When the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act was being debated in Congress a while back, there was lots of talk about the required health exception to any abortion ban. Pro-choicers argued that even if so-called “partial-birth” abortions were banned, a woman should be able to access the procedure if continuing her pregnancy would pose a serious risk to her life or health (pro-choicers also pointed out that, as most Congressmen are not medical doctors, they set out to ban a procedure that doesn’t exist, and defined it so broadly that it could encompass various types of abortions, including pre-viability second-trimester abortions). Anti-choicers made the argument that partial-birth abortion is never necessary to preserve the life or health of a pregnant woman. And they had a point. That specific procedure wasn’t the only option available — a woman could have a different type of abortion procedure if her life or health was threatened. Of course, the leaves out the fact that so-called “partial birth” abortion procedures — usually thought to reference a procedure known as intact dilation and extraction — are very rare, and are usually chosen because they’re the safest and best option for that particular pregnant woman, given her particular circumstances. Doctors could opt to perform the abortion another way, but it might not be as safe for her. Either way, the anti-choice argument won out, and Congress passed a vague ban on an abortion procedure that no one in the medical community had ever defined. And they didn’t include a health exception.
Anti-choicers, before and after the passage of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, argued that the health exception is a convenient loophole for women seeking abortions. They continue to argue that there should never be a health exception for any abortion ban — including legislation to ban all abortions, like we recently saw in South Dakota. The only exception, many of them say, should be in cases where the pregnant woman will die if she gives birth — and some even think that abortion should be illegal no matter what, even if being pregnant threatens the woman’s life.
So are they right? Are health exceptions giant loopholes which will make abortion bans meaningless?
Ask Alicja Tysiac. She lives in a country where abortion is highly restricted, and can only be performed in public hospitals if at least three doctors testify that the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the woman’s physical health or life, if the fetus has a genetic defect that is very serious or is incompatible with life, or if the pregnancy was the result of a crime. Her country, then, does have a health exception — but it’s so strict, and the Catholic church wields such power in that country, that doctors are afraid to utilize it, and end up compromising women’s health in the name of “pro-life” politics. And because she wasn’t able to terminate her pregnancy, Alicja Tysiac is almost blind.
A few years ago a string of doctors told Alicja Tysiac she couldn’t have an abortion even though she would otherwise likely go blind.
A 35-year-old single mother of two living in Warsaw, Poland, Tysiac had suffered from severe myopia–or nearsightedness–for many years. Three gynecologists told her that if she gave birth to her third child, her sight would almost surely worsen.
But Tysiac was unable to get doctors to perform the abortion that could save her sight. One doctor at her local hospital in Warsaw denied her application in the hallway without even examining her, Tysiac told Women’s eNews. A second doctor, after consulting the first doctor in front of Tysiac, also turned her down.
She delivered her third child in November 2000 and not long afterward she suffered retinal hemorrhage, which left her unable to see objects more than five feet away without the assistance of special glasses. She believes she will one day go completely blind.
She has filed suit in the European Union Court of Human Rights.
The current Polish law enables 150-200 women to have legal abortions every year. But between 80,000 and 200,000 Polish women have illegal abortions every year. I’ll say it again: Illegalizing abortion does not decrease the demand for it; nor does it decrease the abortion rate. Compare, for example, the abortion rate (legal and illegal) of a place like Belgium (where abortion is legal and widely available) to the abortion rate of a place like Brazil (where abortion is illegal and highly restricted). You’ll find that Brazil has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Belgium has one of the lowest.
And yet anti-choice forces in this country would like to see us become more like Brazil or Poland.
In 2001 Tysiac filed a criminal complaint against her gynecologist but the district investigator said there was only a casual link between her gynecologist’s decision to continue the pregnancy and her worsening sight. Her case was dropped and no disciplinary action was ever taken against the doctor, according to court documents.
Having an inclusive health exception is important for exactly this reason: If it’s too narrow, doctors will be afraid to properly implement it, and women will suffer.
Thanks to Chioma for the link.
