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Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
OK, maybe I'm completely out of the loop, but what exactly are they doing in Minnesota and why doesn't this article explain that at all?
Are late second trimester/third trimester abortions legal in Minnesota? Are they really doing them under conditions where the fetus is NOT suffering from a condition incompatible with life?
Because essentially, what they are performing is an emergency early term induced birth (which is done - and only done - in many places around the world when the life of the mother is in danger), right?
To an outside observer, this just sounds like "if a serious genetic/developmental defect incompatible with life is discovered late in pregnancy, abortion remains legal. In this special case, doctors are no longer forced to get an incubator contaminated for literally zero gain (since the malformed early birth baby will die under any and all circumstance anyway).
If this is the case, I personally would support all this. It would be cruel (and needlessly dangerous) to force the mother to carry a dying baby to term and birth it. It would be wasted equipment and medical labor, if doctors where forced to use an incubator for the dying baby in a case like that.
Because literally nobody is getting an elective abortion late second trimester and going “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” when the fetus turns out to just keep on living, right?
Up until 2023, Minnesota statutes restricted abortion under the viability standard, generally understood to be 20-28 weeks, with a not-especially-clear exception for health-and-life-of-mother. There was actually some weird legal status for the law due to an older federal court decision floating around, but the official story is that abortion providers weren't doing those types of abortions and the state enforcement pointedly wasn't going to go asking about it.
In January 2023, the PRO Act was passed. While this did not overturn the previous law on abortion, it did create a statutory right to terminate pregnancies that prohibited enforcement of any restrictions outside of that specific section. I don't know if anyone's been able to litigate the difference in court, but my understanding is that this has largely been understood to effectively allow abortion regardless of trimester.
A separate law passed in May 2023 did... a lot of random things, some abortion-related, including formally repealing the older abortion restrictions; after this point there are no situations where abortion itself was banned. It also modified an older born-alive statute:
Ostensibly, this was meant to remove some politically loaded text -- the born alive statutes were very much a pro-life slogan -- but the strict reading removes a lot of requirements for medical practitioners to actively keep the infant alive, rather than ameliorating pain. But to social conservatives, that's basically just letting the child die of exposure: while the mother may (often) be no more interested in keeping the child, all the safety and medical concerns for the mother are kinda done with by that point, and no small portion are within (and sometimes well within) the ability of modern medicine to keep alive.
There's a perspective where the point of abortion is more about whether a mother is stuck having had a child, where someone who has an elective abortion in the late-third or early-second trimester wants to kill the fetus when it turns out to just keep on living, but... uh, it's generally one seen as politically suicidal to spell it out. (And a highly social conservative framing).
The prevalence of third-trimester (and late second-trimester) abortions that do not involve a nonviable infant or a dire threat to the life of the mother are... controversial. There's a lot of progressives that claim it literally never happens, but that's pretty clearly absolutely not true. Social cons often point to the Guttmacher Institute-driven research that said "... data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment", but this includes a lot of late-second-trimester abortions and Guttmacher is really not great about allowing general access to anonymized data to narrow it down further. It's rare as a total of all abortion, but depending on source and where you split the categories you can get anywhere from a substantial minority to a slim majority of late-term abortions.
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