The problem with people with Down's claiming to not be disabled is that you can't claim ableism and also claim to not be disabled. It's like saying that you're straight but that you also experience homophobia.
Not so. A quiet or slightly effeminate boy can get the shit beat out of them daily because they are perceived as being homosexual, even if they aren't. They are experiencing homophobia.
@Doublethink for years, I was much of the opinion you are expressing there, that late abortions should not be allowed, but if you disallow late abortions entirely, you do not allow those abortions that really do need to be carried out to save lives, or for those cases where the baby is not going to survive anyway, and allowing it to die in utero as is likely to happen, is going to cause complications.
What changed my mind were @North East Quine and birdie talking about their experiences, on Ye Olde Shippe™ and their descriptions as to how late in pregnancy the information as to the severity of the child's difficulties was possible to discern. In both their cases they gave birth to the children, with different results. Both said that they would not criticise parents in other situations who did not feel they could care for a severely disabled child.
I also wonder how much overall effect there is on the number of children being born disabled, because although we, generally, are aborting specific disabilities, we are also keeping babies alive that would not otherwise have survived. Is it possible that although we are losing significant numbers of Down Syndrome babies, we are gaining babies with cerebral palsy and disabilities arising from being born early? I know from working in education, being born very prematurely is often, but not always, linked to learning difficulties.
I expressed myself poorly, I rather meant, why late abort rather than deliver early a healthy disabled baby - or for that matter Pomona is arguing you should be able to abort at any stage of pregnancy for any reason. So why terminate late, rather than deliver and give up for adoption ?
I expressed myself poorly, I rather meant, why late abort rather than deliver early a healthy disabled baby - or for that matter Pomona is arguing you should be able to abort at any stage of pregnancy for any reason. So why terminate late, rather than deliver and give up for adoption ?
I expressed myself poorly, I rather meant, why late abort rather than deliver early a healthy disabled baby - or for that matter Pomona is arguing you should be able to abort at any stage of pregnancy for any reason. So why terminate late, rather than deliver and give up for adoption ?
The Canadian experience again - where abortion is allowed any time for any reason, medically it is almost always in the first trimester. The issues of legality don't apply to later on abortions, but they're rare, and no more frequent than elsewhere where are laws regulating abortion. People terminate early either surgically or by taking a medication. Noting that also medication to prevent pregnancy shortly after an episode of unprotected sex or concern that there may be a risk that a person is pregnant, can be obtained from any pharmacist where I live. The person who wants the medication has a short interview to determine that there hasn't been pressure or violence about anything and prescription is given.
It's very clear also that the personal beliefs of nurses, doctors, pharmacists etc are not allowed to interfere with patient care. Thus being anti-abortion does not allow someone to refuse service unless they basically say "excuse me I need to introduce you to my co-worker".
I expressed myself poorly, I rather meant, why late abort rather than deliver early a healthy disabled baby - or for that matter Pomona is arguing you should be able to abort at any stage of pregnancy for any reason. So why terminate late, rather than deliver and give up for adoption ?
Delivery isn't exactly a walk in the park.
It isn't, but we're talking about people willing to go through delivery for a baby not expected to have any kind of disability.
Here too, "209,917 abortions for women resident in England and Wales" in 2020,
The proportion of abortions that are performed at under 10 weeks has continued to increase since 2010. In 2020, 88% of abortions were performed under 10 weeks, increasing from 82% in 2019 and 77% in 2010. In comparison, abortions performed at 10-12 weeks decreased from 9% in 2019 to 6% in 2020. The percentage performed at 20 weeks and over decreased from 2% in 2019 to 1% in 2020.
So 94% of all abortions in England and Wales in 2020 were performed in the first trimester.
Abortions where gestation is 24 weeks or over account for a very small number of abortions (0.1% of the total). There were 236 such abortions in 2020.
A medical abortion post 24 weeks gestation, referred to as evacuation of the uterus, is not a gentle undertaking - at that stage the foetus is large enough for any abortion to require an induced labour, so effectively giving birth; induced labour is well known for being more uncomfortable than giving birth naturally. It also has many of the risks of giving birth - if you want to see chapter and verse, there is this review from NICE (link).
A surgical abortion post 24 weeks gestation is the same procedure as having a Caesarean. When I had my Caesarean, my health visitor, trying to get me to take it slightly easier, pointed out that it was the same surgery as a hysterectomy, with no chance of any post-operative recovery as you now have a baby to heft around, nor any chance of keyhole surgery. It also comes with all the attendant risks of major surgery, internal scarring that often welds the internal organs together and a recommended wait of two years for the scarring to heal well enough before another pregnancy puts pressure on the wound. Because ruptured wombs do not do a lot for maternal and foetal health.
There were 693 abortions carried out because the foetus was diagnosed as having Down's Syndrome, 615 for cardiovascular problems, 443 for musculoskeletal problems, 292 for the foetus affected by maternal figures. These are the largest categories of abortions carried out under Ground E, that the baby would be severely disabled, of which there were 1.5%, 3083.
As you can see, there were vanishingly few abortions post 24 weeks. The majority of abortions carried out because the foetus has been diagnosed as Down's Syndrome must be carried out earlier than 24 weeks. From some simple maths and squinting at the graph, around 5% of abortions are carried out between 13 and 23 weeks, which is when I suspect the Down's abortions happen.
(The more detailed statistics come from the data pages on this page (link))
Another request that everyone be thoughtful about what they say. Remember that not only are you talking about people (mothers and fathers but also disabled people with any of the conditions we are discussing.) Also, the people you talk about may be reading this and seeing what you say about them.
@Curiosity killed your second to last post is edging too close for me. We aren't going to discuss here whether some people should not exist or cost too much.
Sorry - I absolutely didn't mean to say anything about cost. Special needs is my job too.
Trying to rephrase that thought:
I was wondering whether, generally, incidences of disability in the population are remaining constant but resulting from different causes. While we may have fewer Down's Syndrome children due to abortion rates, we may have more disabilities in the population from pre-term babies surviving from ever earlier gestation dates, meaning that there is not an overall change in rates.
I was wondering whether, generally, incidences of disability in the population are remaining constant but resulting from different causes. While we may have fewer Down's Syndrome children due to abortion rates, we may have more disabilities in the population from pre-term babies surviving from ever earlier gestation dates, meaning that there is not an overall change in rates.
I suppose it might be possible, but I strongly suspect that if it's true, then it's nothing more than coincidence. And there's always the confounding effect of changing thresholds for diagnosis in such comparisons.
