Quote:
Originally Posted by HOZ
Well I would like to ask 2 questions:
1. IFF figures that 1% of all abortions are partial birth abortions. Doesn't sound like much...but what is the actual number? If say there was 200,000 abortions in the USA 1% would be 2000. That to me is a lot of head hacking and dismemberment without anaesthetic.
2. How many abortions are truly for the mother's health?
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Sorry, I may not have been clear: slightly less than 1% of abortions are performed after the 20th week. So-called "partial birth abortions" (not a real medical term, btw) are just one technique among many possible ones, and accounts for .017% of abortions in the U.S.
As I said, saying that dismembering a fetus inside the womb is okay but delivering it intact is not is moral relativism in my view. Either both are okay or neither is. (my own view, fwiw, is that late term abortions should not be available as an elective procedure, but should be reserved for use in situations where the mother's health is in danger--but that's just my opinion and I can see the rationale behind other views as well)
As for #2, I wasn't able to find that out--though I didn't spend a lot of time on it. From what I could tell there's some controversy about it, and my guess is that patient confidentiality hampers the accuracy of reporting somewhat. But these intact dilation and extraction procedures are performed between 20 and 24 weeks of pregnancy, not as some more inflammatory statements would have it, mere weeks before a healthy delivery is possible. For those who don't know, the youngest fetus ever to survive a live birth was 22 weeks gestation, and he/she was born approximately the size of a ball point pen. At 24 weeks, there's a 50% survivability rate for preterm labour and after that the fetus becomes gradually more viable, though still at extreme risk. I wasn't able to find any evidence of abortions being performed after 24 weeks gestation, and many hospitals have a 20 week cutoff.
But I kind of presume that even if let's say two thirds of intact D and E procedures are done to protect the health of the mother (and there are many reasons for this--most of them are rare, but so are these procedures) that makes the remainder a very tiny exception. But in the end it doesn't make all that much difference because I think it would be a simple matter to ban all non-medically necessary late term abortions. Everyone except the most strident ideologues would agree to it in my view, so long as it was appropriately constructed to preserve the right to terminate a pregnancy prior to a certain gestational age, and contained appropriate safeguards for the health of the mother. So why not write those into these pieces of legislation?