. So what are anti-abortion feminists to do? What compassionate, realistic people always do: they recognize that it is a complicated world, and everything has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and they accept that abortions will continue to happen, and they decide, okay: in what way can I mitigate the damage?
I imagine such a feminist would look at the realities, feel grief for the aborted fetuses, and acknowledge that without the option of legal abortion, there will be more misery – including the increased maternal mortality that comes with making abortion illegal (and when a woman is dead, her existing children are orphaned, and her future planned children no longer no longer possible). So then this feminist would partner with organizations like Planned Parenthood, to make sure that when Planned Parenthood personnel counsel women whose unplanned pregnancies are problematic (and they do counsel, comprehensively and conscientiously), and they see that a pregnant woman is conflicted about whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, PP knows that this particular feminist is a go-to person for abortion alternatives.
This feminist founds some sort of organization or service to offer women real, honest, practical alternatives. It does not trick women by implying that its pregnancy counseling might involve the option of abortion, but it helps with comprehensive assistance, with either adoption or help throughout the pregnancy, including post-natal care and early childhood advocacy.
We all have to acknowledge that we can’t make the world unmessy. Life is messy, so we have to do what we can.
In my area, there’s a place called Birthright. The last time I checked it out, it was a transparent sort of group: they never failed to clarify that their services were an alternative to abortion. I respect that. There should be open, collegial, and continuous cooperation among all groups and entities involved in reproductive issues.
And if an anti-abortion feminist opposes any or all birth control options…well, that’s a feminist deal-breaker for me.
Phil,
Have you considered all the implications of the ideas that you are arguing for? Should a woman be court-ordered to have a cesarean? Should women with complicated pregnancies be court-ordered to be on bed rest? Should a woman who drinks one beer a month during her pregnancy be charged with negligence? What about one who eats deli meats or soft cheese or sushi? Do babies have a right to their mother’s milk? After all, formula-fed babies are more likely to die in their first year of life. How great would the increased risk of death have to be to justify making it a law that all women breastfeed?
I don’t think I have to do all your complicated mental gymnastics to understand the good-faith pro-life position. Most fetuses, left undisturbed, will turn into babies. Babies are helpless and vulnerable and cute and quite reasonably demand our protection, as individuals and as a society. We all started as fetuses. We think of our children as our children even before they are born. We feel them kick and stretch and turn. We look back and think the seeds of their personalities were present even in the womb (and they probably were, given how much of our personality seems to have a genetic basis). This isn’t hard for me to grasp at all. (Hard-hearted abortion-loving monster though I am, I’ve carried two children to term, so I am quite aware of what fetal life is, thank you very much.) And for many woman, though certainly not all, maybe not even a majority, having an abortion is a sad thing, something they wouldn’t have done if we lived in a different sort of world.
I don’t need bizarre hypotheticals about conjoined twins or people trapped in cars underwater with limited amounts of oxygen or one guy is on a train track but if you switch the track five other people will die or any of that crap.
For me, ultimately, women need to be able to control their own bodies, even while they’re in the process of making new people. Some of the implications of not giving them that control are already playing out in our real world, not in pointless hypotheticals. It’s not that I can’t imagine how someone would have a different view. I’ve imagined it, and I disagree. What is so difficult about that?
And just on the definitional issues, no one can control what someone else calls themselves, and I don’t really care about trying to wrest the feminist label away from someone who considers themselves pro-life. But I do find the position that abortion should be illegal and dangerous to be difficult to reconcile with my understanding of basic feminist principles.
Those are policy implications of the philosophical implications. Two people could agree on the values that they support, or the things that they find “essential,” and then disagree on the best policies to support those.
You seem to be saying that considering the logical implications of ideas is one way to assess whether the idea was a bad idea in the first place. So, for example, a line of thinking that ends with women locked into gurneys while involuntary cesareans are performed is a bad line of thinking. I happen to agree with you.
So what’s your issue? You brought up the hypothetical of women facing charges for eating soft cheese to prove to me that hypotheticals are a pointless waste of time?
That’s great. You’ll notice that earlier, I said that I find hypothetical scenarios fascinating, and I noted that some people don’t. So, was your goal here just to make it really clear that you’re one of those people who don’t like to consider hypothetical thought experiments? And you wanted to support that point with your own hypothetical examples (which, honestly, I kinda liked. I’m going to bring up the cheese and sushi thing the next time I’m having a discussion with a pro-lifer.)
