[Pants-of-dog]

A rape victim is 13+ times more likely to attempt suicide and as such there's an obvious case to make that the pregnancy can make suicide attempts (and success) more likely to happen than if pregnancy was the result of consensual sex. As such, the pregnancy arising from rape is actually an injury, and one that clearly can end with the woman killed or gravely injured. She just needs to use a firearm, the case fatality rate of suicide attempts using those is over 80%. Normally we'd allow abortion if pregnancy represented a substantial risk to the mother's life, don't see why wouldn't one caused by rape count.

This seems like a logical hypothesis, but without evidence, there is no way of knowing if it is actually true.

Regardless, this does not contradict my argument.

The question is not unclear, on the contrary, it's very clear if anything: Would you honor a woman's request to an abortion at the 37th week of pregnancy regardless of her reason? Pure and simple. Will you answer the question? You are free to qualify your response as you desire.

Actual bad faith is to pretend the question is hard to understand.

No, I understand the question.

This is why I paraphrased it more clearly. You then completely ignored my clarification and proceeded to ask your leading question.

Again, if this is all just about scoring debate points, please do not use debates that actually result in taking away people’s reproductive rights and increasing the risks of dying.

[wat0n]

This seems like a logical hypothesis, but without evidence, there is no way of knowing if it is actually true.

Regardless, this does not contradict my argument.

What evidence do you need? That rape victims are more likely to attempt to kill themselves? I already cited that. This alone should justify avoiding forcing them to relive being raped. And yes it does contradict your argument.

No, I understand the question.

This is why I paraphrased it more clearly. You then completely ignored my clarification and proceeded to ask your leading question.

Again, if this is all just about scoring debate points, please do not use debates that actually result in taking away people’s reproductive rights and increasing the risks of dying.

Why are 37-week fetuses unborn "people" yet 10-week ones are not? You have yet to provide a logical answer. You said personhood doesn't matter, after all, but now you are labeling some fetuses as "people" while others are not.

"Pregnant people wanting to terminate their pregnancy have to do so in the feasible way that is least harmful for the fetus at the moment in time in which termination is to be carried out". Do you agree with this proposition?

[Pants-of-dog]

What evidence do you need? That rape victims are more likely to attempt to kill themselves? I already cited that. This alone should justify avoiding forcing them to relive being raped. And yes it does contradict your argument.

Why are 37-week fetuses unborn "people" yet 10-week ones are not? You have yet to provide a logical answer. You said personhood doesn't matter, after all, but now you are labeling some fetuses as "people" while others are not.

"Pregnant people wanting to terminate their pregnancy have to do so in the feasible way that is least harmful for the fetus at the moment in time in which termination is to be carried out". Do you agree with this proposition?

So you have no evidence showing that rape exceptions for abortion have any impact on suicide rates.

Also note that allowing a pregnant person to have an abortion at any stage of the pregnancy would also provide the same benefits without any logical inconsistency.

We also know that keeping pregnant people alive is also a lot easier and better in those places that allow access to abortion. It is a clear correlation.

But if you wish to explain how the suicide rate thing contradicts the claim that abortion bans are about punishing sexually active women, please feel free.

[wat0n]

So you have no evidence showing that rape exceptions for abortion have any impact on suicide rates.

Also note that allowing a pregnant person to have an abortion at any stage of the pregnancy would also provide the same benefits without any logical inconsistency.

We also know that keeping pregnant people alive is also a lot easier and better in those places that allow access to abortion. It is a clear correlation.

But if you wish to explain how the suicide rate thing contradicts the claim that abortion bans are about punishing sexually active women, please feel free.

Would you cite the study? What's driving the difference between both types of jurisdictions?

I find it hard to comment further without seeing it. In the case of a suicidal pregnant person precisely because of the pregnancy, I can understand allowing an abortion would simply count as doing so to avoid risk to life. But the difference you mention could be driven by many things that are unrelated to whether abortion is legal or not.

[Pants-of-dog]

Would you cite the study? What's driving the difference between both types of jurisdictions?

I find it hard to comment further without seeing it.

It is actually “studies”, plural.

There is:
State Abortion Policies and Maternal Death in the United States, 2015‒2018

Dovile Vilda, Maeve E Wallace, Clare Daniel, Melissa Goldin Evans, Charles Stoecker, Katherine P Theall.