And if it's true, is it relevant? I don't think there's some fraction of disabled people that society "ought" to have.
What changed my mind were @North East Quine and birdie talking about their experiences, on Ye Olde Shippe™ and their descriptions as to how late in pregnancy the information as to the severity of the child's difficulties was possible to discern. In both their cases they gave birth to the children, with different results. Both said that they would not criticise parents in other situations who did not feel they could care for a severely disabled child.
To expand on this, the 20 week scan showed that our baby's legs were disproportionately small By 22 weeks we had had further scans which also showed that our baby's arms were small (though proportionately less small than his legs) and a diagnosis of achondroplasia (classic dwarfism).
Unfortunately as the weeks went by David's measurements dropped further away from the mean, and we were told he also had a restricted windpipe, which increased the chances of a simple cold proving catastrophic.
And then his rib cage measurements slowed down and the diagnosis changed to thanatophoric dysplasia, which meant that if he was born alive, he would be life-limited and would die before his first birthday. His rib cage simply wouldn't be large enough to allow his heart and lungs to develop.
We were offered an abortion every time a new issue was identified. The last time we were offered an abortion was at 33 or 34 weeks. David died in utero at 39+6, and after an induced labour was stillborn on his due date.
(We named him David whilst I was still pregnant because he was small and fighting against the odds.)
We were ideally placed to cope - we had been married for ten years and felt our marriage was solid, David was our third child so we had experience of baby and child care, we were solvent and owned our own home with a manageable mortgage, we had supportive families, friends and were part of a supportive church. The hospital care was beyond wonderful; even if they did find our decision to continue the pregnancy unusual, they backed us to the hilt.
And yet, even though we were in such a strong position, it was incredibly difficult. I can't imagine how difficult it would be in a shaky relationship or as a single mother, or with no family support, or if someone already had a child with additional needs or... the list goes on. I would never think badly of anyone who chose not to continue with a similar pregnancy.
What birdie said on the Old Ship (link) in response to another Shipmate suggesting that it should be possible to make a list of disabilities that should be aborted:
As I think you well know, that is impossible because of the wide variety of outcomes even within people affected by one condition.
That is why this is so difficult. No-one has a crystal ball. No-one can tell how badly their child is going to be affected by the condition that's been diagnosed. No-one can tell what impact the birth of a child with a severe disability is going to have on their family, and whether their family can handle that.
I have two children. In both my pregnancies, at the 20-week scans, I sat in a counselling room being told that the scans revealed severe problems. I was damn lucky because I sat in that room with my husband holding my hand, knowing that we had the support of our extended families and community, my husband in stable employment, and that all the medical care I would need in the pregnancies, and our children would need after birth would not be a financial burden to us.
I describe myself as pro-life, but after having that experience twice, there is no way I could stand in judgement on a woman who found herself alone, with no support and no free health care, and made a different decision to the one we did.
Once "abortion" ceases to be theoretical and becomes an actual decision to be made, the important issues shift.
One example of the sort of issues we faced was this: at 22 weeks we were told our baby's arms were disproportionately small and he would never be able to wipe his own bottom.
My first thought was that I faced a lifetime of bottom wiping. We were both 35 - not unusually old to be having a third child, but not young either. We'd be 45 when he was 10, 65 when he was 30. Would we cope with wiping an adult man's bottom beyond the age of 65? If our health gave out, who would do it? Were we making a decision about our older children's futures, giving them a disabled sibling? At what age would "bottom wiping" become part of their young lives?
And then we discovered that there were special toilets with a "wash-and-blow-dry" function! This would give our son his independence!!
Except that our bathroom wasn't big enough to install one of these toilets. We were living in a flat with two double bedrooms, a small single bedroom and one bathroom. Our plan had been that we would live there until our children were all in school and old enough for me to be back to work full time.
One of the double bedrooms was ideally placed to be split in two and become a single bedroom with an ensuite which could include the wonder-toilet.
But at that point we would have two adults and three children in a flat with one double bedroom and two singles.
So we would have to move, and move to a more expensive property. But whilst we were solvent and financially ok where we were we definitely could not afford more. Plus it looked as though I would never work again, but would become a full-time carer. So even the "move in six or seven years plan" wasn't going to happen. Except that somehow we would have to move. Plus my husband's career involved travel, but it looked as though he was going to have to spend more time at home, which would scupper his chances of promotion and better pay.
It boiled down to - I would have to simultaneously be a full-time carer whilst also going out to work full-time, and my husband would have to simultaneously travel abroad whilst not travelling abroad.
So it looked as though the wonder-toilet was a pipe dream and our son would just have to put up with Mum and Dad wiping his bottom into adulthood.
Whilst this wasn't a major issue, it was just one of many practical issues we were wrestling with whilst the goalposts of our son's predicted abilities kept moving. And if someone, on being told that their child's arms were not going to be long enough to wipe their own bottom, chose not to start researching unattainable wonder-toilets, but chose to terminate, well, there would be no condemnation from me.
Plus, it was only the fact that late-term abortions are available here that gave us the time to research wonder-toilets and properly think things through when we were already at 22 weeks. Had we had to make a fast decision to beat a 24 week deadline, I would have had to decide whilst still overwhelmed with the "what sort of quality of life will he have if he can't wipe his own bottom?" "Who will wipe his bottom if I'm not healthy into my 80s?" thoughts.
As has been wisely said before: Before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
Then you'll be a mile away.
And have their shoes.
Seriously, though, it is definitely very different when we move from the theoretical to the reality.
However, life is complicated and messy and to me part of the argument here feels like trying to stop life from happening. And it doesn't work like that.
The majority of congenital problems are not diagnosed antenatally. Of those that are, there is significant uncertainty about prognosis. And then a large number of people who acquire their disability later through illness (e.g. meningitis) or trauma or have an undiagnosed degenerative condition.
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
The problem is that unless we've gone through it, none of us can know what agonies parents who choose to have an abortion after they find themselves in the position that a wanted child is going to have significant disabilities go through. Which is what is happening when most of the parents concerned make the decision to abort a pregnancy later on.
Having originally felt that I could understand those early abortions in the first trimester, those who find that they are pregnant and do not want a child, the 88% who abort in the first 10 weeks in 2020, or the 94% who aborted in the first trimester, but found later abortions harder to understand, the more I hear people's stories, the more I just regard these later abortions as tragedies.