But I do find the position that abortion should be illegal and dangerous to be difficult to reconcile with my understanding of basic feminist principles.
I find it difficult to reconcile with my understanding of basic humanist principles. What do we find inherently important about human beings? Why are humans more important than emus, amoeba, or rocks? It must be the self-awareness and creativity that humans display, probably uniquely. So torturing a woman in the name of protecting an embryo without thought or awareness strikes me as an inhumane approach.
Also, most people picture the entity in an abortion as a full term baby. It’s not. It’s likely a very early embryo. And babies are cute but embryos are not. Seriously, wouldn’t you run if you saw this coming at you in a dark alley. Well, if you could find it without a microscope, that is.
Phil, I’m not sure about the soft cheese example, but there are definite examples of the legal system forcing women to do things in the “interest” of the fetus. There was a particularly infamous case a year or so ago of a woman who was legally forced to go on bed rest when she had a threatened miscarriage, despite the fact that she had 2 small children at home that she needed to care for. (There’s also zero evidence that bed rest does anything to prevent miscarriage: it’s all tradition and guess work, but that’s really beside the point.) So she and her children were put in danger for the supposed protection of a fetus. That’s the reality of life in the US for a fertile woman right now.
My soft cheese example is a hypothetical, but women go to prison on a regular basis in the country on child abuse charges for doing drugs while pregnant. It’s not hypothetical at all.
The woman court-ordered to be on bedrest was not hypothetical, and there is a woman in prison in Indiana right now for trying to commit suicide while pregnant. Women have been strapped into gurneys and forced into cesarean sections while they screamed no, and there is a woman right now still trying to get her child back from protective services after refusing a section. None of these are hypothetical.
So, was your goal here just to make it really clear that you’re one of those people who don’t like to consider hypothetical thought experiments?
I don’t believe our host has asked that all comment threads conform with what you would like to discuss. I have refrained from discussing your hypotheticals and from personally attacking you out of recognition of the fact that you find mental masturbation to be pleasurable and I do not. I am simply pointing out that we already have real-life examples of what will happen if your thought experiment is taken seriously, and I find it extremely disturbing, as an American in possession of a uterus who is at some risk of becoming pregnant. Given that, hypothetically speaking, you are not about to move into my house to read my children their bedtime stories or to keep my husband warm at night. Hypothetically.
It’s always nice to have the option of treating a real problem that only applies to other people as a ‘hypothetical thought experiment’. Hey, I’m not going to be strapped down and forced to have a C-section against my will, so isn’t this a fascinating topic for arms-length debate?
And…Yahtzee.
Again, Phil, my hypotheticals are not actually hypothetical. Perhaps you could acknowledge this?
Phil,
I have not read, and will unfortunately not have time to read the posts to the thread that follow this one until some time later this week, so I will just say that this avoids, or maybe evades is a better word, the question. Let me make it more clear–because maybe my original question wasn’t–in this specific case what do you hope to gain by getting where you’re thinking will take you; what do you hope the rest of use will learn from this thought experiment you have asked us all to engage in with you? In the absence of a concrete specific answer–a change in our opinions about what it means to think a fetus is the same in all ways as a born baby, a different way of looking at women’s reproductive rights policy, of framing the whole reproductive rights debate–what you are doing seems to me purely masturbatory, by which I mean it seems to have no goal other than your own pleasure in intellection. That’s fine. I would not presume to judge you for that; we all engage in that kind of thinking from time to time and we all of us once in a while enlist our friends to participate in it with us. Here, however, now, on this topic, I have absolutely no desire to participate in it with you because, quite frankly, as your answer to my question indicates, you can only articulate what’s in this intellectual journey for you, and so I don’t see that there’s anything in it for me.
The problem isn’t that your hypotheticals hurt my irrational, womanly feelings. The problem is that they are so abstract that they obscure far more than they reveal. If I’m setting up hypotheticals that don’t have to conform to the reality of what a fetus is or the fact that women – you know, human beings – have to gestate them, sometimes at great cost to their own organism, I can stack the deck anyway I like, to make any sort of conclusion seem inevitable or just. That’s bullshit, and you don’t get to spout bullshit and then have no one call it what it is.
“I am simply pointing out that we already have real-life examples of what will happen if your thought experiment is taken seriously, and I find it extremely disturbing, as an American in possession of a uterus who is at some risk of becoming pregnant.”
