Quote:
Originally Posted by AltaGuy
The garbage thing about debates over "late-term" abortions is that it is entirely political/religious. Abortions should be a medical decision made behind closed doors.
Statistics show that abortions performed beyond 20 weeks are exceedingly rare - and even rarer still when access to abortion is unfettered earlier in a pregnancy - and yet the discussion around them is continually brought up, especially in the US. There are certain scenarios beyond twenty weeks where a doctor and their patient might choose to get one: like, say, if the woman's life were threatened.
I don't want a woman and her doctor to have to justify to the state why they performed a medical procedure. Especially when the justifications for that necessity have continually been shown to be nearly irrelevant.
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Which is a reasonable position to have, if you acknowledge that you're taking the moral position that there's no other "person" involved beyond the woman in question, regardless of when the abortion is performed in the term. You seem to just be taking that as a given, when it's actually a totally reasonable point of disagreement.
It's actually pretty damned difficult to decide at what point a viable foetus becomes a human being that should have rights. You seem to think that it's at the point of birth, regardless of whether that's at 9 months on the dot or some time earlier. Fine - I'm not actually sure if I disagree. But to act like that's just an obvious thing everyone should agree on without question is absurd.
The point about there being very few post-20-week abortions is a totally separate point and a strange one to make if you're coming from the position that there's no difference in terms of legal rights between aborting a foetus at 20+ weeks and aborting one at, for example, 4 weeks.
I'm pro-choice but the tendency by some to act like there's simply no room for disagreement about anything remotely related to abortion from the perspective of what the law should be or how people should behave is intellectually dishonest moral grandstanding.