This made me kinda sad today...

[infection]

Pretty sure it mentions absence of fetal viability.

You said “severe abnormalities.” Do you limit that definition to non-viability?

 

[infection]

Also, in the third trimester, delivering a non-viable fetus is always safer than aborting and then delivering the non-viable fetus.

 

[fishonjazz]

To my knowledge, the bill is about the “health” of the mother, and not the life. “Health” means many things, and when something is that open to interpretation it’s hard to say what that means. See the term disability. A lot of people are on disability who are not disabled, and it is not an insignificant percentage — but the idea of disability is out there as being compassionate — and the original premise of disability isn’t meant to be how it’s played out to be.

Thank you for that very informative and thought out explanation. Makes sense

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app

 

[Zombie]

You said “severe abnormalities.” Do you limit that definition to non-viability?

I'm not entirely sure tbh. I've read accounts of parents having to make the call to spare their child's life when viability is slim, and if born the baby's life is sure to be short and painful. I've also read accounts of mothers carrying twins, and one of the fetuses developing with severe abnormalities that may jeopardize the successful birth of the other. I think abortion should be on the table in these circumstances.

 

[fishonjazz]

I'm not entirely sure tbh. I've read accounts of parents having to make the call to spare their child's life when viability is slim, and if born the baby's life is sure to be short and painful. I've also read accounts of mothers carrying twins, and one of the fetuses developing with severe abnormalities that may jeopardize the successful birth of the other. I think abortion should be on the table in these circumstances.

Ya. I read about a woman who made the difficult decision to get an abortion because the doctor told her that the child would be born in extreme pain would suffer right until death. Mom wanted to spare her child that pain and suffering despite the financial sacrifice and physical sacrifice she (the mother) knew she would have to go through.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app

 

[infection]

I'm not entirely sure tbh. I've read accounts of parents having to make the call to spare their child's life when viability is slim, and if born the baby's life is sure to be short and painful. I've also read accounts of mothers carrying twins, and one of the fetuses developing with severe abnormalities that may jeopardize the successful birth of the other. I think abortion should be on the table in these circumstances.

These scenarios play out such as in a situation of twin-to-twin transfusion and sometimes there is fetal selection. However, you have to look and the entirety of what you’re talking about and not one thing in a vacuum — when you’re talking about fetal selection in the third trimester, you are not talking about the same thing as if they were 10 weeks or 15 weeks or what have you, performing an abortion at that stage in the pregnancy induced significant risk to both the other twin and the mother, and you’d be looking at getting far enough along to where delivery is the safest option.

 

[infection]

Ya. I read about a woman who made the difficult decision to get an abortion because the doctor told her that the child would be born in extreme pain would suffer right until death. Mom wanted to spare her child that pain and suffering despite the financial sacrifice and physical sacrifice she (the mother) knew she would have to go through.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app

I think it’s also imperative, separate from this issue, that we remove the demigod status of science and medicine, because there’s a lot we don’t know and we make a lot of decisions on very fallible ‘expert opinion.’

I’m not saying that in any specific scenario, just in general.

 

[Zombie]

These scenarios play out such as in a situation of twin-to-twin transfusion and sometimes there is fetal selection. However, you have to look and the entirety of what you’re talking about and not one thing in a vacuum — when you’re talking about fetal selection in the third trimester, you are not talking about the same thing as if they were 10 weeks or 15 weeks or what have you, performing an abortion at that stage in the pregnancy induced significant risk to both the other twin and the mother, and you’d be looking at getting far enough along to where delivery is the safest option.

Here is the story I was thinking of, from this article

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/18/late-term-abortion-experience-donald-trump

To make matters worse, Olivia’s life was in danger. Cate’s amniotic sac was growing and restricting the growth of Olivia’s sac.

If she carried to full term, the restriction on Olivia’s sac would likely mean an early delivery. Darla says that every specialist they saw disclosed there was a high probability that Cate would not survive the delivery but if she did, there was no guarantee the surgeries – removing the encephalocele and placing her brain tissue back into her skull – would save her.

Darla cried and Peter prayed. “We needed a miracle and we knew as the day went on we weren’t going to get one.


Their other option was abortion, one they did not take lightly, but one that felt rushed because of Texas’s restrictive abortion laws, which bans abortions after 22 weeks. Darla and Peter had 12 days to decide. “If laws were different ... we would have done more testing – one doctor mentioned an MRI, for example, to try to test the level of her brain function. But we didn’t have that, and knowing what timeline we were on, we spent a lot of sleepless nights researching, making appointments, talking to each other and our therapist, and really just spending time being the four of us,” she says.