I don't think it is as simple as the message that suggests that people are choosing to reject an imperfect child, because when you hear the stories, any I have heard have always been more complicated. Not as straightforward as choosing not to give birth to a Down's child, but aborting a Down's child with a severe heart defect and finding after the planned induced labour that the foetus had already died some time before. (That was a family who already had a Down's child, was quite prepared to bring up a second Down's child.)
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
AFZ
One is receiving all the necessities of life via the placenta, the other is not. A fetus is dependent on the mother, and ONLY the mother can sustain it; a newborn can be cared for by anybody with the skills and resources. I can't judge whether that distinction is "coherent" enough to satisfy, but it seems pretty clear. As I mentioned earlier, the first independent breath marks the beginning of the baby's individual existence in Canadian law.
If memory serves, I believe mousethief told us that in the Orthodox view, "life" begins at implantation, because human life is all about relationships, and implantation is the beginning of the relationship between zygote/embryo/fetus/baby and mother.
I think AFZ’s concern about coherence arises where it is only the manner of removal from the mother, and subsequent aftercare that makes the difference between an abortion and the birth of a child.
As other posters have indicated this is likely to have been a bitterly difficult decision for the mother.
I think AFZ’s concern about coherence arises where it is only the manner of removal from the mother, and subsequent aftercare that makes the difference between an abortion and the birth of a child.
Right - whilst @Soror Magna's statement that the foetus is dependent on it's mother/parent is true enough, if the foetus is of a gestational age where it could be viably born, then the statement "ONLY the mother can sustain it" starts to look very much like a technicality.
I agree, of course, that this is likely to be a very difficult decision made by the parents of the foetus, and not one made lightly: this is almost certainly a pregnancy that was very much wanted for several months before it wasn't.
With respect to @Curiosity killed's points, I think the stories she hears are outliers. As far as Down Syndrome goes, in the UK, a large majority of pregnancies that test as "probably Down Syndrome" are terminated; in some other European countries, the proportion is close to 100%. Most of those cases are straightforward "don't want to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome" - although I hesitate to use the word "straightforward" about any such choice.
@Leorning Cniht But those maybe Down's Syndrome pregnancies that are aborted must be between 13 and 19 weeks gestation, maybe up to 23 weeks gestation. They cannot be many of the post 24 week abortions, those pregnancies that could possibly survive if the mother gave birth. That comes from the abortion statistics for England and Wales that 94% of foetuses are aborted before 13 weeks, another 5% by 20 weeks and 1% post 20 weeks (which includes 0.1% post 24 weeks).
From the figures, 3083, 1.5% foetuses were aborted under ground E that the child would be severely disabled, of which 693 foetuses in total were aborted as being diagnosed with Down's Syndrome. Only 236 babies were aborted post 24 weeks and not all of those babies were aborted under ground E.
One of the other figures I forgot to include in the discussion earlier, was that 80% of post 20 week abortions in 2020 were medical abortions, which means an induced labour. So the mothers enduring an induced labour to evacuate their uterus are not avoiding giving birth.
(I shared a room overnight when kept in hospital on an antenatal ward with someone who'd had an induced labour to give birth to a baby that had died in utero, just over a year before. Quite how painful she'd found it, and how badly it was affecting her reactions to the present pregnancy made a deep and lasting impression on me. None of us in that ward got any sleep that night, she was hysterical the next day before and after giving birth by Caesarean, was put in a private room as she couldn't cope, to stop her disturbing everyone else, but we could still hear the screaming. It was all happening so quickly as she was 37, had been 36 when the still birth happened.)
I think AFZ’s concern about coherence arises where it is only the manner of removal from the mother, and subsequent aftercare that makes the difference between an abortion and the birth of a child.
I assume as well there's an issue with the varying level of emotional committent being asked of the medical staff involved.
I have been holding off posting here, because the subject is so traumatic for me, but I shall take a deep breath and wade in there: my son was born at 25 weeks gestation. We're not sure why, but the most plausible explanation is an infection which brought on premature labour.
FWIW a very premature infant doesn't look much like a baby, a fact a lot of people don't appreciate because they've never seen one up close and personal. They're absurdly tiny. They're thin. Their heads are too big. The first time I ever saw my son, he was in an aquarium, hooked up to a shed load of wires, with a blue light over him because of jaundice, and a pair of little goggles over his eyes to protect them from the same. He bore very little resemblance to what I had been accustomed to think of as a baby up until then. I had a very hard time thinking "this is a person". I don't think I'm alone in that - during the third trimester is usually when bonding happens, and if you don't have a third trimester it does a major number on your brain. OTOH I wanted that little scrap to live more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. Still, I think I only really started comfortably thinking of him as "baby" at about 30 weeks or so, when he was a bit bigger, fatter and better proportioned.
Being in an incubator rather than in utero is definitely sub optimal for these very premature babies, which is why an incubator is designed to imitate conditions in the womb as closely as possible* - warm, humid and mostly dark. (Oh and they smell like smoked haddock. Yes really.) When women go into premature labour, the medics also try to keep the baby inside its mother's body as long as possible until they're sure it's no longer the best place for it to be - in my case I was hooked up to intravenous steroids for about 18 hours, in an attempt to develop my son's lungs more quickly. After that they found the infection markers and performed an emergency caesarean ASAP.
I think what I'm trying to say is not so much that the unborn are babies, rather that to all intents and purposes, micro-preemies are fetuses developing outside the womb because for some reason the pregnancy went tits up. The efforts that go into keeping them alive are massive, and very, very expensive (my son cost the French taxpayer €250 000 if he cost a cent).
The line between a fetus dependent on its mother's body, and a baby being kept alive by medical science that, had it been possible, would have been much better off inside its mother's body is in my mind a very blurry one.
*There are scientists about who are working on an artificial womb as an alternative to the current incubators. This may well lead to better outcomes for preemies, but I only hope they are going to be employing some very competent shrinks for the parents because man those things look upsetting. An incubator was bad enough. (My experience of NICU shrinks is mixed.)
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
AFZ
The problem is that you want a nice bright-line digital kind of distinction in a situation that is an analogue sliding scale.
We can't make that sort of distinction. It's not possible to look at the sliding scale between a ball of 8 cells and 45-year-old adult and say, at what exact point did it/they transform from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, despite it being pretty obvious that there are pretty radical differences between the two ends of that sliding scale?
In fact one of the few times that you can actually point to a single event, and thus a single point in time, and say "that was pretty darn significant" is birth. Birth has massive biochemical and metabolical implications, as you switch from getting sustenance through the placenta to consuming food and breathing air. There are permanent changes to how your body works as a result. Enzymes that change form or switch direction, some of them within the space of a few hours.
