Inspiring, from an abortion provider

And then there are stories from the opposite side:

“Another thing that bothered me as I went about my work at the clinic was the fact that I had seen an ultrasound abortion. We did first trimester abortions. This was a late first trimester, probably second trimester. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen the Silent Scream a number of times, but it didn’t effect me. To me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I couldn’t deny what I saw on the screen.”

–Joan Appleton, former clinic worker

“One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was ‘uncontrollable.’ I went into the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing. The other patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in, and here was this little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs too. I’ll tell you one thing about D& E . You never have to worry about a baby’s being born alive. I won’t describe D & E , other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing- you need a lot of strength to do it- arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of the table.”

–Dr. David Brewer of Glen Ellyn Illinois

“In fact many women will come to me considering abortion, and I have been personally told that I am to turn the monitor away from her view so that seeing her baby jump around on the screen does not influence her choice.”

Shari Richards, quoted from the John Ankerburg Show on 3/7/90

“Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks, because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It’s really barbaric.”

–abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen p 93

Lost of similar quotes and stories from abortion providers here, from an obviously biased site. Forgive me if I don’t consider doctors who provide abortions to be heroes.

People don’t get late-term abortions because they’ve suddenly decided after six months that they didn’t really want a kid after all. They get them because they’ve developed complications that mean they’re probably going to die if they carry to term.

Quite frankly, I do find the first post inspiring. I’d much rather know that the choice is there, to have an abortion in a doctor’s office, than the horrible situations that the first post describes.

It serves as a reminder of how far we’ve come. Now, if only we could get those damned abstinence-only classes OUT of the school systems and replace them with comprehensive sexual education, the US would be a lot better off.

Wow. There are some seriously horrible posters in this forum. Grow the fuck up.

Who are you talking to, exactly?

I’m guessing his monitor.

Not you, handsome. Don’t worry.

Crispus’ quotes make me cringe as much as Anders’ quotes make me feel good. Which bolsters my feeling that both the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice sides are ridiculous extremes. Some technical compromise must be made, and discussion about “rights” has to end; because in the end, the baby has as much a right to life as the woman has to choose.

The obvious compromise would be to A) kill the baby to satisfy the bloodlust of the pro-choice camp and then B) financially ruin the mother to satisfy the misogyny of the pro-lifers.

I prefer the terms “Pro-Death” and “Anti-Choice” myself. :)

Look at it this way; if Christians didn’t have poor, unwed mothers around, who would they minister to and look down on?

Both examples are horrible realities.

I don’t think there is any question that at a certain point a fetus becomes a human and therefore abortion is murder. Of course, the debate is about when that happens.

I’ve always chosen a middle ground position, in that I don’t think there should be abortions after the first trimester.

Oddly, this satisfies neither side, but like Rimbo I think a middle ground is the only way to go, at least until science can prove it one way or the other.

I think the problem goes much deeper than just sex education, personally. We’re still in a competitive societal paradigm, and as a child is a burden, it’s highly undesirable for those whose circumstances don’t allow them to bear it comfortably.

There’s many factors at play there, such a social stigmas, that’ve pervasively endured any number of social revolutions, along with the economic realities and the expectations that are placed on the mother.

Consider, for a moment, whether abortions would really be necessary if conceiving a child wouldn’t potentially cripple the mother’s future. Having a child changes the circumstances of the individual, but it doesn’t change the individual at all. And yet, society places a whole lot of responsibility on the mother and provides next to no assistance to her in order to fulfill these responsibilities. I’m not talking about just tax breaks and purported ‘benefits’ that a welfare state might or might not provide, because there are attitudes and prejudices involved that do hinder the mother. There are those women, of course, that manage to break out of those stereotypes despite having a child and carrying on with their lives, but that won’t come without a price.

But how could we share the burdens (and, if done correctly, the dividends) of bringing a child to this world and raising them to be socially contributing individuals? It’s certainly not an easy problem to look at.

