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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?
This idea is just fundamentally incompatible with my morals. Where does this lead?
Just about everything about your life is a “waste of resources”…but human life is valuable.
If you have a heart attack and need an ambulance to take you to the hospital, isn’t it a waste of diesel, and an inconvenience to everybody having to wait for the ambulance to go through lights?
No, it’s not. I contribute to the world around me in many very tangible ways, and I’m certain that everyone in my life would readily agree. I barely even interface with the healthcare system, I have never taken one cent of welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. I just don’t know which resources you believe I’m wasting.
The reason I’m on the ambulance is so they can take me someplace where I can get better. The health condition I’m suffering is, hopefully, temporary. This is fundamentally different from an infant with anencephaly or cyclopia or some such condition. That child will never ever recover from this; their body has failed to develop in a way that is necessary for life. There is no chance whatsoever - barring medical technological advances that we can’t even currently imagine - that such a child will live long enough to even make it out of that operating room. Such a child is often in significant pain - it lacks lungs, so it can no longer breathe once removed from the womb, etc.
If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs. These children are set up to die; whether they die on the operating table, or they die a few hours later in an incubator, there is nothing we can do to keep it from dying very soon after birth. I don’t think you’re really grappling with the question of what it even means to say that such a life “matters.”
I think you realize that this line of argument applies to you as well should you suffer a stroke that renders you a net drain on society for the rest of your life. You might fall back on “my family would be sad if I were left to die,” but there are millions of Christians saddened by the availability of abortion and especially infants born and left to die.
Utility-based moral systems tend to have these problems.
Yes, I have had this conversation with my family multiple times and made it very clear that I would like to be euthanized/taken off life support if such a thing were to happen to me. I do not believe that my physical body is so sacrosanct that it should be kept alive, at great expense, if and when my mental faculties are gone. My mother feels the same way, and as her power of attorney I may one day need to make that decision for her; I plan to honor her explicit desire.
This is part of why I advocate so strongly for eugenics: I would like to eliminate, to the greatest extent possible, congenital conditions which have a strong likelihood of rendering humans mentally inert or broken, such that they become (or just are, from the very beginning of life) a pure burden.
Still there are going to be grey areas where you have retained enough mental faculties to not be 'gone' but you are still nonetheless a burden in the utility scale.
Most of us would trust our immediate family to make the correct decision in these grey areas more than we trust the legislature. Given the general views of conservative Republicans on family values and the trustworthiness of the government, it is odd that the conservative movement thinks that this particular deeply personal decision needs to be taken once-and-for-all by politicians who don't have to live with the consequences, but the nature of American coalitional politics is what it is.
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