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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.
Your timeline has errors. As reported in the article,
So 8 live births after abortion (LBAA) occurred “under his watch,” while 0 survived. This is before any amendments to the law. But the article is incomplete; it didn’t include survivorship numbers for the pre-Walz years. Fortunately, those are included in the linked documents:
Oh. It turns out that infants from their mother’s womb untimely torn don’t have a very good survivorship rate, even before Tim Walz gets involved. The linked reports break these down into more detail, too. Recurring phrases include “anomalies incompatible with life” and “APGAR score of 1.” Roughly a third received “comfort care” measures. We aren’t talking about squalling toddlers left out for the wolves. These are dying or brain-dead infants who cannot be saved by “reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice.”
One other thing I noticed in the 2015 report is that all of its LBAAs came from hospitals, not abortion clinics. Is it possible that the kind of late-term abortion which results in a born-alive infant is particularly dangerous? Say, when the health of the mother is most at risk?
It’s beside the point. Kirk posted his rant about how Walz treated eight children like trash. His data actually showed that Minnesota doctors perform triage in the rare, rare cases where infants are born alive after abortions. You filled in the gaps.
Doesn’t that deserve a fact check?
I made a comment early about how this all seems cargo cultish to me. Thank you for doing the work to collect the data on how many angels fit on the head of a pin in Minnesota in any given year, but I'm personally not interested in quibbling over the million-baby-skulls-a-year sized Baal-pit in which I as an American voter have been playing for the last couple generations.
This may sound to some readers like a woman saying "I'm not interested in quibbling over the government telling me what to do with my body" - I am also writing for you. Please consider that the dead babies are real. Those 10's of millions of lives snuffed out are real. Their right to life came from God. The "right" to an abortion was made up by communists.
I've considered it, and would like to politely suggest that He stop furnishing tiny, fragile clumps of cells with their own souls.
I can laugh about it with you and also gesture toward every other time we've tried to be clever with God
It's only funny and endearing if the end result is not a pile of a million dead baby skills a year
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