Like watching a horror movie.
What does protecting the health of the mother entail? From today’s hearing re: Idaho’s abortion ban conflicting with EMTALA:
The first lawyer representing Idaho on Tuesday, John Bursch of the Christian nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, seemed unconcerned with the prospect of patients going into septic shock. Judge Milan Smith asked him if a woman needed an abortion not to save her life but to prevent losing a limb — like, for instance, one of her legs — could a doctor perform the abortion? Bursch said no.
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Ugh… I don’t understand why ProLife people don’t understand how much stuff like this harms their cause.
They should be the ones lobbying to fix this to shore up their case that the “bad” abortions shouldn’t be allowed.
It’s so logically inconsistent that it blows my mind.
Which kind of speaks to another possibly-semantics internal debate I’ve had for a while:
What is a proper definition of the word “abortion”? To me, abortion is, strictly speaking, a voluntary termination of pregnancy for no other reason than you simply don’t feel like being pregnant anymore. Which is near the real heart of the moral dilemma over it.
So things like ectopic pregnancy treatment, miscarriage treatment, etc. are not really “abortion” because they’re for a specific medical purpose, so they should be morally fine.
I don’t know. Words and precise language matter to me (and they should matter to lawmakers, but that’s a different conversation), but, maybe I’m focusing too much on the word choice aspect of it.
Any polite thoughts that aren’t my own would help with my internal debate.
Guess what? A miscarriage is called a spontaneous abortion.
There’s a disconnect in medical definition and laypeople’s.
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Huh. TIL. 
Thanks for that.
Or, “God-induced Abortion.”
Those are, of course, exempt.
And, since doctors are made in by God,…
Note: I do not intend anyone who has had a miscarriage to be hurt by this comment. There is no God, as far as I’ve not seen. It is intended for jackasses who think abortions, no matter the cause, are murder.
Only if the doctor believes you that it was really “spontaneous”.
Pretty sure there’s documented cases of women being denied appropriate medical care following a miscarriage because someone thought maybe she had a hand in terminating the pregnancy.
I wonder at what point the name-brand pro-life movement morphed from focusing on culture building to obsessing over laws and procedures. Combined with being completely anti- {social support structures} once the birth takes place, it’s hard for me to identify as “pro-life” anymore since now the movement is merely “pro-birth” and missing the point of their own movement anymore, especially since they don’t seem to care about the mothers that much.
Yeah not accepting some nuances, and especially not shunning those who won’t even make an exception for the life of the mother, has resulted in some bonkers positions by pro-life politicians.
I actually think most pro-life people are way less adamant than the ones who make the news, but they haven’t collectively chosen to take a nuanced thoughtful stance on an admittedly complex issue.
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The proper term (medically speaking) for what you describe is in your statement: voluntary termination of pregnancy.
There are some people out there I consider truly pro-life in that they support minimizing the conditions in which one would consider voluntarily ending a pregnancy, meaning the support easy access to contraceptives, removing financial barriers for healthcare in pregnancy and for children, financial support for childcare and universal preschool, etc. However, it seems like the current edition of “pro-lifers” are looking to rub women’s noses in their “choices.” I guess you gotta repopulate all those kids killed due to guns somehow…
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In a moral lexicon, direct abortion is the phrase used to indicate a procedure done with the purpose of killing an unborn child.
As a pro-life person i am distressed that care for a person after the death of the unborn child (fetus or embryo in medical terms) is being denied. The pro-life OBs we have worked with haven’t had a problem with a standard d&c after fetal death. I would be interested in @twig93 finding documentation regarding a case where medical care post fetal death was denied because a doctor thought self-abortion was performed.
It becomes more nuanced with a person in medical distress when the unborn child is still alive. Then a balance of risks is at issue.
When a child is disabled, even to the point of low/short term survivability outside the womb, absent serious medical risk to the pregnant person directly killing the child isn’t medical treatment, it is murder, because the death of the child is the purpose.
Feel free to disagree.
Not denial of care after a miscarriage, but a death from a miscarriage because doctors weren’t providing adequate care.
IFYP
I think this close to analogous to defining murder as something that is, by definition, wrong. If you kill somebody in self defense then you have committed justified homicide, not murder.
In my opinion, defining abortion in the way you are doing so is not very helpful for debating the topic, because built into it is the assumption that there is this clean line between voluntary termination of pregnancy for birth control, and everything else. For example, consider the woman considering a late term termination of pregnancy because she has been diagnosed with cancer and wants treatment, or because she has just learned the fetus is not viable. Is this abortion? Is it not? Talking about abortion in your way (which is also the way a lot of people use the term) invites us to ignore these important cases, in my opinion.
I’d consider that the equivalent of withdrawal of life support, which I don’t know what your moral stance is.
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