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
AFZ
The problem is that you want a nice bright-line digital kind of distinction in a situation that is an analogue sliding scale.
We can't make that sort of distinction. It's not possible to look at the sliding scale between a ball of 8 cells and 45-year-old adult and say, at what exact point did it/they transform from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, despite it being pretty obvious that there are pretty radical differences between the two ends of that sliding scale?
In fact one of the few times that you can actually point to a single event, and thus a single point in time, and say "that was pretty darn significant" is birth. Birth has massive biochemical and metabolical implications, as you switch from getting sustenance through the placenta to consuming food and breathing air. There are permanent changes to how your body works as a result. Enzymes that change form or switch direction, some of them within the space of a few hours.
Intriguingly, I have been arguingon this thread about the dangers of digital thinking.
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
AFZ
The problem is that you want a nice bright-line digital kind of distinction in a situation that is an analogue sliding scale.
We can't make that sort of distinction. It's not possible to look at the sliding scale between a ball of 8 cells and 45-year-old adult and say, at what exact point did it/they transform from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, despite it being pretty obvious that there are pretty radical differences between the two ends of that sliding scale?
In fact one of the few times that you can actually point to a single event, and thus a single point in time, and say "that was pretty darn significant" is birth. Birth has massive biochemical and metabolical implications, as you switch from getting sustenance through the placenta to consuming food and breathing air. There are permanent changes to how your body works as a result. Enzymes that change form or switch direction, some of them within the space of a few hours.
Intriguingly, I have been arguingon this thread about the dangers of digital thinking.
AFZ
Yes, when I say "want", I should perhaps say "demanding as a requirement".
And again, all I can say to you is that birth is in fact a highly significant event in human development. Of course it doesn't replace all the chromosomes or something, but it does cause genes to switch on and off.
The question isn't whether it's transformative, the question is whether you set the bar required for the degree of transformation so high that it can't possibly be met.
@la vie en rouge thank you for your post. I have had very little experience of babies as an adult, so many years ago when a friend gave birth to a 24 week baby I was totally out of my depth in knowing how best to support her (the father wasn't around for long). Then, co-incidently we both moved to another city, so I got to see the child grow up and have her own children.
To try and use a different analogy - for me abortion on demand, much like other decriminalisation arguments, are about harm reduction. They aren't about harm dismissal. You (general you) can think something is wrong but should still be legal because the other options have worse outcomes.
For example, I am hugely concerned by UK alcohol consumption (and even in UK churches that can be a cause for concern!). I have a really hard time being around intoxicated people - any type of intoxication, but the legality and social acceptance of drunken behaviour means it is more omnipresent than other types. I sympathise hugely with the various historical temperence movements, but abolition has been shown to not actually improve outcomes - as tempting as the idea is sometimes on a Friday night in a city centre, it wouldn't solve the problem. What you need is social and economic incentives for making it less necessary to drink to excess and more enjoyable to be sober. To bring it back to abortion, increased paid parental leave for parents of disabled children would be a far better carrot than the stick of removing prenatal screening.
I've said before that I dislike the idea of aborting due to a non-fatal disability like Down's. I also dislike the idea of aborting due to sex. But I don't think outlawing those things would improve life for people with Down's or women. Wanting to protect the medical autonomy of pregnant people doesn't mean I have to agree with every decision they make.
The stories people share only confirm for me that it's individual and personal and that it all needs to be left there without governments, lawyers and others involved.
The stories people share only confirm for me that it's individual and personal and that it all needs to be left there without governments, lawyers and others involved.
1. As has been clear throughout this thread, the US anti-abortion movement is nothing if not totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.
Have you met many Americans who oppose abortion?
I have, including people I care about and may count as friends.
This does not change my sense of the overall movement, which agrees with AFZ's.
1. As has been clear throughout this thread, the US anti-abortion movement is nothing if not totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.
Have you met many Americans who oppose abortion?
I have, including people I care about and may count as friends.
This does not change my sense of the overall movement, which agrees with AFZ's.
You know some Americans who oppose abortion, but not so much that they do anything about it - and all the ones who do are nothing but “totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.”
Hosting
This seems to be drifting from talking about political movements in pejorative terms to talking about national generalisations and getting closer to home to people posting here, so needs to become a bit more careful and nuanced so descriptions of political movements don't come across as insults to people posting here
1. As has been clear throughout this thread, the US anti-abortion movement is nothing if not totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.
Have you met many Americans who oppose abortion?
I have, including people I care about and may count as friends.
This does not change my sense of the overall movement, which agrees with AFZ's.
You know some Americans who oppose abortion, but not so much that they do anything about it - and all the ones who do are nothing but “totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.”
As posted before, I've seen an awful lot of people who will wax rhapsodic about the moral imperative of caring for a fetus, but who continue to support a party that throws the post-born-child into the tender mercies of poverty and want according to the "Free Market."
This seems, to me, hypocritical. And folks who are pro life will similarly say that pro-choicers (or liberals of any variety) are hypocrites for tolerating abortion while talking about the importance of charity to...just about anyone or anything else. This is a conversation I have observed many times.
One could argue the hypocrisy goes both ways. But I do recognize what is observed in the "pro life" movement. And this isn't about individual persons. It's about the movement.
1. As has been clear throughout this thread, the US anti-abortion movement is nothing if not totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.
Have you met many Americans who oppose abortion?
I have, including people I care about and may count as friends.
This does not change my sense of the overall movement, which agrees with AFZ's.
You know some Americans who oppose abortion, but not so much that they do anything about it - and all the ones who do are nothing but “totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile.”
As posted before, I've seen an awful lot of people who will wax rhapsodic about the moral imperative of caring for a fetus, but who continue to support a party that throws the post-born-child into the tender mercies of poverty and want according to the "Free Market."
This seems, to me, hypocritical.
I noted earlier that an equally plausible explanation (offered by Sarah Jones at New York magazine) is that America's professional anti-abortion movement isn't hypocritical, they're authoritarian. The actions of the institutional anti-abortion movement make perfect sense if you see them in terms of enforcing rigid ideas about hierarchy, particularly as it relates to gender.
