wat0n wrote:@snapdragon more than a hard gestational age cutoff, I think there's no reason to kill a fetus to end a pregnancy if inducing labor would have the same effect without killing it and it's not dangerous for the woman.
Whose job is to decide that? Yours? Or the people involved.
I think this is also why you can find quite a few people who take issue at the idea of a late-term abortion. Basically, at this point a fetus is a person for all practical purposes.
No it isn’t. But think about it. Why would a woman choose to terminate a pregnancy at that advanced stage?
Furthermore, abortion would not really be an issue if it was possible to terminate pregnancy this way at any stage. Maybe it will, at some point.
It ought not be an issue at all.
It’s difficult for me to find any statistics for very late term abortions on the USA , but it should be possible for you to find some, even if they’re informal.
I did discover a woman telling of terminating her pregnancy at 29 weeks because the foetus’s brain had stopped developing and it couldn’t possibly survive. I haven’t managed to find anything about a healthy woman terminating a healthy pregnancy at 32 weeks.
To make stipulations is infantilising women. They don’t need anyone to tell them that their late term abortion is a terrible thing. It’s always a tragedy for everyone concerned.
Because foetal testing has advanced so much, very late terminations because of abnormalities are becoming far more rare.
In my Mother’s day, Down’s syndrome wasn’t detected until very late in the pregnancy. These days it’s much earlier.
Nevertheless, sometimes very late abortions are necessary, according to the woman concerned and her doctors.
They’re thankfully very rare, and I say thankfully, because they must be horrendous to go through.
Believe me, if for some reason any of my daughters were to need a late termination, then anyone objecting on their so called moral terms will be told to go and do one.
At any stage, come to think of it.
“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” -Socrates.