Also:
The Pregnancy-Related Mortality Impact of a Total Abortion Ban in the United States: A Research Note on Increased Deaths Due to Remaining Pregnant
Amanda Jean Stevenson

In the case of a suicidal pregnant person precisely because of the pregnancy, I can understand allowing an abortion would simply count as doing so to avoid risk to life. But the difference you mention could be driven by many things that are unrelated to whether abortion is legal or not.

Argument from ignorance, dismissed.

[wat0n]

It is actually “studies”, plural.

There is:
State Abortion Policies and Maternal Death in the United States, 2015‒2018

Dovile Vilda, Maeve E Wallace, Clare Daniel, Melissa Goldin Evans, Charles Stoecker, Katherine P Theall.

Also:
The Pregnancy-Related Mortality Impact of a Total Abortion Ban in the United States: A Research Note on Increased Deaths Due to Remaining Pregnant
Amanda Jean Stevenson

The first one just seems to draw a correlation. And I'd say claim the requirement that a licensed physician perform or supervise the abortion causes higher total maternal mortality rate seems counterintuitive to say the least. I highly doubt someone who isn't a physician would be less likely to kill the woman in the process of performing an abortion than an actual doc. Seems like the study has an omitted variable problem.

I'll read the second one later but clearly a total ban would imply banning women who need an abortion to save their lives from getting one, which is currently illegal for states to do.

Argument from ignorance, dismissed.

It's not a fallacy to point out correlation is not causation. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy as well, you know.

[Pants-of-dog]

@wat0n

Banning abortion is not about saving lives.

It is about punishing sexually active women.

[annatar1914]

@wat0n

Banning abortion is not about saving lives.

It is about punishing sexually active women.

By punishing their innocent children? Madness.

[wat0n]

@annatar1914 why do you consider the fetus to be a child?

@Pants-of-dog here you have an example of people who obviously disagree with your view. For many this is about whether fetuses are entitled to the same protections children have or not. You may believe they aren't, and maybe you are right, maybe you're wrong, I don't know. But this is clearly an issue. And @annatar1914 isn't the only one who believes this.

[XogGyux]

It depends, really.

No, it does not.

Was that back surgery absolutely necessary for you to get back to normal?

Are you aware of any other indication for back surgery?
"Back to normal" might be a stretch, usually the goal is to increase function/decrease chances of progression and/or decrease pain. "Back to normal" might be the ultimate goal and achievable on a fraction of cases, but unlikely. Oftentimes back surgery requires installation of hardware that limits mobility of the joints (fixation) and thus makes it impossible to be "back to normal" (pun not intended).

Was your death or paralysis the result of the surgeon's malpractice?

How could this possibly be relevant at all.

You may want to read this article and also this paper, they deal with that kind of situation.

The situations described there are not parallel to what I described to you. They are talking about conditions that directly lead to the death of someone. The scenario that I illustrated, the initial injury does not directly lead to the final injury/death.

If your death or paralysis during surgery was inevitable, or close to it, yes, I'd be facing the corresponding charges. I would not if your death or paralysis was the result of malpractice.

You are incorrect.
Furthermore, you don't seem to have a firm grasp of what malpractice is. A complication in the OR is not necessarily equal to malpractice. For malpractice, you must demonstrate that the doc was negligent and that somehow that negligence lead to the injury.

How about just aborting it instead of stabbing it?

We have gone through this many many times. In the case of a 37w pregnancy, this is a term pregnancy. Abortion loses meaning.

Indeed.

Elaborate?

So then it would not be justifiable to terminate the pregnancy by killing the fetus, would it?

Again, the specifics of the situation matter.

Because that's my point.

Doubtful.

You can't just expel the person from your house by shooting them on the face without at least trying other methods, if those were feasible (to leave the cases in which someone can be presumed to be there as an aggressor, e.g. if he just got inside after forcing a lock, aside). You can't just claim he was inside your property, even more so if you had allowed him in beforehand.

I don't see how this changes anything. Are you suggesting that there is a way by which a pregnancy can be terminated and that a fetus, say ~20weeks can be reliably and reasonably kept alive? Are you suggesting that the whole of the medical community is holding back and intentionally killing all these fetuses?

So then doctors are indeed not simply "respecting all the patient's wishes when it comes to her treatment", but actually balancing interests (even if the mother's interests take precedence). Why else would this doc be "rogue" if he was just abiding by this principle (the woman's bodily autonomy is sacrosanct) strictly?