And we also have real life examples of women with viable fetuses wanting to get abortions for no legitimate medical reason (the recent Utah case) and the cases of doctors being willing to give post-viability abortions (the Kermit Goswell case). Women wanting to kill viable fetuses happens. Doctors willing to kill viable fetuses also happens (often motivated by money). It is a moral issue that the NARAL side of the abortion debate wants to write off as hypothetical.
It is not hypothetical.
And Kermit Gosnell is going to be in prison for a very long time for what he did. (It’s worth noting that he also acted in extreme disregard for the women he performed abortions on and killed one of them.)
I meant an example of it happening legally.
Sebastian, infanticide happens, too. Do you honestly think that because I want abortion to remain legal and available, I am logically required to excuse or condone infanticide? Come on.
You didn’t provide a link, Sebastian, so I’ll ask. In the “recent Utah case,” was the woman able to obtain a legal abortion of a viable fetus?
Chingona’s response to your Gosnell reference is absolutely correct. His actions were not legal.
Goswell’s abortions were of viable unborn children. Did he do those without the consent of the mothers?
Further, his abortions are of the type that Dianne and NARAL would prefer NOT be illegal so I hardly see why they are out of bounds to notice.
Further still, his abortions would not be illegal in all states.
Is your dismissal of him as an example an admission that they should be illegal in all states?
I’ll help Sebastian out. He brought this up on an earlier thread. It’s a weird case. A woman paid a man to beat her in hopes of inducing a miscarriage in her seventh month of pregnancy after her boyfriend broke up with her. She didn’t miscarry and the baby was fine. They tried to prosecute both of them, but the state’s abortion law doesn’t (didn’t?) allow for any penalties for the woman, so they had to let her go. It sounds like the Utah legislature closed that loophole in the wake of outrage about the case, but I don’t care enough to hunt down the specifics.
I think Sebastian’s point is that there are women out there who would have elective abortions in the third trimester if it were legal. Sebastian seems to think that NARAL’s support for legal third trimester abortion is driving the American people into the pro-life camp. One, I haven’t seen any evidence that the American people are actually being driven into the pro-life camp, and two, the idea that we live in some sort of abortion free-for-all that would drive people in disgust from the pro-choice camp is simply not supported by the facts. That there was no criminal penalty for the woman in the Utah case reflects the pro-life movement’s own tactic of treating women like moral children so as to evade answering the “How much time should she do?” question. It came back to bite them on the ass.
In what state are abortions past 24 weeks legal when there is no health issue? Most states don’t even go to 24 weeks.
I’m going to repeat my comment from #28.
Sebastian H wrote:
I am going to ask for a citation of legal abortions of fully viable fetuses for non-serious reasons. I’ll also ask if Sebastian meant:
“Which is to say that in practical effect fully viable fetuses can be legally aborted for non-serious reasons”
I assumed that he meant legally and that’s why I’m asking for citations. If, otoh, Sebastian merely means that it can be done, I wonder what the point is.
I’m still baffled by the idea that non-conforming views about abortion are a deal-killer wrt to feminism. Though my views about abortion don’t easily fit into a pre-defined label, I know they don’t quite match the standard feminist belief system. Yet I believe in them as fiercely as I believe that women and men should be equally valued. I’ve done an incredible amount of thinking about this topic, and the hypothetical examples have helped a great deal, because as I said, they can remove the emotional aspects of sex and sex roles from the thought process. I don’t do this purely because it’s “fun” to intellectualize about it; it’s because it matters. My moral intuition says that there is at least some value (if not 100% human), increasing over time, to the life that grows inside a woman. And I notice that there is a great deal of violence occurring daily against these lives. I can reconcile this with the understanding that sometimes violence is necessary, and that the experience (including risk) of pregnancy must be given it’s due consideration. But that does not mean I must simply accept that nothing can be done to mitigate the violence and I should just “get over” that moral intuition. Especially if I believe that in most cases it is not a sense of bodily autonomy that motivates women to have abortions, but outside, patriarchal causes: lack of access to birth control, lack of financial security, lack of support for parents, rape. In these cases (as opposed to situations of health or life), a sense of bodily autonomy may justify a woman’s actions, but to then push it to the point where it’s seen as the only factor to consider in how we regard the whole abortion issue is ridiculous.
By the way, I’m often tempted to question the feminist principles of women who are part of Abrahamic religions, or who take their husband’s last name, or who overly conform to beauty standards. But I recognize that in this world of grey, it’s probably not the most productive tactic. Better to engage people as individuals, rather than to flat out assume that their thinking is inconsistent or hypocritical.