I asked AFZ that question not because I thought he was attacking the US but because his assertion that "the US anti-abortion movement is nothing if not totally hypocritical, morally inconsistent, deeply insensitive, misogynistic and vile" seems pretty extreme for someone who I thought was unlikely to have a lot of contact with any of the large number of people who might reasonably be said to be part of that movement. I'm not persuaded by Bullfrog's apparent attempt at drawing a distinction between the the anti-abortion movement and nearly everyone who might support its principle objective. (It's not much of a defense to say it's ok to call them hypocritical because everyone is hypocritical - I'm pretty sure AFZ wasn't trying to say they're no worse than anyone else in that respect.)
I really don't see what useful purpose is served by that kind of intemperate language. I suppose it's just as well that we don't seem to have any sincere, egalitarian, decent abortion opponents among the thread participants - but as I'm not personally invested (I'm not one either) I won't push the point any further.
@orfeo , Louise said that question was not sufficiently respectful of others' feelings to be appropriate in Epiphanies. If you want to argue with a Host ruling, the evidence suggests you know where the Styx is. This is not the place to pick fights as you also very well know.
@orfeo , Louise said that question was not sufficiently respectful of others' feelings to be appropriate in Epiphanies. If you want to argue with a Host ruling, the evidence suggests you know where the Styx is. This is not the place to pick fights as you also very well know.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Clearly I misunderstood the nature of the ruling.
If material in hidden text is completely off limits... why is it so readily visible? I will go ask that in Styx if you want.
Since this thread started out as a discussion on the Texas Abortion Law, I want to go back to it just to give a bit of an update of sorts. Turns out, a number of Republicans are treating this like a hot potato in that it may backfire on them. All previous attempts to restrict abortions had been knocked down by the courts, but since the US Supreme Court has so far allowed this one to stand, it may give the opposition to abortion restrictions to coalesce around it leading up to the 2022 midterm elections. Politico has a very interesting discussion on "Why Republicans are Scared of the Texas Abortion Law."
Having spent some time looking at the figures for abortions after points raised by @alienfromzog and @Doublethink, generalising it seems that there are three things going on at different stages. These are very much generalisations and I am sure that there are cases that don't fit neatly into these broad categories:
First trimester - up to 10-13 weeks - 94% of abortions in England and Wales in 2020 were carried out, 88% up 10 weeks. At this stage it is unlikely much is known about the foetus, so generally these are likely to be abortions as a result of an unwanted pregnancy;
Second trimester - 14 to 23 weeks - in 2020, 5.9% of abortions - guessing from knowledge of being pregnant, these abortions will be, generally, in response to testing, so selective abortions. (I also suspect that there will be unexpected unwanted pregnancies in this group, just taking later to recognise and organise an abortion). From the figures 0.9% of those abortions are carried out between 20-23 weeks;
Third trimester - the late term, post 24 week abortions - 0.1% of abortions - only allowed under English law if there is something significantly awry with the pregnancy or foetus often when there is no hope of a viable baby.
I was chatting about this with my daughter (she spends a lot of time on EDS boards) and she told me that one of the disabilities that can be screened are the more severe forms of EDS*, I didn't find a reference, but I suspect it comes under the blanket heading of inherited diseases. Earlier in the thread, the screening out of Down's Syndrome foetuses and other conditions through standard screening was discussed, and from the NHS website (link) as well as known inherited diseases, there are a number of conditions screened at 20 weeks:
The 20-week screening scan looks in detail at the baby's bones, heart, brain, spinal cord, face, kidneys and abdomen.
It allows the sonographer to look for 11 rare conditions. The scan only looks for these conditions, and cannot find everything that might be wrong.
anencephaly
open spina bifida
cleft lip
diaphragmatic hernia
gastroschisis
exomphalos
serious cardiac abnormalities
bilateral renal agenesis
lethal skeletal dysplasia
Edwards' syndrome, or T18
Patau's syndrome, or T13
There is information about all those conditions as links in the article.
It is now a common opinion in Western countries that a child's impairment would probably place an unexpected burden on her parents, a burden that the parents have not committed themselves to dealing with. Therefore, selective abortion is in general a morally justified option for the parents. I argue that this view is based on biased information about the quality of life of individuals with impairments and their families. Also, a conscious decision to procreate should bring about conscious assent to assuming obligations as a parent. This implies a duty of caring for any kind of child. Consequently, if the child's condition is not such that it would make its life not worth living, and if the parents live in an environment where they are able to provide their child and themselves an adequate well-being, they do not have a morally sufficient reason to terminate the pregnancy on the grounds of fetal abnormality.
we are committed to a liberal pro-choice stance with regard to selective abortion for disability, we will be unable to justify the prohibition of sex selective abortion. Here, I apply his reasoning to selective abortion based on other traits pregnant women may decide are undesirable. These include susceptibility to disease, level of intelligence, physical appearance, sexual orientation, religious belief and criminality—in fact any traits attributable to some degree to a genetic component.
Is selective abortion acceptable? Should parents accept the babies that they have chosen to remain pregnant with? Where are the limits on selective abortion? * EDS - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome - a genetic malformation of collagen that is recognised in 13 forms, including the more severe vascular (vEDS) and classical (cEDS), which can be tested for genetically. Another variation is Marfan Syndrome. Collagen forms the ligaments and tendons, is part of skin, body membranes, gut lining, blood vessels - so depending on how the significantly the collagen is affected the difficulties can be severe. The mildest form is hEDS (Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, which again varies in impact, but for which there is no genetic testing.
I do think selective abortion is an ethical issue, but also that the counselling about what a disabled life might be at point of prenatal detection is of very poor quality.
I do think selective abortion is an ethical issue, but also that the counselling about what a disabled life might be at point of prenatal detection is of very poor quality.
How could it be done better?
And this is coming from a guy who sincerely isn't sure how to answer that question himself.
No, I don't know either, but it brought me up short to realise that a condition I live with* can now be selected as a reason for aborting foetuses. I suspect that's what the Down's syndrome person asked felt too.
On that list of disabilities to be investigated at 20 weeks gestation is spina bifida - Tanni Grey-Thompson has spina bifida (although I don't know which form she has.)
* There is no genetic test for hEDS, although there is for cEDS and vEDS. I have the mildest version very mildly and don't reckon to be disabled, although I know others who are disabled by hEDS. I watch rhythmic gymnastics and wonder how many of the competitors have hEDS to be that flexible.
Comments
Not so. A quiet or slightly effeminate boy can get the shit beat out of them daily because they are perceived as being homosexual, even if they aren't. They are experiencing homophobia.
What changed my mind were @North East Quine and birdie talking about their experiences, on Ye Olde Shippe™ and their descriptions as to how late in pregnancy the information as to the severity of the child's difficulties was possible to discern. In both their cases they gave birth to the children, with different results. Both said that they would not criticise parents in other situations who did not feel they could care for a severely disabled child.
