What do you think about abortion

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Medicaid is a state program; whether or not the state pays probably varies.

Sometimes a transvaginal ultrasound is medically justified; sometimes it is not. There are a lot of Republican politicians who think that they know better than doctors whether an ultrasound is justified.

True, the difference is there is a thing called doctor-patient confidentiality. To prevent abortions the government would have to intrude itself between you and your doctor, which the court has decided is a violation of your right to privacy. A fetus is not a legal person, and so can't be murdered.

There are also Democrats who make the same error. Most of the interference with our diets comes from the Pinko Stinko Commie Loving Freedom Hating Democrats.

ruveyn

Even if you made it illegal, it has existed since women have got knocked up.I know herbs that can be used,the dosage is tricky,to much and you may have a dead woman.I'm uncomfortable with the idea of late term abortion.But I can't be the judge of that person.

A better option would be mifepristone followed by misoprostol one or two days later. Both are available over the counter in many countries. It still has risks without medical supervision, but it´s up to 60%-90% safer than ´herbs´. The tricky part is getting this information to women who want it. Most women don´t know about it and how to get it without arousing suspicion in case it´s only available on prescription. Unfortunately, this has led to a lively black market with prices as much as $100 per tablet in countries where abortion is illegal.

Doctor-patient confidentiality even has its limits. Driving impaired, gunshot wounds, STDs, and underaged abortion. So the government already intrudes in certain instances of medical confidentiality.

That's really because of personhood and legal rights. In the cases you mentioned, other "persons" are at risk so they intercede. An unborn baby is not considered a person legally and doesn't have the same rights as a born person. I am not sure if an unborn baby after the age of viability is considered a legal person or not or has rights, but I know people have been charged in their deaths before.

I think that the bottom line in your position on the debate is that all unborn babies should be legally considered persons and have the same legal rights that born persons do, correct? If so, then that may be what we should be debating, because if they are ruled legal persons, then abortion would automatically be outlawed.

Leg surgery, A sad necessity.

It works both ways, it is bizare how conservatives believe that the government should constantly regulate women's uterus yet any mention of the word "regulation" in any other context is a cause of huge concern. I don't get why conservatives value corporations' privacy a lot more than women's .


F conservatives. Kermit Gosnell is precisely the fault of efforts from republicans to make abortions harder to get.

You nailed it. And I don't believe ALL abortion would automatically be outlawed. MOST, yes, but not all. If an unborn child is murdered because it was conceived through rape, it would be unjust to punish the mother who was faced the difficult choice of keeping a potentially unwanted child. It's already unjust to the baby either way because the baby can't help how it was conceived nor can it defend itself against whatever the mother does to it. So we look to the criminal who committed the rape, who DID have a choice, violated a person, caused a baby to be conceived, and subsequently caused the baby's death. He'd then be a murderer. As long as we keep Justice blind and balanced, I don't care what we do, aside from the obvious emotional aspect of rape, baby-killing, and possibly death penalty for the perpetrator. The system, and the laws that go with it, is prima facie unjust and should be changed to recognize that a human being is a human being regardless of how long it has existed.

That's only ONE scenario in which I could see abortion as an unfortunate necessity.

The other is the self-defense justification that I've outlined previously. I would even support late-term abortion, cruel though it may be, if it were medically necessary, i.e. the woman faced certain death if the child were brought to term. However, even that is a difficult call because a fetus's viability outside the womb can be established early on. It is possible in many circumstances to terminate the pregnancy safely without killing the mother or the child.

This last one is very personal for me. It was discovered early on that my wife had placenta previa with my daughter. For those not in the know, it's a condition in which the placenta covers the cervix, making a natural vaginal delivery impossible. It also severely limits the possibility of carrying the baby to term because you never know when the placenta is going to pop. The night my daughter was born, my wife had taken a fairly routine bathroom break when the floodgates opened, and you'd have thought our bathroom was a murder scene from all the blood on the floor and the toilet--like something straight out of a slasher film. We stayed calm but got to the hospital as quickly as we could.

Normal C-sections have hours of preparation, both for the doctors and the patient, and take all the time that doctors can reasonably give to make sure that the procedure goes smoothly and the patient can recover quickly. I know this because I've been in the O.R. for one and can honestly say from experience my wife is beautiful inside and out. Emergency sections, however, are basically meatball surgery. I don't care how good your doctor is, he might as well have ripped you open with a rusty cleaver. My wife has a straight line now from the incision from her second section, but the first one looked like something from Alien clawed its way out. Unlike Alien, my wife survived, as did my daughter.

I realize that describing the brutality of an emergency section doesn't help my case any...

Anyway, my daughter was born in the 7th month, not even close to term. For 7 months, she was a big baby at 4 lb. Apnea kept her in the children's hospital for nearly 3 weeks, so bringing her home felt more like we were adopting a child. But she grew quickly, stayed healthy, and for two or three years people mistook her and her brother for twins.