“I am going to ask for a citation of legal abortions of fully viable fetuses for non-serious reasons. ”
I don’t understand the question. I presume you know that NARAL has lobbied very successfully to ensure that no statistics whatsoever may be kept on the reasons for late term abortions. In nearly every state which requires any certification at all (only 13 states) 11 of them are self-certification. There are very carefully no statistics on late term abortions.
Dude, you made the claim that:
I am asking you to provide factual evidence supporting your claim. Going all, “Ohhh, NARAL makes sure there are no statistics!!!!!” doesn’t make your initial claim any more believable. In fact, it makes it less believable.
What you have said, if I may summarize, is, “Although there are no statistics about this whatsoever, it is a fact that fully viable fetuses are legally aborted for non-serious reasons often enough that everybody knows it’s true. Even though there is absolutely no documentation of this.”
Are you offering the two claims in bad faith or do you not understand that one of your claims clearly invalidates the other?
My impression is that you made up the thing about fully viable fetuses being legally aborted, hoped nobody would press the issue and, when somebody repeatedly asked for documentation you tried to distract us by harping about evile NARAL.
You, sir, cannot be taken as a reliable or serious source. If anything, this makes me more confident in my pro choice position. I’m more confident because I know that I don’t need to make things up to support my claims. I don’t need to make stuff up because my claims are factual and can be supported by multiple sources. You, otoh, have zero sources to support your claim and, rather than admit that, make up other stuff in an attempt to distract from your lack of evidence.
I’ve seen this so, so many times before. I’m sure your wild claims are successful in garnering sympathy from and angrying up the blood of people who take your position on this issue, but those same wild claims are an absolute failure in a debate with your opposition if your hope is to change the opinion of your opposition. If your goal is to waste the time of your opposition, otoh… WIN!!!111!!1!!
I presume you know that NARAL has lobbied very successfully to ensure that no statistics whatsoever may be kept on the reasons for late term abortions.
According to the CDC, 1.3% of abortions occur at >21 weeks. 21-23 weeks are, of course, the second trimester, so this number is not a perfect measure, but it gives an idea. No more than 1.3% of all abortions reported in the US could possibly have occurred during the third trimester. Other figures of interest: 62.3% of abortions were performed at less than 8 weeks gestation. The percentage of abortions that occurred at 21+ weeks for age 14 or less was 4.3%. Pregnancy is always a life and health threatening event in a girl under 15 and never, by definition, occurs when a crime against the child has not been committed. So one major reason for late abortions seems to be that men rape barely adolescent girls and they have difficulty dealing with the consequences. The percentage of abortions at 21+ weeks nadired at 25-29 at 1% and increased gradually after that age, consistent with the theory that a lot of later abortions are performed for medical reasons. The case fatality rate for legal abortion in 1998 (the last year for which reliable statistics are available) was 0.6 per 100,000. This compares with about 14 per 100,000 for completion of pregnancy.
Source
Barbara @77, did you even read my post? Because with all due respect, it really seems to me that you didn’t.
I’m sorry Jake, it sounded like you wanted to have statistics on the reason why women have late term abortions. Those are very specifically not kept. If you want to know the laws about abortion, that’s easy. There are only 15 states that require any documentation whatsoever that post-viability abortions are “medically necessary”, and only 3 of them require things other than the self verification from the aborting doctor (self verification meaning a mere document stating that it was so, no documentation of tests, specific condition, sonograms, etc). There are a some (I think 5) that require another doctor to be present. In all the other states nothing.
And hey, great, if you really believe that late term abortions only happen for purely medical reasons, we won’t be banning very many by enforcing that right?
Ampersand,
I didn’t intend to disagree with your original post (which I certainly read). Sorry if that was unclear.
Sebastian, who would you put in charge of deciding what constituted medically necessary?
I think the point where I draw the line as a feminist (who used to be pro-life, not so much anymore) is that I am not allowed to enforce my *beliefs* on other people. I was, at one time, fully convinced that personhood began at conception, but that’s not a provable belief. It’s primarily religiously based and hinges on fuzzy things like souls.
So, with that belief, I was extraordinarily careful about birth control (pretty much always using two different methods), because there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to be taking the morning-after pill or getting an abortion. But those were my ethical choices, not things that should be legally mandated on other people. (I always found the extreme pro-life objection to the pill really ironic—I was on the pill *because* I was pro-life, and because I didn’t consider the 98 or 99% effectiveness of condoms good enough by itself.)
