If reproductive technologies keep pushing back the point of 'fetal viability' earlier and earlier, and if the effects of successful technological intervention in this regard is increased anti-abortion and abortion-ambivalent sentiments, should we not anticipate that the trimester system itself may become unviable (if not so already)? What may be an American feminist response to this technological trend?
To move the question into another direction, we shouldn't forget the question of culture as it mediates technology. We don't hear of the French, the Swedish, etc. killing doctors who perform abortions. Does anyone have any data to indicate that medical advance in reproductive technologies have changed their minds as well and have made them more anti-aboriton, approximating American culture?
> Instead of trying to persuade people that late abortions are trivial
>events -- which few women unfortunately enough to have undergone them
>will accept -- I think we should argue that they represent terrible
>social failures -- ignorance, shame, poverty, fear, lack of access to
>earlier abortion, and tragic personal circumstances, like serious fetal
>deformity and sudden drastic problems in a woman's life that she has no
>other way out of. There will always a need for late abortions -- second
>trimesters are now about ten percent of all abortions, and third
>trimester abortions are (I think) around one percent, almost impossible
>to get. So of course pro-choicers can't agree to banning them in the
>interests of a "compromise" on abortion. But we don't have to say
>they're trivial.
The problem is that pro-choicers have already done what you advocate here. I think pro-choicers have already spoken very eloquently that later abortions are in many cases delayed abortions (due to moral, financial, and legal condistions under which we live). I myself have spoken of later abortions as being ironically caused by anti-abortion & abortion-ambivalent cultural and social conditions, including in posts to m-fem and lbo. In response to efforts to ban what the anti-abortion movement chose to name "partial birth" abortion, pro-choicers have emphasized hardship cases while clarifying what dialation & extraction actually is, arguing the term "partial birth" can be nowhere found in medical terminology and is obscurantist. However, I'm afraid we can't say that pro-choicers have been very successful at fighting the Right on this ground.
I think that as long as _all_ abortions, not just very late ones, are considered to be weighty moral choices, we can't even avoid the avoidable cases of late abortions. All weighty moral choices or choices regarded as such cause deliberation, individual and collective, so the result of looking at all abortions as weighty moral choices is the scrutiny of the motives and circumstances of women who want to abort, especially in a very sexist and puritanical society, with a view toward putting more and more limits upon when an abortion can be had. How do we counter this view of _all_ abortions as weighty moral choices? Any thoughts?
Yoshie