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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?
Yes and yes.
In the 6 states (including Minnesota) and DC where there is no term limit, patients are free to have an elective abortion at any time for any reason, including at 38 weeks or later if they so desire.
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/11/abortion-laws-bans-state-map
Information is scarce but this study indicates that elective abortions of healthy babies are a significant proportion of all third trimester abortions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9321603/
The introductory conclusion is really quite shocking when translated from academeese:
"People are often too dumb to recognize they're pregnant until the 3rd trimester."
The logical follow-on to that, implicit in the author's writing, is "And you can't hold somebody accountable for being a real dumbass! Let 'em kill that baby"
This actually points to a something I've never heard a great answer on. How, in a world with ubiquitous condoms and the pill are we hitting 1 million abortions a year.
I genuinely can't think of an answer to this other than "a lot of people really like raw-dogging, and a lot of women really hate the side effects of the pill, and a lot of people are just really fucking stupid and don't know how pregnancy works."
I love it. If this were the honest popular answer, the whole conversation would be different. Instead, we have the often used euphemism of "I wound up pregnant!" like it's winning the lottery or having a pigeon shit on you.
I like to bring up the old MTV sex ed ads: sex is no accident
"Your honor, I was roller blading while fully erect!"
"Case dismissed!"
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