But my personal pro-lifeness had a lot of privileges. I was in college, so I had access to cheap birth control pills and free condoms. I had a boyfriend who saw preventing pregnancy as *our* rather than *my* problem and who would’ve stuck with me if I’d gotten pregnant accidentally. I didn’t have any medical conditions that would make pregnancy more dangerous than usual. I had parents who would’ve helped and supported me if I’d gotten pregnant. (Knowing that you were an “oops” baby yourself means your parents don’t have a lot of room to judge, and my parents are pretty awesome in general.)
Wanting to enforce your beliefs on other people, particularly in ways that specifically harm and restrict women, is anti-feminist.
As a side note, it also violates any sense of freedom of religion. If you think a not-yet-implanted zygote has a soul, that’s a religious belief, and you’re welcome to it. But you don’t get to enforce it on others any more than you get to make them go to your church.
Sebastian H, here’s the issue I have with “medically necessary.” Third trimester abortions are already extremely difficult to get, and represent a tiny portion of abortions in general. Very few doctors do them (something about not wanting to be shot by terrorists, perhaps?).
Requiring proof of medical necessity means that doctors will be even more hesitant. For it to be a *legal* standard, it has to be enforced by people who aren’t actual medical experts. So a doctor might see a case that he/she believes is a true medical necessity, but not be willing to take the chance that a court won’t think so.
Our culture also tends to poo-poo things like mental health. There could be a situation where an abortion is medically necessary for mental health reasons. But since we tend not to believe that depression or suicidal thoughts are a real thing, is a court going to accept that, or are they going to tell her to suck it up and deal?
I also doubt that appropriate consideration would be given to what viability actually means. At 24 weeks, survival for the baby is hardly a sure thing. (39% according to one statistic I found (http://miscarriage.about.com/od/pregnancyafterloss/a/prematurebirth.htm), but of course it’s going to vary a lot depending on the individual medical issues. I can easily see that being glossed over. (A full picture would, of course, include the mother’s chances not just of death but of disability or severe injury, as well as the odds that she’ll actually carry the child to term.)
Further, I don’t think “stats aren’t kept, so we know for sure that this happens” is a valid argument. First, demonstrate that it happens. Second, demonstrate that you could require medical necessity in such a way that it wouldn’t harm or kill women whose abortions are medically necessary, but whose doctors aren’t willing to go to jail on the chance that a court will disagree. This also needs to take into account that if a woman’s life is in danger, she might need an abortion *now* not in two weeks after three doctors have signed off on it, or court approval has been granted, or whatever requirement would be enforced.
Personally, I think that abortions after potential viability should only happen for medical reasons. However, I think that what constitutes medical reasons should be between a woman and her doctor, not arbitrated by people who neither practice medicine nor get to live (or die) with the consequences of the decision.
So you’re sticking to your story that, although there is absolutely no evidence, women have medically unnecessary abortions of viable fetuses.
“You know, there are alien abductions of people all the time. If the government wasn’t hiding the evidence I could prove that to you,” is exactly as convincing as your argument. It’s also exactly as much a conspiracy theory as yours is.
You simply have no credibility on this. If you want to keep going, I’ll keep pointing out how ridiculous you’re being.
Too bad there aren’t better statistics available on why late term abortions are performed. Not trying to dismiss the privacy concerns, but I for one would love to know, maybe in a very generic way. For now, I’m OK assuming that they’re medically necessary according to a reasonable person’s standards. With this assumption in mind, what would be the danger of a law that restricts third trimester abortions to “medically necessary”, and “this would be decided between a woman and her doctor”? Is it only the fear that extremist pro-lifers would somehow become involved and twist things so that the “reasonable person’s” standards no longer apply? I agree that this is a legitmate concern, but I don’t know what to do about it other than say “you extremist pro-lifers are incredible jerks”. (I’m happy to say it – don’t know if it will help!)
Yet, why should I allow the actions of pro-life extremists to push me into being a counterweight to their misguided belief system, giving up the notion of “reasonable restrictions”? I’m not religious in the traditional sense (I’m not really sure that anyone has a soul…), so I’m not trying to have a religious say in someone’s life. It only has to do with where I think the rest of society has jurisdiction in an otherwise private matter. Kind-of like how parenting methods or landlord behavior or employer behavior are private concerns unless they cross a certain line.
“So you’re sticking to your story that, although there is absolutely no evidence, women have medically unnecessary abortions of viable fetuses.”
What are you talking about?