I also wonder how much overall effect there is on the number of children being born disabled, because although we, generally, are aborting specific disabilities, we are also keeping babies alive that would not otherwise have survived. Is it possible that although we are losing significant numbers of Down Syndrome babies, we are gaining babies with cerebral palsy and disabilities arising from being born early? I know from working in education, being born very prematurely is often, but not always, linked to learning difficulties.
Delivery isn't exactly a walk in the park.
The Canadian experience again - where abortion is allowed any time for any reason, medically it is almost always in the first trimester. The issues of legality don't apply to later on abortions, but they're rare, and no more frequent than elsewhere where are laws regulating abortion. People terminate early either surgically or by taking a medication. Noting that also medication to prevent pregnancy shortly after an episode of unprotected sex or concern that there may be a risk that a person is pregnant, can be obtained from any pharmacist where I live. The person who wants the medication has a short interview to determine that there hasn't been pressure or violence about anything and prescription is given.
It's very clear also that the personal beliefs of nurses, doctors, pharmacists etc are not allowed to interfere with patient care. Thus being anti-abortion does not allow someone to refuse service unless they basically say "excuse me I need to introduce you to my co-worker".
It isn't, but we're talking about people willing to go through delivery for a baby not expected to have any kind of disability.
So 94% of all abortions in England and Wales in 2020 were performed in the first trimester.
Source (link) for all the above.
A medical abortion post 24 weeks gestation, referred to as evacuation of the uterus, is not a gentle undertaking - at that stage the foetus is large enough for any abortion to require an induced labour, so effectively giving birth; induced labour is well known for being more uncomfortable than giving birth naturally. It also has many of the risks of giving birth - if you want to see chapter and verse, there is this review from NICE (link).
A surgical abortion post 24 weeks gestation is the same procedure as having a Caesarean. When I had my Caesarean, my health visitor, trying to get me to take it slightly easier, pointed out that it was the same surgery as a hysterectomy, with no chance of any post-operative recovery as you now have a baby to heft around, nor any chance of keyhole surgery. It also comes with all the attendant risks of major surgery, internal scarring that often welds the internal organs together and a recommended wait of two years for the scarring to heal well enough before another pregnancy puts pressure on the wound. Because ruptured wombs do not do a lot for maternal and foetal health.
There were 693 abortions carried out because the foetus was diagnosed as having Down's Syndrome, 615 for cardiovascular problems, 443 for musculoskeletal problems, 292 for the foetus affected by maternal figures. These are the largest categories of abortions carried out under Ground E, that the baby would be severely disabled, of which there were 1.5%, 3083.
As you can see, there were vanishingly few abortions post 24 weeks. The majority of abortions carried out because the foetus has been diagnosed as Down's Syndrome must be carried out earlier than 24 weeks. From some simple maths and squinting at the graph, around 5% of abortions are carried out between 13 and 23 weeks, which is when I suspect the Down's abortions happen.
(The more detailed statistics come from the data pages on this page (link))
@Curiosity killed your second to last post is edging too close for me. We aren't going to discuss here whether some people should not exist or cost too much.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Trying to rephrase that thought:
I was wondering whether, generally, incidences of disability in the population are remaining constant but resulting from different causes. While we may have fewer Down's Syndrome children due to abortion rates, we may have more disabilities in the population from pre-term babies surviving from ever earlier gestation dates, meaning that there is not an overall change in rates.
I suppose it might be possible, but I strongly suspect that if it's true, then it's nothing more than coincidence. And there's always the confounding effect of changing thresholds for diagnosis in such comparisons.
And if it's true, is it relevant? I don't think there's some fraction of disabled people that society "ought" to have.
To expand on this, the 20 week scan showed that our baby's legs were disproportionately small By 22 weeks we had had further scans which also showed that our baby's arms were small (though proportionately less small than his legs) and a diagnosis of achondroplasia (classic dwarfism).
Unfortunately as the weeks went by David's measurements dropped further away from the mean, and we were told he also had a restricted windpipe, which increased the chances of a simple cold proving catastrophic.
And then his rib cage measurements slowed down and the diagnosis changed to thanatophoric dysplasia, which meant that if he was born alive, he would be life-limited and would die before his first birthday. His rib cage simply wouldn't be large enough to allow his heart and lungs to develop.
We were offered an abortion every time a new issue was identified. The last time we were offered an abortion was at 33 or 34 weeks. David died in utero at 39+6, and after an induced labour was stillborn on his due date.
(We named him David whilst I was still pregnant because he was small and fighting against the odds.)
We were ideally placed to cope - we had been married for ten years and felt our marriage was solid, David was our third child so we had experience of baby and child care, we were solvent and owned our own home with a manageable mortgage, we had supportive families, friends and were part of a supportive church. The hospital care was beyond wonderful; even if they did find our decision to continue the pregnancy unusual, they backed us to the hilt.
And yet, even though we were in such a strong position, it was incredibly difficult. I can't imagine how difficult it would be in a shaky relationship or as a single mother, or with no family support, or if someone already had a child with additional needs or... the list goes on. I would never think badly of anyone who chose not to continue with a similar pregnancy.
What birdie said on the Old Ship (link) in response to another Shipmate suggesting that it should be possible to make a list of disabilities that should be aborted:
Once "abortion" ceases to be theoretical and becomes an actual decision to be made, the important issues shift.
One example of the sort of issues we faced was this: at 22 weeks we were told our baby's arms were disproportionately small and he would never be able to wipe his own bottom.
My first thought was that I faced a lifetime of bottom wiping. We were both 35 - not unusually old to be having a third child, but not young either. We'd be 45 when he was 10, 65 when he was 30. Would we cope with wiping an adult man's bottom beyond the age of 65? If our health gave out, who would do it? Were we making a decision about our older children's futures, giving them a disabled sibling? At what age would "bottom wiping" become part of their young lives?
And then we discovered that there were special toilets with a "wash-and-blow-dry" function! This would give our son his independence!!
Except that our bathroom wasn't big enough to install one of these toilets. We were living in a flat with two double bedrooms, a small single bedroom and one bathroom. Our plan had been that we would live there until our children were all in school and old enough for me to be back to work full time.
One of the double bedrooms was ideally placed to be split in two and become a single bedroom with an ensuite which could include the wonder-toilet.
But at that point we would have two adults and three children in a flat with one double bedroom and two singles.