In the meantime, we live in a culture, perhaps borne on basic human biology, that is what it is. All it takes to put this whole issue on its head is a rephrasing. “If you make abortions illegal, only the outlaws would do them”. The outlaws, of course, would either be those who can pay for unregulated, black-market abortions in boutique clinics, or those who potentially harm themselves severely doing it. Instead of dead babies, you’d have dead women, and neither sight is any easier to deal with.

Edit: Science shouldn’t be looking for the ‘sweet spot’ when a fetus isn’t yet a child. It should be looking for ways so that the mother and the baby can both live unhindered.

Your squeamishness & inability to recognize the value of safe, regulated abortions is a personal failing, not a valid argument. I don’t see any reason to forgive you for wanting to deny women this opportunity, and instead forcing them to have highly dangerous & potentially damaging back-alley abortions.

Fortunately, your God will forgive you. That’s his schtick.

Well, that would be an ideal option, but I’m pretty sure it already exists. Medically, I’m pretty sure they could take a fetus in any state of development and keep it alive until “birth,” though maybe I’m wrong. However, I’m sure the issue would be the cost of doing it and the question of responsibility. The question would be whether you want pregnancy to become a “minor inconvenient consequence of having careless sex” that society or the government takes care of for you.

As your first post points out, there are deeper societal issues involved with the question of abortion.

So what exactly is your position, Anaxagoras? How far into a pregnancy is abortion ok in your view? At what point do the rights of the baby outweigh the rights of the woman?

See, this is where I thought my line of thought would prompt people to go. No, I’m not talking about an institutional solution to this. Also, being pregnant’ll never be a minor inconvenience.

Nevertheless, I’m not talking about going all-out Logan’s Run; I want mothers to be able to have their children and the lives that they wanted.

Even if society changed and provided the kind of social support for women that made child-rearing less of a personal burden, there would still be women who would get pregnant and not want to keep the child. As it is, not all children are adopted, so you are going to have some sort of institutional or foster home system develop.

The other side would be whether some people might make poor choices if they knew the consequences of pregnancy weren’t as dire as they are today. So, if you are going to lessen the burden, you have to have an answer to that, and I’m not convinced sex education and cheap, easy, birth control are going to solve all those problems. A lot of the accidental pregancy’s that already occur are happening to women who have knowledge of the risks and access to solution.

Do you understand that for people who are against abortion, what you are saying is akin to saying, “I don’t see any reason to forgive you for wanting to deny women this opportunity to get free state cyanide to poison their children, rather than forcing her to drown them in a bucket.”

Both are sins for people who are against abortion, just as both the doctor assisted and self-done abortions are sins.

The line of argument is not going to work against people who believe that you are killing a human being. You need to find a way to justify killing a human being for them to be swayed, or change their minds that it is a human being at all.

My position is that the stories that Crispus cited are a waste of time, and completely sidestep the very real consequences of banning abortions. Furthermore, those who are willing to give abortions (or abortionists, as Crispus so quaintly puts it) are indeed heroes because they’re willing to provide valuable services to women, despite the fact that there are many ignorant people who will come to hate them despite of, or rather because of, their line of work.

I’ll go ahead and answer your other questions, although they seem rather far afield. I was responding to Crispus “All abortionists are not heroes”, rather than a reasoned discussion of exactly when abortion stops being acceptable.

Abortions stop being OK when the fetus becomes a baby. Those very terms are arbitrary, and I would be OK with saying that that transition occurs after the second trimester, upon birth, or even some clearly defined point after birth. I’m not much concerned about when the transition occurs, to be honest. The easiest point to define that moment is probably at birth, because once the baby comes out, most people feel an instinctive emotional response that the former fetus is now a small human baby. Fine… that’s OK by me. I notice that a lot of people have serious problems allowing third trimester abortions except in extreme circumstances, and that also seems OK to me.