{ 34 comments }
Anti-choice forces would like us to become a country wherein every act of intercourse could lead to pregnancy. Let’s not kid ourselves. They don’t seek to limit abortions or even outlaw all abortions–their itent is to take us back to the dark ages where contraception was unheard of.
Their opposition to the “health of the mother” exception is simply the first line of attack. And, they’ve got a lot of momentum right now.
Scary, scary times, people.
Anybody else completely sick upon hearing that? Her gynecologist decided to continue her pregnancy.
*barfs, wishing that it would fly through the space-time continuum and land on said gynecologist’s head*
The same line jumped out at me, Kyra. Disgusting.
Jill,
You never answered the question of whether an exception for the mother’s health in the United States under Doe v. Bolton’s current definition of health would be a giant loophole. Isn’t there a difference is how “health” exceptions are defined and implemented in Poland compared to the United States? You can’t ask if “health” under Doe’s definition of “health” is a giant loophole and then answer your question by examining how another country deals with abortion and health issues. By “inclusive health exception,” do you mean an anything goes health exception? If so, then that’s not a real health exception at all.
It would also be nice to say that the illegal abortion estimate in Poland is from a pro-choice advocacy group and the way (their methodology, if there was any) they got their estimate isn’t provided in the article. Just restating the claims of abortion advocacy groups regarding illegal abortion without examining their methodology is the same kind of action that has led ignorant pro-choicers to claim for years that 5,000 to 10,000 women a year died from illegal abortions before Roe.
Is it true that pregnancy can turn severe myopia into blindness? Was her retinal hemorrhage caused by giving birth? Or caused by something else?
see
Permanent Blindness as a Complication of Pregnancy-Induced Hypertension
Serous Retinal Detachment Triggered By Eclamptic Attack
I know that I’ve received smackdowns in left-blogostan for expressing this point of view before, but I’ll do it again anyway:
aren’t Christians supposed to believe in “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? or to use the “Old Testament” version: “an eye for an eye” (isn’t it really, for all the much balleyhoo’d difference, the same thing — if you take out someone’s eye, you gotta expect your eye to be taken out under “do unto others”)? Anyone involved in preventing a woman from having an abortion when her health is threatened by a pregnancy should have his/her health similarly threatened. Anyone who prevents a woman from having an abortion and she dies in childbirth is guilty of murder and the death penalty should apply. The case you cite is literally one where “an eye for an eye” applies …
People who say “why would one have an abortion for health reasons” and who thus minimize the very real risks of continued pregnancy and delivery, while not themselves at the time of making that statement (FWIW, my mom has noted that none of those women who have had abortions, regretted them and turned whacky “pro-life” seem to have had abortions because of health complications in pregnancy) experiencing a traumatic pregnancy, are the abortion-wars equivalent of Chicken-Hawks. If you are not willing yourself to sacrifice your health for a pregancy, why should you be willing to have used the full force and power of law to force women to do so?
While I believe in free speech, ideas have consequences and, from chickenhawks to pro-lifers to rich folk who can weasle out of legal constraints, I am tiredof people pushing policies that do not effect them but make the lives of others miserable. If you are not willing or gonna face the bad consequences of your idea, then you should keep your trap shut. If “pro-lifers” really wanted to convince me of their bona fides regarding “no health exceptions” each one should pair up with a pregnant woman and undergo the same threats to life and limb that she does — i.e. if she goes blind, the pro-lifer gets blinded, etc. If they are not willing to do that, well then, they are no better than chickenhawks sending other people off to war while they “support the war effort” by smearing Gold Star Moms and cheering for torture from the comfort of their air-conditioned basement computer rooms.
