Regarding my use of the term "womanhood," this was partly shorthand on my part and was simply meant as a euphemism for reproductive rights or a woman's right to control her body. I appreciate that literal womanhood encompasses much more than that.
The main thing I recall from the weekend posts is the idea that the fetus is part of a woman's body, everybody has the right to control their body, ergo the right to abortion follows. This is not illogical to me, but it is not all that compelling either.
Ownership and control of a thing does not necessarily imply unlimited rights, either in law or in any moral system a progressive person would be likely to promulgate, as jks noted briefly. Parents have rights to custody of their children, but clearly their rights are limited in certain ways. People have rights to the pets they own, but there are limits to those as well (e.g., cruelty to animals). If someone owned an irreplaceable natural resource (or species of animal or plant), most would agree that they do not have the right to destroy it. So there are plausible limits to the right to control one's body. Suicide is illegal; it may be so under a socialist regime as well.
What prompted this, let's not forget, was the disability question. Suppose science advances to the point where destruction of fetuses with a variety of undesirable characteristics becomes very easy. Under the doctrine of individual rights, including control of one's body, individual prejudices are given full sway. The right to choose is also the right to do social wrong. A disability advocate might say, the only problem is the ramifications for society of the routine destruction of fetuses with "defects." But the pro-life advocate could make the same argument with respect to the generic fetus.
Brett made an interesting analogy, and concluded: << . . . There is a conflict of rights, but it is perfectly rational to conclude that the woman's right to her body supercedes the fetus' right to life (or that one person's right to life stops short when it imposes on other people's freedoms and rights). . . . >>
Note if there is really a conflict of rights, then the pro-choice argument is substantially reduced. All of a sudden, there's another person involved; not a fetus. This throws up two difficult tasks: taking it upon ourselves to evaluate the cost to the woman of having the birth, and then actually weighing that cost against the fetus' 'right to life.' It is not so obvious that physical toll of birthing (not necessarily taking custody of the child) looms as large as the life or death of another person.
Some people raise practical difficulties about enforcing any set of restrictive rules. I don't dispute any of those points, but I think in one sense they are beside the point. There may be things we have no power to correct, but that doesn't mean we can't agree that we don't like them.
> Kim noted:
>
> >I'm all for more information on who's getting
> third-trimester abortions and why, but you lose me when you start
> talking about how a proper defense of "womanhood" is rightly a
> defense of the baby in the womb.
Please note disclaimer above. All I meant was that the vesting all consideration in the mother and none in the fetus seems grossly disproportionate to the humanity involved.
> While I certainly understand Marta's concerns I just
> can't understand some of the comments made on this
> thread....
>
> Firstly, here are some numbers from the CDC:
>
> "The CDC reports that about 16,450 procedures, or
> roughly 1% of all abortions, in 1992 were
> performed after 20 weeks of gestation (the middle of
> the second trimester). AGI, using unpublished
> data from the federal National Center for Health
> Statistics, estimates that two-thirds of these
> abortions
> were performed at 21-22 weeks. After 26 wee ks, when
> fetal viability is most likely, the number of
> abortions is estimated at 320; given the uncertainty
> of the data, however, the number could be as high as
> 600" (or .036% of all late term abortions; there are
> approx 1.5 million abortions performed each year)
Thanks for the numbers. We seem to be looking at a range of several hundred late term abortions, maybe as much as a thousand. Fine.
> Now, as for why women obtain these abortions so late
> in their pregnancy:
>
> The following are from "Reasons Why Women Have Induced
> Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries" Akinrinola
> Bankole, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas
> _International Family Planning Perspectives_, 1998,
> 24(3):117-127 & 152.
>
>
> US N=1900
>
>
> 13% of second AND third trimester late term abortions
> are, generally, life threatening and debilitating
> birth defects.
>
>
> 7% are for maternal health reasons.
>
> Not all of these involve D&X, the
> procedure Max described, though rather unfairly as
> I'll show below. There are other options, btw.
I didn't mean to be unfair. I'm simply ignorant of the medical procedures involved.
> The rest of these abortions are for other reasons:
> can't
> afford, don't want any more children, want to postpone
> childbearing, can't handle the responsibility, too
> young, parents don't want, partners don't want, etc.