First of all, I have provided evidence that women *seek* medically unnecessary abortions of viable fetuses. The Utah case and the Goswell cases illustrate that. (I.e. the mothers were not forced into abortions by their doctors or something. In the Utah case we have evidence directly from the mother that the fetus was a wanted fetus for the first seven months until the boyfriend told her to get rid of it. You’re at serious risk of coming down on the side of the patriarchy on this case.).
Second, I have then shown that evidence of the reasons for late term abortions are actively and successfully suppressed by NARAL in ways that don’t exist for any other medical procedure.
Third, the Goswell case shows that a doctor can get away with performing unnecessary late term abortions for more than a decade *because of the lack of oversight which NARAL has insisted on*.
Fourth, I’m asking for more oversight.
That is a pretty logical chain of argument, complete with examples. You can argue about the weight of them if you want (though so far what I’ve seen is just dismissiveness). But to argue that it is tantamount to alien abductions is just being a jerk.
We’ve seen this precise game in all sorts of other cases where the victim is helpless and there are institutional reasons to deny that a crime was committed. Are we going to believe the official prison reports on prison rape (i.e. that it rarely happens) when it is in the interest of the warden to say it never happens? Of course not. Should we reflexively believe the police on cases about police brutality if they only check on it was a sworn statement saying “no brutality here”? Of course not. Feminists more than most people understand that when the object of oppression is helpless there has to be oversight or it is enabled. Saying that there should be more oversight to ensure that there aren’t as many prison rapes is not arguing against criminal punishment. Saying that there should be more oversight about late term abortions is not arguing against all abortions.
A pro-life feminist believes that there are intense dependency issues and power-differentials between a mother and unborn child. These issues come to a head as the unborn child becomes viable.
Sebastian’s case would certainly be stronger for some examples. Nonetheless, I think he has a point: It’s inevitable that, were late-term abortions legally and practically available nationwide, someone somewhere would have a non-medically necessary abortion. Most things that are possible, someone, somewhere has done or will do.
But Sebastian, like most pro-lifers, is ignoring what happens to women. It’s also inevitable that, were late-term abortions universally banned except in cases of proven medical need, there would be women in desperate need of abortions who are nonetheless denied abortions, either because the people who need to sign off on it are in CYA mode or because they’re religious Christians who would rather see a woman suffer or die than permit an abortion.
Women likeAlicja Tysiac in Poland, who is now legally blind (and may soon be totally blind) because doctors weren’t willing to define her condition as one that medically required an abortion. Girls like 13 year old LC, who is paralyzed because doctors in Peru refused to operate on her because she was pregnant, but also refused to give her an abortion despite abortion being legal in cases of urgent medical need. Girls like 13 year old Paulina in Mexico, who was denied an abortion despite the law making abortion available to rape victims.
People like Danielle and Robb Deavers, who were forced by Nebraska’s pro-life laws to go through with a doomed pregnancy so they could watch their newborn Elizabeth suffer horribly for fifteen minutes before dying. Women like the 48 women in Wisconsin from 1969-1971 who died when an abortion might have saved them (Roe V Wade was in 1973). And, of course, there’s the inevitable fact that when abortion is illegal, some women get illegal abortions (which are often less safe), increasing the number of women who die.
And I don’t think there’s any question that some of the people who run Catholic hospitals will do everything they can to pressure the staff to not provide abortions, including excommunication.
Sebastian, there is no perfect world available. There is no possible law we can pass that will lead to an outcome in which nothing bad ever happens. So I don’t find “if women are free to make their own medical choices, there will be some bad things that happen” to be at all a persuasive argument. Bad things will happen regardless of if women can make their own choices. By taking women’s freedom away, you don’t prevent bad things from happening; you just bring us to a world in which bad things happen, INCLUDING women having their freedom taken away.
So the question isn’t “how do we avoid bad things ever happening?” We can’t. The question is, who do we want making these difficult decisions? I agree with Kelly about that:
Barbara, you and I cross-posted, but I think my comment #90 works as a response to your comment #88. We shouldn’t pass laws because we think they should be passed as a matter of abstract principal, without regard for the actual costs and benefits of the law. (I’m not saying that principals shouldn’t matter at all, just that they shouldn’t be the sole concern.) The costs of the law you favor would be very high on some families, especially on some women.
Sebastian wrote:
How is that different from what a pro-lifer who is not a feminist believes?