The reason we “anti-choicers” want the narrowest possible health exceptions is that we believe a fetus is an innocent human life. Once you start from that position, nothing but the most extreme of conditions (if any) should allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy and take a life. Then there was the line that received such strong objections, “her gynecologist’s decision to continue the pregnancy”
As far as we know, the pregnancy was not forced on this woman. Part of the pro-life position (to generalize about a very diverse group of people) is that men and women should act in a sexually responsible manner. This means that when you engage in sexual conduct, you’d better be prepared for the consequences. The most extreme version of this argument is the usually religious based one, which says no contraception, and no sex until you are married. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people saying that you just need to make sure you are using birth control (preferably two different kinds). This isn’t because we want to deny women of some basic human right; no one has a right to sex without consequences (which is why we demand that men pay child support, even if they did not wish to be fathers).
UH, QM, are you a man?
Sex is the same thing as agreeing to pregnancy, any more than accepting an invitation to dinner is assenting to sex in exchange later on.
QM:
Your position is noted. I’ll let Amanda Marcotte know that you’re conceding her large point, which is that this is all about punishing women for having sex.
QM, the fetus is life position is what the anti-choicers SAY, but what they BELIEVE is that women should be punished for having sex. Otherwise, there would be no reason to talk about the bad conduct of the woman involved, or the consequences of their acts. If you are ‘defending’ ‘innocent’ life, the conduct of the incubator becomes irrelevant for you. Even if I bought that you are defending life, your gross disregard for the lives of grown women and their ability to take care of the children they already have belies your stated rationale for pursing abortion bans with narrow health exceptions. It’s like you have to keep being reminded that women are people too. But you don’t care.
Let me point out a huge assumption you are making. That this woman had total control over her sexual choices. A lot of women do not. It runs a spectrum from that child who was allegedly gang raped by the football team recently all the way to housewives who are made to realize that their husbands 1) don’t believe in birth control; 2) will throw them out if they don’t have sex and 3) have few alternative means of supporting themselves and the 5 kids they already have. And there is a lot a shame and denial surrounding those in that boat. You may want to sit on the high court of deciding who is and is not a slut, and who deserves to have their life saved and who does not, but I’d like you to think about limiting your judgments to the ‘person’ in the mirror, and let women and their doctors worry about the life and dealth of themselves and what they are carrying inside their bodies.
I would feel more comfortable about the bona fides of people taking QM’s position on sex and “consequences” if men taking such positions were willing to submit themselves to the same physical risk as women do with pregnancy: i.e. if a woman looses her sight from pregancy, the man has to loose his sight as well.
At the very least men taking this position, should have simulated pregancies (hormone shots, weight packs, etc.) if they knock their girlfriends up … after all, they should face the “consequences” of sex as well. Otherwise this all sounds like sexism in the guise of moralizing to me.
As for me, I’m not gonna do these things myself, but I’m no hypocrite: I’m not asking women who are pregnant to face the “consequences” of sex.
As to the fetus being an “innocent human life” — that’s a matter of definition that tends to vary from religion to religion. Some people are anti-abortion ’cause they believe in original sin and the fetus is a “guilty human life” who should at least have a chance to get born and hence baptized and thus saved from eternal damnation. Other religions hold that the fetus is not really quite human (e.g. read the Hebrew Bible) and thus taking the life of a fetus, while maybe not always morally acceptable, is in no way anything close to manslaughter (if a fetus is a human, do women who have a tendancy to miscarry have an obligation not to get pregnant lest they miscarry again — after all, shouldn’t someone always try to avoid killing another human when it can be avoided?) — and thus, it would be immoral to force a woman to suffer morbidity, damaging her body made in the image of God, so that way a mere fetus could live.
Of course, that’s the problem with tryin’ to legislate morality: one person’s morality is another’s immorality.
T. Comfyshoes,
Neither of you links discuss whether pregnancy is a danger/health risk for women with severe myopia. Rather they discuss the risks of preeclampsia.
It certainly is possible that pregnancy is a risk factor for women with severe myopia but I haven’t seen any information yet which points to that or that this woman giving birth caused her retinal hemorhage.