“Finally, we just looked at each other and said it was okay. We had to do what was best for her. So we knew what we had to do to bring home one.” Darla says she was prepared to deal with it all, but “if it meant Cate was going to suffer, we just couldn’t do that to her”.

At 21 weeks and six days, Darla had an injection, and Cate’s heart stopped. “For us, it was completely humane,” she says.

In the case of an additional fetus that gets aborted in the womb, the tissue is usually reabsorbed back into the body, but that wasn’t the case this time.

“I kept telling Peter, I’m carrying our healthy baby and our dead baby. I can’t reconcile that in my brain. At the same time, it was a comfort to know that I didn’t have to say goodbye right then,” she says.

Thirteen weeks after the diagnosis, Darla delivered Cate and then gave birth to Olivia, a healthy 5lb baby. The family took turns holding Cate and later in the afternoon, the chaplain came to take her away.

“And then we had to grasp that we were only a family of three,” she says.

So not quite 24 weeks, but had they the benefit of the extra time they could have made a better informed decision.

 

[Zombie]

I think it’s also imperative, separate from this issue, that we remove the demigod status of science and medicine, because there’s a lot we don’t know and we make a lot of decisions on very fallible ‘expert opinion.’

I’m not saying that in any specific scenario, just in general.

Yeah I think this is good advice. That said, as I'm sure you'd agree science and medicine are about as good as we've got. I'll take fallible expert opinion over infallible dogmatic opinion every time.

 

[infection]

Here is the story I was thinking of, from this article

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/18/late-term-abortion-experience-donald-trump

To make matters worse, Olivia’s life was in danger. Cate’s amniotic sac was growing and restricting the growth of Olivia’s sac.

If she carried to full term, the restriction on Olivia’s sac would likely mean an early delivery. Darla says that every specialist they saw disclosed there was a high probability that Cate would not survive the delivery but if she did, there was no guarantee the surgeries – removing the encephalocele and placing her brain tissue back into her skull – would save her.

Darla cried and Peter prayed. “We needed a miracle and we knew as the day went on we weren’t going to get one.


Their other option was abortion, one they did not take lightly, but one that felt rushed because of Texas’s restrictive abortion laws, which bans abortions after 22 weeks. Darla and Peter had 12 days to decide. “If laws were different ... we would have done more testing – one doctor mentioned an MRI, for example, to try to test the level of her brain function. But we didn’t have that, and knowing what timeline we were on, we spent a lot of sleepless nights researching, making appointments, talking to each other and our therapist, and really just spending time being the four of us,” she says.

“Finally, we just looked at each other and said it was okay. We had to do what was best for her. So we knew what we had to do to bring home one.” Darla says she was prepared to deal with it all, but “if it meant Cate was going to suffer, we just couldn’t do that to her”.

At 21 weeks and six days, Darla had an injection, and Cate’s heart stopped. “For us, it was completely humane,” she says.

In the case of an additional fetus that gets aborted in the womb, the tissue is usually reabsorbed back into the body, but that wasn’t the case this time.

“I kept telling Peter, I’m carrying our healthy baby and our dead baby. I can’t reconcile that in my brain. At the same time, it was a comfort to know that I didn’t have to say goodbye right then,” she says.

Thirteen weeks after the diagnosis, Darla delivered Cate and then gave birth to Olivia, a healthy 5lb baby. The family took turns holding Cate and later in the afternoon, the chaplain came to take her away.

“And then we had to grasp that we were only a family of three,” she says.

So not quite 24 weeks, but had they the benefit of the extra time they could have made a better informed decision.

I’d have more sympathy for legislation that were more narrow.

 

[infection]

Yeah I think this is good advice. That said, as I'm sure you'd agree science and medicine are about as good as we've got. I'll take fallible expert opinion over infallible dogmatic opinion every time.

It’s a false dichotomy. The problem with fallible expert opinion isn’t that it’s fallible, it’s that it’s believed to be a lot more solid than it is, and then we end up doing things like basing legislation on someone’s interpretation of it, and a whole host of other problematic societal implications.

 

[Zombie]

It’s a false dichotomy. The problem with fallible expert opinion isn’t that it’s fallible, it’s that it’s believed to be a lot more solid than it is, and then we end up doing things like basing legislation on someone’s interpretation of it.

Absent solid opinion we should probably have less, rather than more restrictive legislation based on it, no?