> But, again, remember that we're talking both second
> AND third trimester.
By your numbers, we're talking about 80 percent of a number between 200 and 1000, annually, that are problematic.
> Has anyone considered the fact that it isn't exactly
> fun for a woman to have a late term abortion. It
> takes two days because they must dialate a woman's
> cervix 4-8 cm. with metal bars and spreaders.
Nobody said any of this was fun for anyone.
> . . .
> When those who criticize (even by implication) these
> women for having
> abortions for ostensibly frivilous reasons manage to
> dialate one of your orafices that wide with metal
> bars and
> spreaders, *then* let's speculate about the frivolity
> of these decisions.
I NEVER criticized anyone for having an abortion. You could take as an implicit criticism cases of people who postpone the procedure. If you're not going to have the baby, from the mother's point of view and interest, as you underline above, waiting to have the procedure is not smart.
> But, I'm hoping that the 'fitting into their prom
> dress' remark was a joke.
I did note the jokes of others probably reflected discomfort with the subject.
> . . .
> It seems rather dismissive to suggest that a woman
> goes through such a terrible heartwrenching procedure
> because she can't fit into her prom dress or because
> she's ashamed of a child with a cleft foot or even
> Downes' Syndrome.
The latter is exactly what is at issue; one could be dismissive as well regarding the concerns of the critics of selective birthing.
> This kind of discussion, implying
> that women are callous and cruel creatures more
> concerned with their 'lifestyle' and 'image, ' is just
> disgusting. I don't doubt that, on occassion, these
As you say, there are fewer than a thousand cases a year. It's not about women generically.
> things happen. However, to observe such instances and
> then jump to the conclusion that we're on the slippery
> slope to some sort of Nazi hell in which we are
> slaughtering babies, the infirm, elderly, and disabled
> is really troubling. It will take much more that laws
> supporting abotion on demand to reach such a state in
> U.S. society.
This is a caricature of the argument you are referring to. Nobody used those terms. I used a hypothetical to make a point based on systematic destruction of fetuses with physical defects, the wrong gender, or the wrong race/ ethnicity. Unfortunately, the real-world correlates of these patterns cannot be dismissed.
> Furthermore, those women who have second trimester
> D&X's are very often women who didn't know they were
> pregnant (yes this is quite possible), misjudged how
> far along they were, were too poor too afford medical
> care to know how far along, couldn't scrape up the
> money, couldn't figure out how to travel many miles
> to get to a clinic, were too young and too scared to
> figure out what to do in general.
>
> So, it seems to me that one of the ways
> to eliminate the MAJORITY of late term abortions is
> to make certain that abortions are affordable,
> accessible, and acceptable much, much earlier. (In
> fact, most abortion clinics won't take women who are
> less than 10 weeks pregnant anyway, because the
> procedure is more painful and is more likely to result
> in failure)
In spite of yourself, you're acknowledging that late-term abortions are undesirable or in some way, unfortunate outcomes.
Indeed, who comes out of one of these experiences feeling good? Very few, I would venture to say.
> Why don't we put our energies into lobbying for
> RU48, (which a Hungarian company I believe just
> refused to produce for U.S use). How about wider
> access to the morning after pill, and
> extending health care and education, especially poor
> women. It costs about $400-$500 to have an abortion,
> btw.
All well-taken and reinforcing the point -- there's something about the outcome we don't like.
> . . .
> Yes, abortion sucks as it is typically performed by
> our very warped medical establishment.
I don't doubt it, but there's still the fetus/baby, no matter how streamlined the procedure. That is the source of the moral problem, in my view, and also the source of all the urges we have, admitted or not, to find some other solution.
At the risk of distorting his argument, Rob said:
<< . . . To legislate otherwise is effectively to deny rational beings the freedom to be ethical - for which one simply *must* have conscious agency. . . . >>
which sounds like a splendid encapsulization of a libertarian position (and not necessarily wrong, in that vein). But he also says:
<< . . . Perhaps the very old-fashioned thought that rights and responsibilities are inextricably mutually constitutive, and therefore must ever reside together (a dialectical unity, if you like), must ever be invested in the same person, is the way to go. . . . >>
which seems to settle firmly on the fence.