I realize that this isn’t the main point of the post, I know that there are places where women are way worse off than in the US and that we should definitely take whatever incremental steps to make their lives better, and Jill, I’m sorry for hijacking, but really, who cares if her pregnancy caused her blindness. What really matters is that there was a woman who got pregnant and didn’t want to be. Period. The reasons she doesn’t want to be prenant don’t matter, whether for health, emotional, financial, or any other reasons. Whatever she decides to do about it really isn’t anybody elses’s business. Not the government of Poland, not the church, nobody. Of course, if there is an abortion ban, there should be very wide health exceptions, but there really shouldn’t be any restrictions on abortion at all anywhere.
I am sick to death of people without the necessary equipment to produce children going on and on about what is or isn’t a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy. For that matter, I’m sick of women going on about all the dirty sluts having abortions as well. So, with all due respect to QM, Jivin, and the others who make that argument, fuck off, because unless you’re the one who is pregnant, it isn’t up to you. If I have something growing inside of me, whether it’s a human being or not, I get the final say in whether it stays inside of me. And if that’s immoral, well you can take your goddamn morality and stick it up your bloviating ass, because I don’t need or want it.
No
No, it’s about making sure that women understand that actions have consequences, and if they can’t face those consequences, maybe they need to not do the action; an unpopular sentiment, I know, in a society that believes everyone has a right to do whatever the hell they want and have the government pick up the wreckage. On that note, any way that we can make men pick up more of the responsibility when they get a woman pregnant, I am all for.
bmc90:
This is like me saying that feminists don’t really want women’s equality, they just hate and/or mistrust men. I’m sure there are some who do, but it’s an unfair generalization to say that all do.
Yes, I have to keep reminding myself that I am a person. It’s harder than you might think. Apparently, what you need to be reminded of is that not all women are perpetual victims: many just have bad judgment and make bad decisions. They (we) aren’t entitled to lives without consequence. Yes, the child gang-raped by the football team is a horrible, disgusting tragedy, but considering the fact that a very small percentage of abortions are due to rape or incest, those should be put aside for the sake of debate (as you can make exceptions based on hard cases, but not good policy). The housewives aren’t just helpless victims: they’re the ones who married these men in the first place, that was a choice they made.
People choose to drive all the time, but nobody advocates withholding rehabilitation because they made that choice and ought to live with the consequences of the predicatable accidents.
Oh, sure, it’s unrealistic for most people not to drive in the modern world, but some folks do it — either they live in cities where public transportation is available or they eschew cars like the Old Order Amish.
Some folks might say that this example is different because no “innocent life,” whatever that is, is at stake. But your stated reason is not the “innocent life.” For you, you’ve said right out that “it’s about making sure that women understand that actions have consequences, and if they can’t face those consequences, maybe they need to not do the action.” IOW, sex outside some set of prescribed circumstances is immoral and the proper punishments are unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Though, of course, nothing in history really indicates that these deterrent measures eliminate sex outside of marriage; nor do all women have a say in the matter.
As an aside, rape is hardly a rare exception. If you’re reading out an exception for something that happens with great regularity, you’re simply declaring that you want those women punished anyway, even if they did nothing “wrong.”
QM, if I’m sitting in the emegency room where doctors are arguing about whether my 16 year old unconscious daughter “deserves” to have an abortion, may or may not go blind, or die, with neither I nor the doctors having any idea how she got pregnant, I guess I’ll call you and you can tell me to put aside her life for the sake of debate. Then I’ll pass the telephone over to the mother of an incest victim in the same boat. But you will probably be too busy helping rapists get visitation rights to see their children to take the call. Enjoy. Thanks, but I would rather have policy made on the “hard” cases, as in the ones where I or people I love could die.
I’m thrilled to hear that once I got married, I signed on for what ever crazy thing my husband decided to do next, and I can’t even do anything to save my own life so I can take care of my kids. Wonderful.
Given the number of unreported sex crimes, you have NO idea how many abortions result from rape or incest. Tossing aside the life of a victim of these crimes to protect a part of the persons’ body engaged primarily in cell division is insane. Keep. Your. Twisted. Morality. For. Yourself. How is that for a choice?
