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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?
This idea is ubiquitous. One of the point I realized this, was COVID era argument: we have to lock people down in order not to overburden healthcare system. It was one of the most stupid arguments I have heard - my purpose and governing principle in my life is now supposed to be not to overburden healthcare system? This amorphous system is actually more valuable than human life as it is embodied in my daily activities and pleasures. I exist for the benefit of this system - not the other way around. No more dangerous activities such as skiing or anything else. By the way the same goes for other similar arguments: smoking and being fat and chronically ill is terrible for the healthcare system, so you should stop doing it.
It reminded me of the old Monty Python skit.
You can make anything sound stupider if you stop halfway through the reasoning. Preventing the collapse is valuable if it prevents massive amounts of unnecessary suffering. Doesn’t that sound like something people might want to avoid?
I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat. There is legislation to make them more difficult, especially smoking, but the reasoning is more “to reduce the bad thing itself” than “to prevent healthcare collapse.”
One of those things was banned during COVID lockdowns, the other two were exempt. Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.
I mean, I agree, but that’s because I think you’re the one stopping early.
Do you think the average lockdown enthusiast would have said defending the healthcare system was their purpose and governing principle?
Only in the UK would it be the modal response. But it was common in the US as well.
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