So we would have to move, and move to a more expensive property. But whilst we were solvent and financially ok where we were we definitely could not afford more. Plus it looked as though I would never work again, but would become a full-time carer. So even the "move in six or seven years plan" wasn't going to happen. Except that somehow we would have to move. Plus my husband's career involved travel, but it looked as though he was going to have to spend more time at home, which would scupper his chances of promotion and better pay.
It boiled down to - I would have to simultaneously be a full-time carer whilst also going out to work full-time, and my husband would have to simultaneously travel abroad whilst not travelling abroad.
So it looked as though the wonder-toilet was a pipe dream and our son would just have to put up with Mum and Dad wiping his bottom into adulthood.
Whilst this wasn't a major issue, it was just one of many practical issues we were wrestling with whilst the goalposts of our son's predicted abilities kept moving. And if someone, on being told that their child's arms were not going to be long enough to wipe their own bottom, chose not to start researching unattainable wonder-toilets, but chose to terminate, well, there would be no condemnation from me.
Plus, it was only the fact that late-term abortions are available here that gave us the time to research wonder-toilets and properly think things through when we were already at 22 weeks. Had we had to make a fast decision to beat a 24 week deadline, I would have had to decide whilst still overwhelmed with the "what sort of quality of life will he have if he can't wipe his own bottom?" "Who will wipe his bottom if I'm not healthy into my 80s?" thoughts.
Before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
Then you'll be a mile away.
And have their shoes.
Seriously, though, it is definitely very different when we move from the theoretical to the reality.
However, life is complicated and messy and to me part of the argument here feels like trying to stop life from happening. And it doesn't work like that.
The majority of congenital problems are not diagnosed antenatally. Of those that are, there is significant uncertainty about prognosis. And then a large number of people who acquire their disability later through illness (e.g. meningitis) or trauma or have an undiagnosed degenerative condition.
For me, the problem comes with saying it's OK (morally/ethically/whatever) to abort a foetus for these conditions... but a live child with these is undoubtedly fully a human person.
The problem for me remains the lack of a coherent argument to make this distinction.
AFZ
Having originally felt that I could understand those early abortions in the first trimester, those who find that they are pregnant and do not want a child, the 88% who abort in the first 10 weeks in 2020, or the 94% who aborted in the first trimester, but found later abortions harder to understand, the more I hear people's stories, the more I just regard these later abortions as tragedies.
I don't think it is as simple as the message that suggests that people are choosing to reject an imperfect child, because when you hear the stories, any I have heard have always been more complicated. Not as straightforward as choosing not to give birth to a Down's child, but aborting a Down's child with a severe heart defect and finding after the planned induced labour that the foetus had already died some time before. (That was a family who already had a Down's child, was quite prepared to bring up a second Down's child.)
One is receiving all the necessities of life via the placenta, the other is not. A fetus is dependent on the mother, and ONLY the mother can sustain it; a newborn can be cared for by anybody with the skills and resources. I can't judge whether that distinction is "coherent" enough to satisfy, but it seems pretty clear. As I mentioned earlier, the first independent breath marks the beginning of the baby's individual existence in Canadian law.
If memory serves, I believe mousethief told us that in the Orthodox view, "life" begins at implantation, because human life is all about relationships, and implantation is the beginning of the relationship between zygote/embryo/fetus/baby and mother.
As other posters have indicated this is likely to have been a bitterly difficult decision for the mother.
Right - whilst @Soror Magna's statement that the foetus is dependent on it's mother/parent is true enough, if the foetus is of a gestational age where it could be viably born, then the statement "ONLY the mother can sustain it" starts to look very much like a technicality.
I agree, of course, that this is likely to be a very difficult decision made by the parents of the foetus, and not one made lightly: this is almost certainly a pregnancy that was very much wanted for several months before it wasn't.
With respect to @Curiosity killed's points, I think the stories she hears are outliers. As far as Down Syndrome goes, in the UK, a large majority of pregnancies that test as "probably Down Syndrome" are terminated; in some other European countries, the proportion is close to 100%. Most of those cases are straightforward "don't want to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome" - although I hesitate to use the word "straightforward" about any such choice.
From the figures, 3083, 1.5% foetuses were aborted under ground E that the child would be severely disabled, of which 693 foetuses in total were aborted as being diagnosed with Down's Syndrome. Only 236 babies were aborted post 24 weeks and not all of those babies were aborted under ground E.
One of the other figures I forgot to include in the discussion earlier, was that 80% of post 20 week abortions in 2020 were medical abortions, which means an induced labour. So the mothers enduring an induced labour to evacuate their uterus are not avoiding giving birth.
(I shared a room overnight when kept in hospital on an antenatal ward with someone who'd had an induced labour to give birth to a baby that had died in utero, just over a year before. Quite how painful she'd found it, and how badly it was affecting her reactions to the present pregnancy made a deep and lasting impression on me. None of us in that ward got any sleep that night, she was hysterical the next day before and after giving birth by Caesarean, was put in a private room as she couldn't cope, to stop her disturbing everyone else, but we could still hear the screaming. It was all happening so quickly as she was 37, had been 36 when the still birth happened.)
I assume as well there's an issue with the varying level of emotional committent being asked of the medical staff involved.
FWIW a very premature infant doesn't look much like a baby, a fact a lot of people don't appreciate because they've never seen one up close and personal. They're absurdly tiny. They're thin. Their heads are too big. The first time I ever saw my son, he was in an aquarium, hooked up to a shed load of wires, with a blue light over him because of jaundice, and a pair of little goggles over his eyes to protect them from the same. He bore very little resemblance to what I had been accustomed to think of as a baby up until then. I had a very hard time thinking "this is a person". I don't think I'm alone in that - during the third trimester is usually when bonding happens, and if you don't have a third trimester it does a major number on your brain. OTOH I wanted that little scrap to live more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. Still, I think I only really started comfortably thinking of him as "baby" at about 30 weeks or so, when he was a bit bigger, fatter and better proportioned.
Being in an incubator rather than in utero is definitely sub optimal for these very premature babies, which is why an incubator is designed to imitate conditions in the womb as closely as possible* - warm, humid and mostly dark. (Oh and they smell like smoked haddock. Yes really.) When women go into premature labour, the medics also try to keep the baby inside its mother's body as long as possible until they're sure it's no longer the best place for it to be - in my case I was hooked up to intravenous steroids for about 18 hours, in an attempt to develop my son's lungs more quickly. After that they found the infection markers and performed an emergency caesarean ASAP.