I am not going to get into the whole “life begins at conception” dispute again (rehashed above). But the argument that pro-lifers MAKE against health exceptions is NOT that a person’s llife outweighs another person’s health– and that is precisely BECAUSE that they know that it is a losing argument to argue that we should make a woman go blind or sterile or cause her to suffer massive internal bleeding just to preserve the life of an embryo or fetus. The fact is, even if one believes that life begins at conception, it does not follow that one it is immoral to kill a being that threatens a woman’s health and well-being. Most pro-lifers, for instance, also support broad rights of self-defense and gun ownership that would allow people to shoot an intruder in their home without having to prove that the intruder was a threat to the occupant’s life (as opposed to merely being a threat to injure the occupant).
Rather, the argument that pro-lifers make is that once you recognize a health exception, it’s a loophole that leads to abortion for any reason. At bottom, THIS argument strikes me as the worst sort of sexism. It is essentially an argument that you can’t trust women, that they will lie and say their health is threatened when it isn’t. Further, with respect to partial-birth abortions (or late term abortions), where is the evidence that it is borne out? Where is the rash of “convenience” abortions in the third trimester? My understanding is that current practice is that these types of abortions ONLY occur when there is a serious threat to the mother or some very serious deficiency or deformity in the fetus.
I would actually say only about half of pro-lifers take that position on gun-usage as well. It is an interesting connundrum, though: if you believe in the right to use deadly force in self-defense when someone threatens you, why does that apply to a home intruder and not something that is pretty much a parasite inside your belly? FWIW, this line of thinking, btw, is at least a thousand years old.
QM says:
“No, it’s about making sure that women understand that actions have consequences, and if they can’t face those consequences, maybe they need to not do the action; an unpopular sentiment, I know, in a society that believes everyone has a right to do whatever the hell they want and have the government pick up the wreckage.”
Let’s think this through. Absent abortion rights, the only way to assuredly prevent a pregnancy is to be celibate. (And even that doesn’t work if a woman is raped.) So, in QM’s view, it is “irresponsible” for ANYONE (or at least any woman) to have sex unless they intend / want to have a child. Doesn’t matter if they are married. Doesn’t matter if they are over 40 and don’t expect a pregnancy. No matter WHAT the circumstances, you allow a penis into that vagina, you must take responsibility for the consequences, i.e., bear the child.
Put in these terms, does ANYONE really believe this, other than a few monks and priests? QM’s argument relies on a remarkable assertion about sexuality that I don’t think even most conservatives accept, which is that not only is there a connection between sexuality and procreation but that NO person should engage in intercourse who does not plan to conceive a child. 99.99 percent of ALL sexual intercourse is immoral under QM’s standard.
Look, QM, in the real world, people have intercourse for pleasure. Legalized abortion, like birth control and vaccines for STD’s, allows them to have a pleasurable sex life without jeopardizing their careers, their livelihoods, their emotional stability, their bodies, and their aspirations with the threat of having to bear and raise a child they don’t want. You may THINK that any time a person has sex, they should be signing an 18 year binding contract to raise a child (more likely you haven’t thought through your argument at all), but the rest of the world doesn’t believe this to be the case.
So let the rest of the world go on having sex for purposes you don’t approve of. Frankly, it’s none of your damned business. And if you are truly offended by the fact that some of those people might conceive and therefore be forced to abort, why don’t you make a point to do more for all the children who are born into this world and who desparately need our help to survive. Even short of adoption, there are a lot of worthy charities for you to contribute time and money to, which will make a difference for needy children without trying to throw a roadblock in front of women who have the audacity to want a pleasurable sex life without having to bear children.
I’ve got to ask this, even though I know that QM won’t have a good answer…So, QM, if you think that every conceptus (I’m assuming that by fetus you mean fetus or embryo or blastula because otherwise you would have no objection to abortion in the first 8 weeks, but please correct me if I’m wrong) is an “innocent human life”? Well, between 50 and 80% of concepti die within the first two weeks after conception due to failure to implant or other early failures of pregnancy. What are you doing to prevent those? Lobbied the NIH for more funding on research into the etiology of very early miscarriage? Dedicated your life to such research? Endowed a foundation which gives grants to study miscarriage? If you hadn’t heard of this epidemic until now, which steps do you plan to take in order to end this epidemic?