“Nonetheless, I think he has a point: It’s inevitable that, were late-term abortions legally and practically available nationwide, someone somewhere would have a non-medically necessary abortion.”
There is no reason to get hypothetical. I know you don’t characterize this country as *currently* having late-term abortions legally and practically available nationwide, and we know that the statistics on it are deliberately suppressed, and we know that neither the woman nor the doctor are likely to report them, yet still we see evidence of them even now (again see Goswell). So even in THIS world, we see medically non-necessary abortions. Even in the world where you think late-term abortions are too difficult to get, we see them.
As for letting it be purely between the doctor and mother, in no other power differential situation would you so totally write off the viewpoint of the 3rd party whose life is getting extinguished. I understand that YOU don’t believe in the personhood of the unborn child. But a large majority of people do, as do pro-life feminists. If you don’t believe in the personhood of black people, of course you don’t think slavery is bad. If you don’t believe in the personhood of the unborn but viable fetus, of course you don’t think killing it is a big deal. But if you do, there is a *balance* of competing rights between *different* persons. You don’t balance it by totally writing them off.
No. No you haven’t. You have provided no links to the “Utah Case.” All the information we have on it is what Chingona kindly provided. That tells us that a woman in Utah asked a man to beat her so that she would miscarry. I have no evidence that she sought a legal abortion from a medical provider. In the second case, Goswell, the doctor is being tried on murder charges. Again, no legal, medically unnecessary abortion was performed. In fact, patients are testifying that he performed those operations against their will.
If you’d provide a link supporting your assertions about the Utah case, I’d happily read them. I’d even admit that you are correct about what happened there if those links supported your claims. Can I get a link from a reputable source?
This is a lie. There is no other way to put it. You have claimed that NARAL succesfully lobbied to eliminate reporting on late term abortions. Claiming and showing are not the same thing. Can you provide a link from a reputable source to support your claim? If you do that you may then truthfully claim that you’ve shown such a thing.
Yes. In the same way that serial killers can get away with committing murder for more than a decade. Although I’m pretty sure that NARAL has nothing to do with the serial killers ability. Goswell is a murderer who performed abortions and other procedures against the will of at least some of his patients. You’d probably be better off dropping Goswell from your arguments. Another reason to drop Goswell from your argument is that his name is actually Gosnell. The Goswell mistake comes from anti-abortion sites. Reputable news sites know the man’s real name.
None of this lends credence to your claim in which you wrote:
When I asked if you meant legally, you did not say no. So I am assuming that you mean that, “in practical effect fully viable fetuses can be legally aborted for non-serious reasons.”
Showing that there are women who will seek a late term abortion for non-serious reasons does not support this claim.
Citing a man being prosecuted for murder for performing late term abortions – especially when you have made the same error in his name that all the anti-abortion sites make – does not support this claim.
Lying about providing evidence for the claim that NARAL lobbied successfully to eliminate reporting on late term abortions does not support this claim.
You are not credible.
Ampersand wrote:
It certainly would be stronger with some examples. This is what I’ve been asking for since comment #28. I don’t, however, agree that he has a point. You have a point, but that is not the one that Sebastian H has been making. Sebastian H is making the point that this is going on right now and we know that this is going on. But he cannot, or will not, provide evidence.
Elective 3rd trimester abortions are not legal. Sebastian is claiming that, in effect, they are legal because they are easy to procure. That is a different point than Ampersand has made and I would like to see some evidence supporting this assertion.
How am I to come to an agreement on any points with somebody who provides no evidence for their side and lies about providing evidence for their side?
As for letting it be purely between the doctor and mother, in no other power differential situation would you so totally write off the viewpoint of the 3rd party whose life is getting extinguished.
The third party doesn’t have the ability to state their own case. It’s generally assumed that both the mother and the doctor will take the interests of the unborn child into account. Those are the people who’ve been responsible for the fetus’s welfare for the last nine months, and the ones who know the most about the situation. If you assume that women are heartless or doctors who perform abortion are corrupt, I can see where you’d have trouble with that idea.
The concept of “innocent until proven guilty” should mean that we don’t require people to prove that they’re not committing a crime. Instead, we should be prosecuting crimes once there’s actual evidence that one has occurred. “Prove that this abortion was legal” is similar (though much less severe, I think) to the proposal in Georgia to require women who have a miscarriage to submit police reports.
To make it clear, I would not object to all states requiring a doctor’s statement that the abortion was medically necessary. I would object to requiring test results or diagnoses, since those are private medical information. I would object to making the woman explain to a judge why she needs an abortion.