I think what I'm trying to say is not so much that the unborn are babies, rather that to all intents and purposes, micro-preemies are fetuses developing outside the womb because for some reason the pregnancy went tits up. The efforts that go into keeping them alive are massive, and very, very expensive (my son cost the French taxpayer €250 000 if he cost a cent).
The line between a fetus dependent on its mother's body, and a baby being kept alive by medical science that, had it been possible, would have been much better off inside its mother's body is in my mind a very blurry one.
*There are scientists about who are working on an artificial womb as an alternative to the current incubators. This may well lead to better outcomes for preemies, but I only hope they are going to be employing some very competent shrinks for the parents because man those things look upsetting. An incubator was bad enough. (My experience of NICU shrinks is mixed.)
The problem is that you want a nice bright-line digital kind of distinction in a situation that is an analogue sliding scale.
We can't make that sort of distinction. It's not possible to look at the sliding scale between a ball of 8 cells and 45-year-old adult and say, at what exact point did it/they transform from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, despite it being pretty obvious that there are pretty radical differences between the two ends of that sliding scale?
In fact one of the few times that you can actually point to a single event, and thus a single point in time, and say "that was pretty darn significant" is birth. Birth has massive biochemical and metabolical implications, as you switch from getting sustenance through the placenta to consuming food and breathing air. There are permanent changes to how your body works as a result. Enzymes that change form or switch direction, some of them within the space of a few hours.
Intriguingly, I have been arguingon this thread about the dangers of digital thinking.
AFZ
Yes, when I say "want", I should perhaps say "demanding as a requirement".
And again, all I can say to you is that birth is in fact a highly significant event in human development. Of course it doesn't replace all the chromosomes or something, but it does cause genes to switch on and off.
The question isn't whether it's transformative, the question is whether you set the bar required for the degree of transformation so high that it can't possibly be met.
For example, I am hugely concerned by UK alcohol consumption (and even in UK churches that can be a cause for concern!). I have a really hard time being around intoxicated people - any type of intoxication, but the legality and social acceptance of drunken behaviour means it is more omnipresent than other types. I sympathise hugely with the various historical temperence movements, but abolition has been shown to not actually improve outcomes - as tempting as the idea is sometimes on a Friday night in a city centre, it wouldn't solve the problem. What you need is social and economic incentives for making it less necessary to drink to excess and more enjoyable to be sober. To bring it back to abortion, increased paid parental leave for parents of disabled children would be a far better carrot than the stick of removing prenatal screening.
I've said before that I dislike the idea of aborting due to a non-fatal disability like Down's. I also dislike the idea of aborting due to sex. But I don't think outlawing those things would improve life for people with Down's or women. Wanting to protect the medical autonomy of pregnant people doesn't mean I have to agree with every decision they make.
[statement that doesn't quite work yet to respect what others have shared - L Epiphanies Host]
My apologies!
L
Epiphanies Host
This makes the most sense to me also
I have, including people I care about and may count as friends.
This does not change my sense of the overall movement, which agrees with AFZ's.
This seems to be drifting from talking about political movements in pejorative terms to talking about national generalisations and getting closer to home to people posting here, so needs to become a bit more careful and nuanced so descriptions of political movements don't come across as insults to people posting here
Thanks
L
Epiphanies Host
Hosting off
As posted before, I've seen an awful lot of people who will wax rhapsodic about the moral imperative of caring for a fetus, but who continue to support a party that throws the post-born-child into the tender mercies of poverty and want according to the "Free Market."
This seems, to me, hypocritical. And folks who are pro life will similarly say that pro-choicers (or liberals of any variety) are hypocrites for tolerating abortion while talking about the importance of charity to...just about anyone or anything else. This is a conversation I have observed many times.
One could argue the hypocrisy goes both ways. But I do recognize what is observed in the "pro life" movement. And this isn't about individual persons. It's about the movement.
I noted earlier that an equally plausible explanation (offered by Sarah Jones at New York magazine) is that America's professional anti-abortion movement isn't hypocritical, they're authoritarian. The actions of the institutional anti-abortion movement make perfect sense if you see them in terms of enforcing rigid ideas about hierarchy, particularly as it relates to gender.
I really don't see what useful purpose is served by that kind of intemperate language. I suppose it's just as well that we don't seem to have any sincere, egalitarian, decent abortion opponents among the thread participants - but as I'm not personally invested (I'm not one either) I won't push the point any further.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Clearly I misunderstood the nature of the ruling.
If material in hidden text is completely off limits... why is it so readily visible? I will go ask that in Styx if you want.
https://forums.shipoffools.com/discussion/3678/texas-abortion-thread-new#latest
[Edited to add - in fact to save you doing it I just pasted the post into the new thread for you]
L
Epiphanies host
I was chatting about this with my daughter (she spends a lot of time on EDS boards) and she told me that one of the disabilities that can be screened are the more severe forms of EDS*, I didn't find a reference, but I suspect it comes under the blanket heading of inherited diseases. Earlier in the thread, the screening out of Down's Syndrome foetuses and other conditions through standard screening was discussed, and from the NHS website (link) as well as known inherited diseases, there are a number of conditions screened at 20 weeks:
From the discussions earlier, I wonder if the question that both @Doublethink and @alienfromzog were asking are found in this linked 2002 article from Springer which has this abstract:
It is a paid article and all I can find free is the above. It is countered by another Springer article, this one from 2020 (link) that argues if
Is selective abortion acceptable? Should parents accept the babies that they have chosen to remain pregnant with? Where are the limits on selective abortion?
* EDS - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome - a genetic malformation of collagen that is recognised in 13 forms, including the more severe vascular (vEDS) and classical (cEDS), which can be tested for genetically. Another variation is Marfan Syndrome. Collagen forms the ligaments and tendons, is part of skin, body membranes, gut lining, blood vessels - so depending on how the significantly the collagen is affected the difficulties can be severe. The mildest form is hEDS (Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, which again varies in impact, but for which there is no genetic testing.
How could it be done better?
And this is coming from a guy who sincerely isn't sure how to answer that question himself.
On that list of disabilities to be investigated at 20 weeks gestation is spina bifida - Tanni Grey-Thompson has spina bifida (although I don't know which form she has.)
* There is no genetic test for hEDS, although there is for cEDS and vEDS. I have the mildest version very mildly and don't reckon to be disabled, although I know others who are disabled by hEDS. I watch rhythmic gymnastics and wonder how many of the competitors have hEDS to be that flexible.