Yes. I know many Catholics who believe this and have the large families to prove it.
Cf. The Meaning of Life.
DAS:
No, they may have large families because they follow their church teachings on birth control. (And note that it is a distinct minority of Catholics who do this.) But that doesn’t mean that they believe that as a UNIVERSAL principle, every person who has sex under any circumstances is signing the 18 year contract. I may have been exaggerating a little bit when I said that nobody believes this, but it has got to be a pretty small number of people who do.
that’s what i thought when reading Jivin J’s comments.
Jivin J, are you looking for proof?
The government doesn’t pay for abortions anymore. It hasn’t for over twenty years.
If a fetus is an innocent human life (as you say), then there should never be any exceptions “based on hard cases.” That innocent human life is not responsible for how it was conceived. Unless this is really about (again for the crowd) punishing women for having sex.
What exactly do you mean by legal exceptions not being good policy? Would you advocate setting up a benevolent dictator who decides which women and girls are or aren’t worthy of receiving an abortion? If so, I nominate Bill Napoli for the job.
Not in Latin America and Catholic parts of Africa.
Jivin J, in case you’re unaware, eclampsia/pre-eclampsia is a not-too-uncommon complication of pregnancy that can, among other things, cause blindness. Regardless of whether the woman is already myopic. My point being, that while *pregnancy* may not cause blindness, *complications of pregnancy* certainly can. Quite the semantic quibble going there.
Did you read the whole second link?
“Retinal hemorrhage and papilledema in preeclampsia characterize patients with an acute, severe rise in blood pressure.” (first paragraph of the discussion section)
Oh, and if you follow up on the bibliography, you can also see that the Valsalva maneuver (which can happen when you’re pushing out a baby) can also cause retinal damage in the absence of eclampsia/pre-eclampsia.
Entering “myopia, pregnancy” into pubmed results in 7 pages of articles. For example:
This article on worsening myopia associated with pregnancy
So what?
It never fails to astound me that the American public educational system continues to crank out people so absolutely ignorant of the intention of the seperation of church and state.
This government, although having been compelled by their own prejudice and greed, over the hundreds of years, still has a responsibility to make laws that impinge as little as possible on the liberties of the citizen.
Either the pro-lifers and their supporters still cannot see women as full citizens, thus heirs to all the rights of citizenry, or they cannot grasp that fundamental fact that their view is based on a religious tenant that they have no right to force onto others against their will.
Doubting the stats that Jill cites and demanding that she prove them right or wrong is ridiculous. She has no such responsibility. If you don’t believe the stats or doubt them, do your own damn objective research to rebut them.
But who can interview dead women and dead doctors? Having abortion illegal forced it underground and proof abounds of its effects. The pro-lifers, having conceded the argument of its existence, unable to let the old horse die, pulls it out again and beats the wretched thing with another tact — degree. We know there was some damage, but it wasn’t all that bad.
Back to civics class where so many seem to have been hanging out in the back of the school puffing a biggie, or sleeping on their desks:
Since the government provides its services based on the funding of all people in this country, regardless of ethnic, religious or political standing, it seems only proper to assert that said government has an obligation to not impinge on the liberties of all such persons while simoutaneously serving the interests thereof. A difficult task indeed.
Constituents of groups or associations that form voluntarily in a social system have the right to meet out demands of conformance among them, as long as the follow basic tenants of human rights accepted universally as granted to those already living as full humans on this earth.
That doesn’t include fetuses, pre-born babies, embryoes or whatever one wishes to call those who have yet to become full human beings.
Go practice your religion with your fellow followers and leave government and the rest of us out of it.
The thing is, that in “saving” this woman’s third pregnancy, the two children she already had were put in jeopardy because now they are being raised by a blind single mother who at best will be blind and at worst will die from her condition. This woman has only so many resources to go around and they are going to be severely impacted by a complicated pregnancy. Preeclampsia bad enough to cause blindness could also likely cause death for the mother and/or baby and leave two orphans behind.
