>
> It's a little more complicated than that. If a
> woman who is eight months pregnant decides she
> wants to have an abortion, that's a problem.
I don't agree with John Thornton here. Legally there's lots of precedent about extreme cases where the default position of "leave the citizen be" is overridden by necessity. Despite habeas corpus, an obviously insane person, e.g. someone acting out crazy shit because she Hears Voices, can be locked up under the Baker Act. When one is clearly dangerously deranged, not just the right to abortion but also more unargued rights such as to drive a car, walk down the street, handle razor-sharp knives, etc., are customarily revoked.
Anyway, does any such woman actually exist or are you just conducting a limit-case thought-experiment? If the second, what's the relevance to a discussion about laws? Laws don't deal with events which take place only in someone's imagination, but with events that really happen.
Some women have abortions during the third trimester, but in real life, no one does this for convenience, much less regalement; that's a anti-abortionist pitchman's fantasy, without referent in reality. In the real world, third-trimester abortions invariably take place when the fetus is dead or soon-to-be dead, and/or not aborting the fetus will surely led to the death of the mother. If it were my job to measure out a dose of guilt for every act I see, which it ain't, I'd even say that, adding them all up, the third-trimester abortions which take place in the real world are not less but _more_ guiltless than the average of all the first-trimester ones.
Yet I've never heard of legislation which specifies "third-trimester abortions shall be illegal *only when the woman is certified x-tra cra-zee*," instead whatever laws exist against them, and there are plenty of them and lots more on the drafting table, criminalize a legitimate medical procedure necessary to save a woman's life. That's a seriously bad thing, so while this limit-case talk is interesting it also seems kind of irrelevant to ordinary political life.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net