My own pro-choiceness doesn't really procede from the question of whether a zygote is a life, as much as it does from a rejection of utopianism.posted by fairytale of los angeles at 4:11 PM on March 21, 2011 [6 favorites]
According to the 2006 Guttmacher Institute report Repeat Abortion in the United States, women having a second or higher-order abortion are substantially different from women having a first abortion in only two important ways: They are more than twice as likely to be age 30 or older and, even after controlling for age, almost twice as likely to already have had a child. (Among all women having an abortion, six in 10 are mothers.)posted by Miko at 8:02 PM on March 21, 2011 [30 favorites]
Just as with women having their first abortion, however, the majority of women having their second or even their third abortion were using contraceptives during the time period in which they became pregnant. In fact, women having a repeat abortion are slightly more likely to have been using a highly effective hormonal method (e.g., the pill or an injectable). This finding refutes the notion that large numbers of women are relying on abortion as their primary method of birth control. Rather, it suggests that women having abortions—especially those having more than one—are trying hard to avoid unintended pregnancy, but are having trouble doing so.
The harm and benefit in parasitic interactions concern the biological fitness of the organisms involved. Parasites reduce host fitness in many ways, ranging from general or specialized pathology (such as parasitic castration), impairment of secondary sex characteristics, to the modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their fitness by exploiting hosts for resources necessary for the parasite's survival: (i.e. food, water, heat, habitat, and dispersal).posted by rtha at 11:38 AM on March 22, 2011
Although the concept of parasitism applies unambiguously to many cases in nature, it is best considered part of a continuum of types of interactions between species, rather than an exclusive category. Particular interactions between species may satisfy some but not all parts of the definition.
My clinic was special. It was one of the three free-standing facilities in the country at the time that routinely performed abortions well into the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. Yes, we performed the much talked about, often loathed (even in liberal circles) late-term abortion. . . .posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 10:04 PM on March 22, 2011 [5 favorites]
Do late term abortions often end perfectly viable pregnancies? Of course they do. . . .
We all agree, say the politicians, that the best solution to this problem is to have fewer abortions, period.
I don’t agree with them. I think the only solution is for all of us to become very serious about creating a world where the children who already exist have a decent chance at growing up healthy and in control of their own destiny. . . .
Many of the women I had the honor of talking to before they had their abortion told me they would prefer not to terminate their pregnancies but they simply could not afford to bring a child into this world. They wanted their pregnancy, they loved their pregnancy, but they could not in good conscience ask their child to suffer the same poverty they were suffering.
Women who terminate in their second trimester often do so because they are uninsured or their employer-sponsored insurance plans exclude contraceptive and abortion benefits. They can’t raise the money for a first trimester abortion, which often means they have to desperately scurry to borrow money for more expensive second-trimester procedures.
Some women simply have no idea they are pregnant until they are well into their second trimester. We receive ridiculously mixed messages about our sexuality. We are taught that it is our responsibility to be attractive and sexy, then we fight legislation to teach sex education in the public schools. How many adult women do you know at this very moment who can’t give you an accurate, concise explanation of how her own reproductive system works?
Many women don’t receive crucial genetic testing results until their second trimester. I vividly remember holding the hand of a lovely biologist who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus would not survive the rest of her pregnancy. She was given the “choice” of terminating at that point or waiting to deliver her dead baby several weeks later.
Determining the morality of a stranger’s actions is pretty easy when you don’t know the facts. And when it comes to abortion we never want to know the facts. The facts make us squeamish. The facts point us to the truth that while we profess to hold “life” in the highest esteem we do precious little as a culture to ensure the most basic quality of life for our most vulnerable.
. . .
I have watched the abortions you don’t want to think about. I have also watched beautiful, brilliant living children subjected to unspeakable horrors that I wish I didn’t have to think about. I’ve seen politicians and ministers and good respectable people question the morality of women who have chosen abortion over failing a child they would have loved dearly.
Abortion in Canada is not limited by the law (on-demand, no time limit). While some non-legal obstacles exist, Canada is one of only a few nations with no legal restrictions on abortion.Catholics for Choice Canada and the Coalition for Choice:
Anti-abortion activists in Canada typically mimic the efforts of their American counterparts. Some have suggested that “partial-birth” and late term abortions should be banned in Canada...such a ban would infringe on women’s constitutional right to the security of the person. At the same time, it would award politicians more rights than pregnant women as well as their doctors - making medical advice secondary to political legislation. All medical care, including abortion care, should be based on clinical standards with the goal of meeting patients’ needs and minimizing risk to patients. Physicians should not face criminal prosecution or imprisonment for providing clinically appropriate care for their patients. Canada is one of only two countries in the world with no laws restricting abortion. Because of that, Canada serves as a respected role model for abortion care internationally. Abortion is a health procedure and as such, can be left up to the discretion of the doctor and patient. It requires no extra regulation, in the same way that childbirth or heart surgery require no extra regulation. It would be reactionary and counter-productive to pass any restriction against abortion, because that would endanger women’s health and lives, and infringe on women’s equality rights.The Case Against Abortion Restrictions:
Canada, one of only 3 countries in its particular position, provides an excellent case study with respect to the argument against restrictions on abortions. As of the R. v. Morgentaler decision in 1988, Canada began a time of no legal restrictions on abortion... What the decision in Morgentaler means is that technically a woman can walk into a clinic at 35 weeks and abort. Legally, there is nothing stopping her. Practically speaking, even if a woman were to ask to terminate a healthy fetus at 35 weeks, chances are next to zero that a doctor would do it. Realistically, and most importantly, women don’t do that. This is where the “trust women” phrase comes into play. You, me, the government, everybody, needs to trust that women will do the right thing. Women who want abortions will get one done as soon as possible. Unfortunately, in the US, a woman will often have to pay for an abortion out of pocket. This means she has to spend time raising money, which can lead to her being later in the pregnancy at the time of the procedure. In Canada, where most abortions are covered by health insurance, many women are able to have an abortion as soon as possible, since they don’t have to spend time raising money towards the cost of the procedure. This means that more Canadian women have abortions in the first trimester. That is the best argument for why abortions should be publicly funded.According to Guttmacher, the statistics in Canada are almost the same - a very little bit better - than those in the US. The big difference is in the 20 weeks plus area: in Canada, 0.4%; in the US, 1.5%. It is possible that the many obstacles and restrictions we have in place here do indeed cause some percentage of women to have to delay their attention to their pregnancy - whether because of inadequate health care, lack of money, difficulty traveling or getting legal permissions, or more than one such factor.