I had preeclampsia. This is serious stuff. And, you likely don’t know BEFORE you get pregnant that you will have it (although perhaps in some cases you may have some indicators that it may happen). Even if you know you will get it, you will not know how the condition will progress until the pregnancy proceeds. If this woman’s doctor was telling her that blindness was likely, it sounds like she was on the very severe end of the condition. This is a very serious condition. Even the mild cases are taken very seriously and can turn badly at any moment, especially during delivery.
Just because you go into a pregnancy with good intentions doesn’t mean everything is going to go well. Any pregnancy at any time can take a down turn medically and you may be forced to make some hard decisions. (Or for that matter, you may suffer some financial or emotional hit, that was unanticipated.)
A mother has to decide for herself if the risk she takes for the sake of her unborn baby outweighs the obligation she has to herself and the family she already has. That is hard enough without someone telling her she should have known the consequences to begin with. Yes, we all know sex causes babies. But no one is so all-knowing that they can anticipate the specific conditions of each pregnancy and the outcome of each birth.
In my case, I know that I’ve been preeclamptic in my two full-term pregnancies. I know that another pregnancy would be complicated (especially now that I’m older) and that it could potentially leave my two sons motherless. Death from childbirth is not a thing of the past, and my risk factors are higher than most. I take lots and lots of precautions to make sure I don’t tempt fate, but if I were to get pregnant (shit happens, even with best laid plans) I would definitely consider my options.
I think the majority of women like me are not willy-nilly having lots of crazy unprotected sex knowing that they could have potential problems with a pregnancy, but just thinking… “oh well, if I get knocked up I’ll just have an abortion”. I just don’t think that’s the reality of how most women come to the decision of whether to abort or not.
Erika:
The higher birth rates in Latin America and Africa may well have little to do with Catholicism (which, after all, is a minority religion in Africa anyway). For those living in developing countries, it makes more sense to have larger broods, because absent government and private pensions, the average worker has to rely on his or her children to take care of him or her in old age.
Further, even those women who want to control family size have a more difficult time doing it– marriages are more unequal, divorce is often harder, marital rape isn’t punished, and contraceptives and abortions are harder to come by and hard to afford.
When immigrants come here, they tend to have fewer children than they would have in their home countries, which is consistent with this analysis.
Again, I don’t think there are that many people who believe, as a matter of UNIVERSAL principle, that anyone who has sex under any circumstances is agreeing to an 18 year contract to take care a kid. Yes, there are some folks on the right fringes of religious groups that do believe this, but don’t assume that just because fertility rates are higher in various places, that has anything to do with these sorts of beliefs.
That woman thought it was better to be sighted with 2 kids than to be blind with three. That is up to her. Not up to the law. Not up to you.
My answer: No.
I used the Poland example because they have the kind of health exception that anti-choicers would prefer (although I think it’s safe to say that anti-choicers would prefer no health exception). Health exceptions in the United States only apply at the point when elective abortion is banned, and they require a doctor’s consent. The vast majority of abortions happen early, when there are fewer legal limitations. The ones that happen later, at the point where abortion is highly restricted, do happen for health-related reasons, or because of severe fetal abnormalities. And these abortions are fairly rare.
You act like throngs of lazy women are going to wait around until the third trimester to finally have an abortion, and will claim “mental distress” without any backing. We have a health exception now, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this happening. So if it actually is a giant loophole, and it enables women to have late-term abortions willy-nilly, I’d say that you’re the one who needs to explain why 90% of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Really, the solution’s very simple. One need only wait until the mother has suffered the actual physical damage: blindness, heart attack, hemorrhage or what have you and then determine from that the the woman is, in retrospect, perfectly eligible for an abortion. She will not, of course, actually have had an abortion, but she will be given the right to have had one back when it would have been useful, had it been possible then to be certain that damage would occur. There you go.
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