Basically, I would object to anything that makes a woman carrying an ancephalous fetus or a pregnant woman with cancer jump through legal hoops before getting an abortion. Especially because of the risks to them of delaying that abortion. I’d also object to reporting procedures that have the effect of preventing medically necessary abortions.
What would you suggest as an alternative?
“What would you suggest as an alternative?”
I’d suggest what happens in nearly every European country, that the doctor document why a late term (which in Europe typically means 20-24 weeks or later) occurred complete with charts and all medically relevant tests which prove it. It isn’t as if I’m suggesting something that has never been heard of or tried in the history of the world.
To whom would the doctor have to provide this information? What kind of authority would you give the third party? Would they review past abortions performed by that doctor or would they have to give approval for the abortion in advance? What would you do to protect the medical privacy of the women?
This is where the abortion politics of this country become very important. Click on some of Amp’s links. Are you okay with those outcomes? Are those acceptable to you? Because they aren’t to me.
Can you provide some links to the policies to which you refer. My google-fu came up with nothing and I’m eager to read these rules. Can you get me the links to these policies in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Albania, Austria, Italy, Norway, Greece or Sweden? Or at least give me the search terms I can use to find them.
From your claim, it seems like documentation is provided post-operation so that there is no approval process only a review and possible penalty. I’m wondering what the deadline is for providing documentation and what kind of committee reviews it as well as the various penalties for both an unwarranted late term abortion and late reporting or lack of reporting by the physician. Are there any penalties for the patient? It would also be interesting to know the requirements for the physician’s documentation. Are patients names and other identifying attributes redacted? If not, does the review committee have some kind of procedure to protect the identity of the patient.
There are so many questions raised by your outline of what nearly every European country does.
“Can you get me the links to these policies in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Albania, Austria, Italy, Norway, Greece or Sweden?”
Wow. Are you a cite please troll? Try abortion EU. Or abortion policy and then the country name.
By way of example see UK abortion law here
Note that it is generally illegal in the UK after the 6th month.
See also the conviction of doctor Sood for illegal abortions in Australia.
Your link fails, Sebastian. But thanks for the search terms. Things like “France late term abortion laws” produced nothing that mentioned anything like, “… the doctor document why a late term (which in Europe typically means 20-24 weeks or later) occurred complete with charts and all medically relevant tests which prove it.”
Although I don’t see the actual laws when I use your search terms, though, leaving me with no actual details on the various national laws and the procedures in place to monitor late term abortion.
Using your excellent search term I find things like this map with simplified summaries of abortion laws in the EU. When I click on each of the countries on the map for details, let’s see if it gives any details supporting your claim of how almost every European country handles late term abortion:
Austria: NO
Belgium: NO
Bulgaria: Maybe? But I lean towards a NO
Cyprus: NO
Czech Republic: NO
Denmark: Maybe (the abortion must be approved by a committee of four people)
Estonia: NO
Finland: NO
France: NO
Germany: NO
Greece: NO
Hungary: NO
Ireland: NO
Italy: NO
Latvia: NO
Lithuania: NO
Luxembourg: NO
Malta: NO
The Netherlands: NO
Poland: NO
Portugal: NO
Romania: NO
Slovakia: NO
Slovenia: YES (After the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, special authorisation by a commission composed of a gynaecologist/obstetrician, a general physician or a specialist in internal medicine and a social worker or a psychologist is required. )
Spain: NO
Sweden: YES (After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare. )
UK: NO
4 out of 27 doesn’t seem like “nearly every European country” to me.
I’m disappointed on two fronts. The first is that, according to the link I used, it is not true that, “… what happens in nearly every European country, that the doctor document why a late term (which in Europe typically means 20-24 weeks or later) occurred complete with charts and all medically relevant tests which prove it.”
Secondly, I was really looking forward to reading laws of multiple countries that have passed what may – if implemented acceptably – have been a law that I could have agreed upon with an pro-lifer.
It looks like you couldn’t find a link to the applicable laws, either, huh?
You either added the last two lines on your comment while I was checking out the links that you led me to, or I just flat out missed them.
The link to UK abortion law says nothing about, “… the doctor [must] document why a late term (which in Europe typically means 20-24 weeks or later) occurred complete with charts and all medically relevant tests which prove it.
I’m not sure how your last line is significant. Abortion is also generally illegal in the US after the 6th month, no? The exceptions appear to be pretty much the same as the ones you find in the US, too.