I am struggling to see what you are trying to say with that sentence.

I'm assuming that for some reason delivery would lead to the woman's death and an abortion wouldn't.

Depends of the circumstances. That's not always the case.

Even if she wants to abort a 37-week fetus?

Again, abortion loses meaning at this stage, this is a full-term pregnancy. Its like saying "aborting a landing attempt" when the plane is already on the hangar.

No, we shouldn't respect everything she wants. If as you said there was a way to transfer the fetus outside the woman without killing it, we would do so even if the woman wanted to abort it for whatever reason.

At this point you are arguing with yourself.
Tell me, how many docs/clinics and pregnant women do you know that are performing 37w abortions routinely?

Guidelines can be based on gestational age. It's not outrageous, at all.

Guidelines are not and should not be provided by a court. This should be left to the actual experts on the matter.

I'd also not say the last one is arbitrary.

It is all arbitrary. Even if we could pinpoint the exact moment at which a particular fetus "becomes a person", not all pregnancies develop at the same exact speed, there will be variation. It is OK to have a degree of arbitrarily, but we must be mindful of why it exists and that it is in fact arbitrary. Same thing with the 18y adulthood discussion we had earlier. It is OK to have an arbitrary number, it is not OK to assume that this has any sort of biological meaning, it is, after all, arbitrary.

It literally says the fetus has at least as a good chance of surviving and being discharged as if labor started naturally. How is this arbitrary, when inducing birth would match naturally-started birth as closely as possible?

I don't know WTF you talking about in this statement/question?

I'd expect courts to follow.

This is optimal..., several decades' worth of fighting back and forth about wether we can use a woman as an incubator and for how long and how to prosecute doctors that help that woman terminate a pregnancy and the decisions about the outcomes of these cases will be made by mainly old dudes that have no training in medicine or biology.

She may indeed be seen by a psychiatrist and if the call was that she's competent I'm guessing the request would just be denied as unethical.

Actually, physicians don't determine competency. That is a legal term and is determined by judges. Perhaps what you mean is capacity (a psychiatrist is not needed but often time involved for this). Anyhow, your guess is as good as mine, the specifics of the case should be known. Assuming this is an otherwise healthy person with no other medical and/or psychiatric illness other than a weird fetish for having 37w abortions, she would likely be expectant management +/- consideration for induction of labor.

Not in the 37-week case.

In all cases.

So you're basically treating the fetus as a person here. Do you realize it?

To the extent that can happen is purely by coincidence and not the deciding factor of this. My approach would be identical if the woman was carrying a dog inside her uterus. There is no need to stab the dog inside her, there is no need to steb the dog outside of her, if she wants to abort the dog she can and finally if she is at term with the dog she can just deliver the dog.
If this is your backdoor way of "showing" that a fetus is a person, it is irrelevant, just as I told you yesterday, the day before yesterday, and several weeks ago.

Did you see the suicide attempts stat among rape victims I posted?

13% of them seemingly survived a suicide attempt, possibly 1% died based on a paper on the CFR of suicide attempts. What makes you believe pregnancy wouldn't make these probabilities greater?

It is irrelevant.

[annatar1914]

@annatar1914 why do you consider the fetus to be a child?

@Pants-of-dog here you have an example of people who obviously disagree with your view. For many this is about whether fetuses are entitled to the same protections children have or not. You may believe they aren't, and maybe you are right, maybe you're wrong, I don't know. But this is clearly an issue. And @annatar1914 isn't the only one who believes this.

@wat0n ,

A Fetus is not lacking in the essentials of what it means to be human. And therefore, we can then get past the hypocrisy and irrational word games and either abolish abortion or accept infanticide.

[Pants-of-dog]

@annatar1914 why do you consider the fetus to be a child?

@Pants-of-dog here you have an example of people who obviously disagree with your view. For many this is about whether fetuses are entitled to the same protections children have or not. You may believe they aren't, and maybe you are right, maybe you're wrong, I don't know. But this is clearly an issue. And @annatar1914 isn't the only one who believes this.

Everyone who wants to punish women for being sexually active will disagree with me about this because they do not want to look like paternalistic and sexist people.

It does not change my argument.

This is clear when we see that they never propose anything that would actually save a life.

[annatar1914]

Everyone who wants to punish women for being sexually active will disagree with me about this because they do not want to look like paternalistic and sexist people.

