Muzman on 4/7/2013 at 02:34

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-dramatic chipmunk music!-

Anyway, a nice old fashioned stoush. Didn't think we had it in us anymore. Hopefully Briareos now has some idea why Texas women are putting up a fight over this right here though.

For all the debate over viability and pain and personhood and all the rest; the fact that it is such an indistinct area as far as our conception of what 'human' actually means and none of it fits at all well with our laws and morals (which itself says a few interesting things about what it is to be human, maybe) - that generally confirms to me that there ought to be no restriction on third trimester abortions. I suspect just about everyone here agrees, broadly speaking, with all the exceptions usually put in place where third trimesters are prohibited; physical and mental health of mother or child, complications, rape and that sort of thing. This is almost exclusively why later abortions happen anyway. Fussing over where to draw the line, while interesting, doesn't really seem to serve any purpose in a wealthy western country at least.
A slippery slope to, I dunno, some sort of post birth euthanasia or something seems fairly easy to disprove. You don't wipe away all the precedents regarding individuals and children just like that. Once you're out of the womb you are on pretty solid legal ground. The slippery slope is more the other direction. Once you put a time marker in utero, which isn't based on anything truly solid enough to stand, it is just going to keep moving back toward conception 'just to be on the safe side'.
It's more of a marker of community principle or something than a useful restriction. Which is understandable but not actually necessary.

Oh yeah; some thing more on the original topic, I found this good summary of the kind of multi-pronged legal assault that is going on nationally over there.

(http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/16/2/gpr160207.html)

I don't think anyone's run the numbers on Texas that I can see but you can see he costs that are sometimes incurred by these changes in the Virginia example.



A country clinic operating on a tight margin in Texas is unlikely to be able to comply.

Ohio just did pretty much the same thing apparently.
(http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/07/01/2237701/ohio-budget-signed-into-law/)

So this is the wedge religious conservatives are hammering in what looks like a co-ordinated fashion everywhere, and hard at that.

Briareos H on 4/7/2013 at 08:03

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Re. metrics, whichever way someone wants to define the limit, it will end up subjective. As I mentioned earlier, the date limit is ultimately a minor point in the grand scheme of things because late-term, fringe abortions don't appear to be very common outside of medical reasons. Most countries in the world limit it between 12 to 24 weeks and it works.
Sometimes, I think a small touch of naive conservatism is good in the sense of "yeah we don't really know how to put a limit but we really want to say that a fetus is a person before birth" and I can roll with that concept: whether in or out of the utero, the thing is completely co-dependant anyway and we know the brain starts taking in and memorizing experiences long before birth. If the larger part of society decides that at some point before birth the fetus becomes a person, then a compromise between freedom of the mother and aborting a person must be found. Not cool for the mother (once again: not talking about rape cases or medical conditions, that should be a disclaimer for every post apparently) but I really can understand the gut feeling that most people seem to hold that the thing is alive and kicking before birth.
Still, I totally could live in a society that states the fetus is a person at birth, imposing no restriction on abortion. I don't believe in the "slippery slope" towards authorizing infant killing or whatever idiotic idea. There is no compelling metric so why not choose the easiest one? And yes, after all, why not. I personally don't think there's another easy metric, we are defined by our experiences and the experiences of a fetus are a continuum - as for human reasoning and rational thoughts, which can arguably be used to define being a person, that doesn't come until long after birth. Plus whatever leads us to make less babies is probably a good idea. Very "first world reasoning" though.

I get the feeling that not having a clear-cut opinion on things is often frowned upon in debates, especially online, but I think here's a beautiful case where a clear-cut opinion is usually a bigoted one.

Same goes with the "only women" argument. I can totally agree that women's groups should have a larger say than men in legislative decisions about abortion, although not as much as reproduction specialists. Still, placating loudly that message here sounded like a red herring because I don't see anyone fighting publicly over it in the context of that Texas bill.
We live in a society that, although not yet in practice, can --in intent-- define itself beyond gender roles and that's cool.



Yeah and I preferred the debate when it was about the intents of lawmakers rather than about patriarchy and dethtoll showing us how much of a feminist he is. Mopgoblin and him telling us what we could and couldn't discuss was a prime example of poisoning the well and I'm glad the discussion went past that.

SubJeff on 4/7/2013 at 14:04

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dethtoll; facilitating reasonable discussion since 1992

Queue on 12/7/2013 at 07:00

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So you're all for Government Death Squads?

Vivian on 12/7/2013 at 10:03

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Dude, like, really cute, miniaturised drone strikes on neonates. I'm calling it now.