When you look at the (Canadian) statistics, abortions rates after 12 weeks are extremely low, and negligible after 20 weeks. From ARCC:
90% of abortions in Canada are performed during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and just over 9% of abortions take place between 12 and 20 weeks of gestation. A mere 0.4% of abortions take place after 20 weeks of gestation. These are considered late term abortions.
What this tells us is that there is no need for restrictions on abortions. Late-term abortions (after 20 weeks in Canada) are typically done on wanted pregnancies, thus restrictions are simply harmful to women who are going through the worst time in their life. If the government covers the cost of abortions, women will have it as soon as they can get an appointment.
The day before Tiller's death, a woman came into Carhart's Nebraska clinic 28 weeks along. Carhart asked her what she would do if she had to carry the baby to term. "She didn't say she was going to kill herself," he says. "She said she would put it up [for adoption]." He turned her away.Is he not pro-choice, because he told a woman who no longer wanted to be pregnant that she would have to carry to term? He's a hero to reproductive freedom, but there he is, telling a woman that she's just going to have to continue her pregnancy for another 12 weeks. A sexual slaver, under the absurd standards this thread has set for what "pro-choice" means.
Carhart has a few firm lines; he won't, for example, do elective abortions past 24 weeks, because the fetus is likely viable. "It just makes sense to me," says Carhart. "After a certain point in time, the fetus is viable and we have to look at it differently than if it were not viable."
There are accessible clinics, and the procedure is legal. But within many women's homes, their communities, their churches and their minds, a trip to the abortion clinic amounts to a damnable transgression. In fact, abortion is so stigmatized, many women don't even realize it is legal. . . . "What we're dealing with now is thirty-five years of women being very publicly shamed by antichoice protesters," says Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood. "Underground abortion is one of the consequences."'Other details on present-day self-induced abortions from a recent CBC radio piece, including a "menstrual extraction" device invented in the 1971 for those wanting to DIY (or...have a friend do it? Not clear if one woman can do it on herself) at home.
Past viability, no doctor will terminate a pregnancy without a compelling reason. But what is a compelling reason, and who decides? Some would count a serious fetal abnormality, mental or physical; others would not. What if the baby has a 50 percent chance of surviving outside the womb? A 30 percent chance? While most of us navigate these questions in theory, Carhart deals with them in practice. At Tiller's clinic, he saw a rape victim in the third trimester of pregnancy. Every time she felt the baby move, she said, it brought back the rape all over again. She'd made three suicide attempts. Carhart performed her abortion. "If a woman is going to kill herself, then I think you have to look at it for her health," he says.
...patients he had seen as a medical student, in the days before Roe: women whose botched abortions, anywhere from the first to the third trimester, left them with perforated uteruses, intestines protruding from the vagina, or untreatable pelvic infections. The way Carhart remembers it, it was a good week for the emergency room if only five women died
Carhart began challenging partial-birth-abortion bans, first the one in Nebraska and then the federal law. The bans, which state legislatures began to pass in the mid-1990s, generally targeted a procedure called intact dilation and extraction, in which the dead fetus is removed intact after the skull is crushed. It is a rare procedure, used in 2,200 of the 1.3 million abortions performed in 2000, and only in cases where doctors believed it was the best option for minimizing risks to a woman's health, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Carhart worried that the Nebraska law, passed in 1997, wouldn't just ban intact D&E but was vague enough to criminalize other types of abortion. Backed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Carhart filed a suit against Nebraska's attorney general. The case made it to the Supreme Court in 2000 and was decided in his favor, overturning the Nebraska ban for both its vagueness and its lack of an exception for women's health. When Congress passed a national ban in 2003, Carhart challenged again and returned to the Supreme Court. The court then ruled against him, leaving a national ban intact today.It sounds like he's pretty much in favor of not restricting his decisionmaking with law.
"Abortion is not a four-letter word," he says. "I'm proud of what I do."posted by Miko at 7:51 AM on March 26, 2011 [1 favorite]
...If women need this service, Carhart reasons, who is he to say no? If he won't provide these complex and challenging abortions, who will?
It's this comment that went in a weird direction and suddenly derailed badly what had previously been a pretty solid and even-handed thread, and honestly we would probably have deleted that one and saved a whole lot of further GRAR in that thread if we'd seen it before it was heavily responded to. I would have appreciated you just taking a walk and giving the thread a rest after the pretty clear WTF reaction you got at that point; that it kept going is why we had to nix stuff and leave a note.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:53 AM on March 21, 2011 [8 favorites]