It does not change my argument.

This is clear when we see that they never propose anything that would actually save a life.

@Pants-of-dog :

I'm proposing Socialism, including free health care, education, housing, and employment as human rights. As a pro life individual, I put my money where my mouth is, to its logical conclusion.

[wat0n]

No, it does not.

Are you aware of any other indication for back surgery?
"Back to normal" might be a stretch, usually the goal is to increase function/decrease chances of progression and/or decrease pain. "Back to normal" might be the ultimate goal and achievable on a fraction of cases, but unlikely. Oftentimes back surgery requires installation of hardware that limits mobility of the joints (fixation) and thus makes it impossible to be "back to normal" (pun not intended).

How could this possibly be relevant at all.

The situations described there are not parallel to what I described to you. They are talking about conditions that directly lead to the death of someone. The scenario that I illustrated, the initial injury does not directly lead to the final injury/death.

Clearly you didn't read or understand the article nor the paper. The paper mentions explicitly that the proximate cause of death was not the direct or immediate cause of death.

You are incorrect.
Furthermore, you don't seem to have a firm grasp of what malpractice is. A complication in the OR is not necessarily equal to malpractice. For malpractice, you must demonstrate that the doc was negligent and that somehow that negligence lead to the injury.

I know, that's exactly what I was referring to. The paper even mentions a case of a person who died from complications from an organ transplant (rejection), a transplant that was necessary because someone else injured them, and it was ruled a homicide by the coroner.

If you died from complications arising from the back surgery, yes, I'd be charged for homicide as well. This much is clear.

We have gone through this many many times. In the case of a 37w pregnancy, this is a term pregnancy. Abortion loses meaning.

And we will have to keep going through it, because as you said it is materially possible to kill the fetus in utero and then deliver the stillborn. Doing so would still be an abortion.

But few doctors would do it. Why?

Elaborate?

You just mentioned one way in which you'd be effectively performing an abortion. Kill the fetus in utero, then dispose of it as desired.

Again, the specifics of the situation matter.

Sure. But let's assume the fetus has developed normally and birth would not be more risky to the woman than it usually is (the fatality rate is less than 20 in 100,000).

Doubtful.

I can taste the salt here.

I don't see how this changes anything. Are you suggesting that there is a way by which a pregnancy can be terminated and that a fetus, say ~20weeks can be reliably and reasonably kept alive? Are you suggesting that the whole of the medical community is holding back and intentionally killing all these fetuses?

Plenty would not say a 20 weeks old fetus is viable. But what about a 37 weeks old one?

I am struggling to see what you are trying to say with that sentence.

It's not that complicated. You're saying it is reasonable to take into account the interest in keeping the 37 weeks old fetus alive in the process of terminating the pregnancy.

Depends of the circumstances. That's not always the case.

Of course it depends on the circumstances, that's my point

No doctor would attempt to deliver a normal 37 weeks old fetus if doing so would kill the mother, unless she specifically consented to it.

Again, abortion loses meaning at this stage, this is a full-term pregnancy. Its like saying "aborting a landing attempt" when the plane is already on the hangar.

If it's materially possible, no, it doesn't lose its meaning. For the mother it also has practical meaning as that means she at the very least is responsible for putting the baby for adoption.

At this point you are arguing with yourself.
Tell me, how many docs/clinics and pregnant women do you know that are performing 37w abortions routinely?

None, thankfully. But a serious request to do so by a competent pregnant woman would be denied if not medically justified. Am I correct here?

Guidelines are not and should not be provided by a court. This should be left to the actual experts on the matter.

You're getting it backwards. Experts provide the guidelines, courts will follow them.

It is all arbitrary. Even if we could pinpoint the exact moment at which a particular fetus "becomes a person", not all pregnancies develop at the same exact speed, there will be variation. It is OK to have a degree of arbitrarily, but we must be mindful of why it exists and that it is in fact arbitrary. Same thing with the 18y adulthood discussion we had earlier. It is OK to have an arbitrary number, it is not OK to assume that this has any sort of biological meaning, it is, after all, arbitrary.

Sure. Yet at the same time, we're picking those ages because we know that for most the cutoffs are on the ballpark for the most part.

For a fetus it could be even easier if we were to agree that it becomes a person when it has at least the same probability of survival and discharge upon inducing birth as it would have if labor began naturally. Research can help establish the guideline. This also seems to be the reason why you say nobody would perform an abortion on a 37 weeks old fetus. There's just no real reason to.

