'Health' of the Mother

"Choice", "Pro-Choice"...if you think it's okay to kill a baby, why don't you have the guts to call it what it technically is- "abortion"? "Choice" sure makes a soft, fuzzy rallying cry for what is the taking of an innocent life. If the word "abortion" feels uncomfortable to use, maybe it's for a reason?! Maybe natural selection or God or whatever is responsible for all of this reality doesn't think or reward the killing of ones offspring? Ya think? Unless that baby is going to kill the woman carrying it, what reason other than utterly repugnant selfishness is there for killing it? There will never be consensus on this issue because people who think like me will no more support abortion than we will the Nazi euthanazia of WWII. Murder is murder, wrong is wrong, everytime.

Partial birth abortion was developed to decrease damage to the mother during a late term abortion. In an abortion of a fetus greater than 18-20 weeks, the baby's head is so large and the mother's body so unready for induced labor, that extracting the fetus routinely tore the mother's cervix and caused massive bleeding. Usually the mother survived the hemorrhage, but often these women were unable to ever carry another baby to term after their cervix was lacerated.

Think of how heartbreaking it would be for a woman who wants a child but for a medical reason can not carry the current baby to term. Perhaps her baby died inside of her, and inducing labor failed, then the abortion tears her cervix and she will have to remain childless. Or her baby had severe hydrocephalus, a 100% fatal birth defect that even most pro-lifers agree is a reason for a late term abortion. Or she had a hormone sensitive cancer such the the cancer would kill her if she continued the pregnancy, but if she aborts then does chemo she could have another child, but her cervix tears during the abortion and she will have to remain childless. As a doctor, I have had patients with all of these tragic problems. Because of cases like this, obstetricians came up with a way to abort late term fetuses without the baby's head tearing the cervix. The baby is partially delivered feet first, a small hole is made at the base of the skull and the brain is suctioned out, causing the soft skull to deflate and allow the delivery without tearing the cervix. Disgusting, yes, but it does protect the mother and allow her to have more children.

Partial birth abortions are very rare. In Virginia where they keep track of this, a series of 25,000 abortions had only 60 partial birth procedures done.

Personally I agree with you that late term abortions should be illegal except in the case of medical harm to the mother or severe birth defects. I think that I would put the gestational deadline for normal (not medically necessary) abortions at 16 weeks though, not 12.

Incidentally, the reason why Obama voted against the 2007 bill banning partial birth abortions is because that bill did not contain a clause protecting the rights of women who needed medically necessary abortions and the victims of rape and incest. Obama is NOT in favor of late term abortions, but he does believe that in some extreme cases they should be allowed.

Did McCain or any of his supporters or the Right to Lifers ever consider that almost all women who carry a baby to late term is doing so because SHE WANTS TO??? Very few women get to late term int heir pregnancies and then decide, "Oh, wait! I've changed my mind." It has to be a heart breaking experience to have to make such a decision after so late in a pregnancy that was obviously wanted. We are not incubaters for procreation, we are flesh and blood women, and deserve to decide for ourselves whether to risk health and life for child birth. McCain would probably feel differently if HE were to carry a baby and be faced with the choice of his own life and the life of his unborn child. What if we told men they couldn't have surgery for prostate cancer or enlarged prostates, or any other male ailments?
Grrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Let's not forget that McCain voted against Biden's efforts to establish protections for abused women. Let's not forget that Palin refused to pay for rape kits. Possibly in her case this was because rape kits use DNA techniques similar to the ones that show that over 98% of the three billion base pairs of human DNA are the same as chimpanzees. But more likely it is because she wants to brutalize raped women by keeping them from using Plan B. Perhaps what McCain and Palin want is the kind of brutal laws that Pentecostals like Palin and other ultra-right-wing Christians forced into place in El Salvador. Their impact has been summarized in the report "Persecuted" (2000), which is summarized by the Center for Reproductive Rights thus: "The report shows that a year and a half after El Salvador's new abortion law took effect in 1998, 69 cases involving illegal abortions had been brought before courts. Most involved poor, under-educated, young women who self-induced abortions by using clothes hangers, ingesting very high doses of birth control pills, antacids, caustic liquids or cytotec pills. In 23 of the cases, hospital personnel turned the women over to police after they arrived for medical treatment following incomplete abortions. . . . The law criminalizes abortion without exception, even to save the life of the pregnant woman or in cases of rape or incest." The result is that even women obtaining abortions face prison terms of up to 12 years. Just what the kind and compassionate people like McCain and Palin want, apparently. Brutalize the woman by raping her and then brutalize her by tempting her to have a back-alley illegal abortion that sends her to the hospital anyway, where her crime will be discovered so that she afterward can be sent to prison and brutalized more.

Abortion is a terrible procedure that no woman enters lightly. However, unintended pregnancies and pregnancies that endanger the mother's health and life happen all the time. Before abortion was legal, many women died or became infertile because of illegal abortions. With the legalization of abortion, women's deaths from childbirth or abortion went way down. Now it's time for the next step -- establish policies and attitudes that make abortion extremely rare and unneccesary. This of course, is the platform of the Democratic party and of Barack Obama.

Your religious views are your own and the government has no right to force those views on all citizens, I don't believe a clump of cells is a life, i don't care about your religious views. I don't believe abortion is wrong. My body, my life, my decision.
No one has the right to force me to into slavery disguised as gestation.

What I find intereesting whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, the hypocrisy of the Republican Party as it relates to subject. On one hand they say do not murder the unborn child. However, as a minority, I also hear that they disparage and hold disdain for the minority mother for having many "babies" from several "babies" daddy's, and SOME Republicans saying, that these "babies mommas" are a drain on the welfare system. So, which one is it?? Do you want EVERYONE to have their babies or just the people of the CAUCASIAN persuassion? I am just curious.

As long as there are abortionists out there that thumb their nose at the law and even boast as to how many healthy viable fetuses they abort each year for the "health" of the mother, this will be a extremely volitile subject. George Tiller claims to abort, on the average, one viable fetus for every business day of the year. He has boasted to have abort a child only days before its delivery. Nins, if this man you talk about was such a Christian, what was he doing get his girlfriend pregnant? Obviously his believe system wasn't strong enough to keep him from fornication, it is no wonder he couldn't handle the results of his sin. How do you know that his behavior or ability to cope would have been any better if they had chosen to abort and the girlfriend died anyways? You sure did weacve that story to fit your agenda but what about the real issues?

To kill a fully formed human child is a crime and a sin. Even criminals convincted of horrific crimes get humane deaths, in capital punishment. Infants get no anaesthesia, no lethal injection. They get a knife to the back of their tiny necks and a crushing instrument to their skulls. No pain medicine. No anaesthetics. Just pure, cruel and unusual punishment for the crime of being unwanted. Obama supports this all the way through to delivery. If the human baby made it 4 more inches out of the birth canal, it would be murder.