So even in cases when comparatively crude procedures are necessary and risky, doctors are skilled and knowledgeable enough to make the best of a risky situation and ensure a maximal chance of survival for all.

My point is that while abortion could save lives when a pregnancy poses a risk of death to the mother, there are more often than not alternatives that can save the lives of both which render abortion unnecessary. I can't think of any situation in which abortion WOULD be necessary to save a woman's life. Someone far more educated than I might know, but any procedure that is reasonably available or becomes reasonably available which would preserve the lives of mother and child would negate the need for abortion.

As much as I adore my 4yo, as beautiful, sweet, and funny as she is, and as much as she has me wrapped around her little finger, I'd have traded it all in a heartbeat if it meant the life of my companion/lover/friend. I feel blessed not to have been faced with that choice. I can't be completely anti-abortion as long as husbands and wives are faced with that.

But I can't be completely in favor of anything that inherently means the unnecessary termination of a human life; and as long as babies CAN be brought to term or near term, as long as alternatives exist to save the lives of mothers and the unborn, abortion will remain largely unnecessary and unjust.

@OliveOil:

I wan't ignoring this fact, either, but didn't consider it relevant earlier. I still don't think it's relevant, and it's a blatant red herring. Would AspE change his position if a fetus IS a legal person? As I've often said, I don't care what the law says. Laws can be changed, and often are.

If murder is defined as the willful, unjustified termination of a human life, then abortion by definition is more often murder than not. It at the very least is manslaughter, which would further be classified as voluntary or involuntary. Even if you took LKL's argument, or the argument that "we didn't kill it, we just took it out of the womb--it died on its own," you've got a case of voluntary manslaughter or negligent homicide. Involuntary could be accidental death or self-defense. If even an embryo is a human life, and it is, then legal "personhood" really shouldn't matter. That shouldn't even be in our vocabulary. Were Jews in Nazi Germany legal persons? African slaves prior to the Civil War? Ok, bad example on that last one: They WERE counted as people, and the 1/5 thing was a compromise. However, the rationale for enslavement was and often still is that those people are somehow less than human.

The culture today is different than that of Nazi Germany and Antebellum America. Take human trafficking in our current time: There are two schools of thought here. One is the misogynist view that women are not human or are less than human, nothing more than objects that can be sold for a price. The other is that even if women are human, it doesn't matter. This is no different from attitudes in the CSA, the Third Reich, and even the abortion debate. The idea of there even being such a thing as legal "personhood" when it comes to human beings is just silly, if not downright offensive.

Both attitudes are immoral. At LEAST the immoral attitude that "it's a human being, but it doesn't matter" is consistent. Classifying a human, any human for any reason, as inhuman or sub-human is just absurd.

No.

A human fetus has a parasitical relationship with the mother's body (I didn't say it was a "parasite"). And, if it's using my body's biological resources to sustain its existence, it lives or dies at my discretion.

When it's able to sustain life on its own, it is no longer in a parasitical relationship with the mother's body, and its existence can be sustained by others. I couldn't care less about its "potential" to become an independent entity because I don't give two hoots about the supposed "rights" of "potential people." I only care about "actual people," not "potential people."

"Fetal rights" are inane. Whether or not a human has a "right" to life are defined by circumstances more so than any inherent quality of being human. The circumstances surrounding those of a fetus do not convince me that it should not be eliminated at the mother's behest.

It's better to have a legal abortion than it is to have an illegal one.

Since you agreed that your position is based on your opinion that the unborn and unviable baby should legally be a "person" and have the same rights as born people, whats your argument for the reason that should happen?

My argument that it shouldn't be a legal "person" and have the same rights is simply that without the mother carrying it, it cannot live at all. It is totally dependent on her right then and if she were to be fatally wounded, it would die no matter what. Therefore, her rights supercede its, and if they do then her right to remove it before it is viable because she wants to should carry as much weight as her right to remove it before it is viable because otherwise she risks probably serious injury or death. Because she is the baby's life support, and because she is capable of sustaining her own life, then her right to pursue happiness even takes precedence over the baby's life to it's potential capability of sustaining it's own life. Before the age of viability the baby really has no life of it's own. It's totally dependent on the mothers body, which nothing can replace. Once the baby is viable, then it has potential for it's own life, which usually comes about by full term delivery.

I guess my point is that because before viability the baby's life is completely dependent on the mother, then the baby's life belongs to her and not the baby. Once there is a possibility of the baby living even with life support after birth then it's life doesn't belong to the mother because there are other means of keeping it alive. Do you see what I'm saying? If not let me know and I'll try to explain it clearer. I am not sufficiently caffiened up yet, so I can try after a few more pots...... uh...... cups of coffee.

If a fetus has rights then so does every bacteria in our guts have rights.

ruveyn

I don't know. Is a foetus classed as bacteria?