Before this moment, it's still murky but I think this is something most can agree with.

I don't know WTF you talking about in this statement/question?

I simply refer to the third proposal for operationalizing "fetal viability".

This is optimal..., several decades' worth of fighting back and forth about wether we can use a woman as an incubator and for how long and how to prosecute doctors that help that woman terminate a pregnancy and the decisions about the outcomes of these cases will be made by mainly old dudes that have no training in medicine or biology.

They are under a legal obligation to respect expert opinion, even more so in these type of cases. They have to rule while respecting the law and precedent themselves.

Actually, physicians don't determine competency. That is a legal term and is determined by judges. Perhaps what you mean is capacity (a psychiatrist is not needed but often time involved for this). Anyhow, your guess is as good as mine, the specifics of the case should be known. Assuming this is an otherwise healthy person with no other medical and/or psychiatric illness other than a weird fetish for having 37w abortions, she would likely be expectant management +/- consideration for induction of labor.

So she'd not get what she wants, for obvious reasons.

In all cases.

No, because pregnancy can be terminated by inducing labor and giving birth to a normal child in the case of a 37-weeks old fetus. Nature itself and scientific knowledge give the doctor a choice.

To the extent that can happen is purely by coincidence and not the deciding factor of this. My approach would be identical if the woman was carrying a dog inside her uterus. There is no need to stab the dog inside her, there is no need to steb the dog outside of her, if she wants to abort the dog she can and finally if she is at term with the dog she can just deliver the dog.
If this is your backdoor way of "showing" that a fetus is a person, it is irrelevant, just as I told you yesterday, the day before yesterday, and several weeks ago.

It doesn't matter if it's a coincidence or not. What matters is what you're doing. If it looks like a duck...

It is irrelevant.

No, it's not. Suicide is definitely a problem here.

@wat0n ,

A Fetus is not lacking in the essentials of what it means to be human. And therefore, we can then get past the hypocrisy and irrational word games and either abolish abortion or accept infanticide.

What are those essentials?

[annatar1914]

What are those essentials?

@wat0n :

Primarily, being made in the image and likeness of God. Rational soul in a marvelously adapted material form.

The racism and materialism of secular and atheistic society obscures this. Beyond and without the reasons I've given there's no reason to not have infanticide and slavery.

[Pants-of-dog]

@wat0n

If it is possible to remove a viable unborn child, why would you insist on having a procedure that would kill the child?

[wat0n]

@wat0n

If it is possible to remove a viable unborn child, why would you insist on having a procedure that would kill the child?

The mother may not want it. She may even refuse to birth it alive, being inside her body. Bodily autonomy and all, if we take your position to its logical conclusion she has every right to do so since it's inside her body.

[Pants-of-dog]

The mother may not want it.

That does not matter in developed countries, where the state can pick up the neo-natal ICU tab and provide some sort of care.

The pregnant person can simply relinquish the baby to an adoption agency.

She may even refuse to birth it alive, being inside her body. Bodily autonomy and all, if we take your position to its logical conclusion she has every right to do so since it's inside her body.

The pregnant person has the right to have the fetus removed. Any rational person would be more than happy with that.

This ludicrous idea that some evil woman will gleefully murder her child just because she found a legal loophole is so improbable as to be irrelevant.

If we are basing laws on such unrealistic scenarios, we can then ban anything even remotely racist because someone somewhere may be harmed somehow.

[wat0n]

@Pants-of-dog I'm simply applying radical views of bodily autonomy to their logical conclusion here. A 37 week old fetus is objectively still inside the womb and no different from a 7 weeks old one in this regard.

You are now establishing a standard: Rationality of means to achieve the goal, in this case, terminating pregnancy. I'm okay with that but you are conceding the pregnant person would face some limitations on her ability to decide how to do this and by extension what kind of treatment she gets. This is logically true even if most are okay with these limitations.

@annatar1914 just to understand your stance, are there any circumstances in which an abortion would be acceptable? For example, if necessary to save the mother's life?

[annatar1914]

@annatar1914 just to understand your stance, are there any circumstances in which an abortion would be acceptable? For example, if necessary to save the mother's life?

@wat0n :

A procedure to save the life of the mother, which has the consequences of ending the unborn child's life, isn't really an abortion because such is not the real intent.