One of the finalists for a National Magazine Award is Martha Mendoza’s “Between a Woman and Her Doctor,” a crushing story about the baby that died in her womb and her desperate attempts to find a doctor able to remove its body from her body. This is the inevitable result of the ever-worsening restrictions on abortions.
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If the alternative means going back to the bad old days when the majority of partial-birth abortions were performed on healthy mothers with healthy fetuses well into the second trimester, then I’ll pass.
As dichotomies go, I’d label that…false.
While I personally don’t agree with abortion except for rape and incest, it IS her choice, in my opinion. It’s her life, she’s a responsible adult, she can make the decision herself.
You think? The message I gleaned from this story is that the partial-birth abortion ban is responsible for reducing the number of doctors willing or able to perform the D&E procedure, which in turn resulted in Ms. Mendoza’s unfortunate circumstance. The implication is that D&E restrictions are bad and should be lifted — which, it seems to me, would take us back to the bad old days I described above.
Sorry, the “You think?” was directed to Waldo, not Dannyboy.
Your objection is not (I speculate) to the procedure itself, but to the advanced stage of development of fetuses that are often subjected to it. I’m not aware of any reason why D&E cannot be used early in pregnancy.
Of course, if your objection is to all abortions, then, yes, under your viewpoint then any market demand for training in this practice would inherently mean that abortions would be available.
I object to abortions when they terminate healthy fetuses from healthy mothers who consensually engaged in sexual activity, and D&E seems to be a particularly cruel way to terminate such pregnancies. I object to both the procedure and the stage at which it is (or was) most often executed.
I don’t think all abortions should be illegal; I also don’t think all abortions should be legal. If some restrictions mean that women like Ms. Mendoza have to wait a few days longer to have the procedure performed, it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
At any rate, before this post disappears off the sidebar, let me thank you for allowing me to spout off my half-baked ideas here in your home turf. :)
That, as always, is the question — what tradeoff are we willing to accept in deaths of women for deaths of fetuses? While some may find this easy to resolve in the abstract, I personally can’t envision explaining to the family of Mrs. Mendoza, had she gone septic and died, that the tradeoff is worth it in the grand scheme. But to those who genuinely believe that a fetus is not potential life, but actual life, I suppose that hundreds of women could die each year and they’ll still say that the tradeoff is worth it.
Good point — we don’t want women dying as a by-product of stricter abortion laws. Perhaps medical schools could teach the D&E procedure to their OBs-in-training so they could treat those situations like Ms. Mendoza’s. It seems negligent for the medical schools not to teach this procedure, considering that the ban explicitly makes an exception in cases where the mother’s life is endangered. This would be a good issue for women’s rights organizations to take up with the AMA or other appropriate organizations, without getting into the morass of abortion politics.
After that happens, we should have no problem solving world peace and feeding the starving people of the world. :)