wat0n wrote:Let's assume the fetus is a person for a sec. In which cases can most people agree abortion would not be perverted?
Uhm. That sounds like an awful lot of murder investigations that we would have to be doing. If fetus are people, and about 20% of all pregnancies (probably more) end up in spontaneous abortion, with the US having 4M birth per year, that means there is well over 1 million SPONTANEOUS abortions. That is a lot of mourning and a lot of mulder investigations that we would have to be doing to ensure that 1 million people did not meet their untimely demise due to some sort of negligent indiscretion by the mother right? You took the wrong antibiotic before you knew you were pregnant? Jail time... You exercised too much releasing an ungodly amount of hormones and molecules that made it inhospitable to the person growing on you? Jail time. Assuming that a fetus is a person does not solve your point, it only adds layers of complexity that you cannot really deal with. Again, while at the same time not coming up with a solid reason to explain why 1 person can violate the body autonomy of another. Furthermore, as I have said before, a fetus, certainly during the whole first half of the pregnancy is physically incapable of having any sort of consciousness, probably not even after birth. Arguing a fetus that has never had consciousness is a person is a hard task, that is, at the end of the road, you still have to prove why a person can override body autonomy of other.
I think the list would include saving the mother from "loss of life or limb", when the fetus isn't really expected to live for long ("deformities incompatible with life", it's just an extension of the former considering the risks involved in the delivery) and rape (personally though I'd make the rapist face the legal consequences of the abortion in this case, not the victim, but the agreement would be that the victim should indeed have the right to terminate the pregnancy). What else?
That all sounds like the kind of shit you would read from a fairy tale book. Reality is messy. Even the best doctors cannot predict outcomes. When I admit patients to the hospital I have the "code question". Basically, I need to document "code status" for a patient in case there is an emergency we know beforehand what to do. It goes something like this "If your heart were to stop, essentially you die, would you want us to do CPR and try to bring you back to life, and potentially put a plastic tube down your throat to connect you to a machine that would breathe to you to try to revive you?". Many patients answer "yes but only if I am not going to be a vegetable" and then I have to explain to this patient that during a code, we won't necessarily know what will be the outcome of it at the end, when you die, your blood flow to the brain is impaired, if we are able to revive you, depending on how long you died for and how good our CPR was, etc and what other medical problems you have... that would determine the degree of cerebral damage and "how much of a vegetable" you might end up having (being). In other words, we deal with uncertainty all the time. Who is going to be deciding what percentage of "death" and or "limb loss" is acceptable? Maternal mortality in the US is already 20 in 100,000 live births, so that is already a risk of dying from just having a delivery. So technically speaking all pregnancies already carry a risk of death, a small, but real risk of death. So according to you, someone would have to come up with numbers and scenarios that would make it OK to proceed if they cross this arbitrary threshold. What is it going to be? more than 10% of woman dying good enough to perform an abortion? Or perhaps we need to go with the "coin flip" or 51% chances of dying and now you are entitled to the abortion? Perhaps not even that, perhaps we need more certainty, perhaps we need to be 90%+ sure that you will die for us to allow an abortion? Who the fuck would be choosing these numbers?
Now assume the fetus isn't a person.
I don't have to. They are not people.
After viability it gets murkier since there are, in principle, options for terminating pregnancy that give the fetus a chance to live (we can discuss how to precisely define viability if you want) but I guess many would still be okay with on-demand abortion in this case too.
Viability is a terrible way to make the decision around. Who is going to make the decision of what is "viable"? Again, you throw these terms as if they were some sort of milestones that can be measured, they cannot. You don't become "a person" at some date on your gestational age and/or become "viable" on the 127th day and 4 hours 40mins and 26 seconds.
Viability is a fluid variable that will be affected by the resources available, willingness of the parents to push for treatment and/or accept complications and/or disability, technology (present and future) and many other variables that we don't even know yet. Arbitrarily choosing a "viability date" today would only make it obsolete in a couple decades as our technology improves, and simply legislating "viability" is kicking the issue back to courts and judges to decide what constitutes viability.