Booman's list (via Atrios):
I know most of my readers are pro-choice but I still think it worth considering what it means to ask a woman to carry a pregnancy to term when she knows that the baby will have one of the following conditions:No woman would have a late-term abortion willingly or casually. The horror of this decision should be a private matter. Yet now, with the wingnut hate speeches egging the unstable loner males on to shoot pro-choice doctors, they guarantee that women will not have a choice but must carry to term these damaged fetuses.
Anencephaly
Trisomy 13
Trisomy 18
Trisomy 21
Polycystic kidney disease
Spina bifida
Hydrocephalus
Potter's syndrome
Lethal dwarfism
Holoprosencephaly
Anterior and posterior encephalocele
Non-immune hydrops
Way to go, back to the Dark Ages!
2 comments:
Late-term abortions are, without exception, essential (usually life-saving for the woman) and always premeditated. They are never (and I emphasize never) undertaken lightly, or without good medical cause.
Those who say women should accept the "child" God gives them have never been confronted with, say, anencephaly, nor contemplated what their romantic notion of parenthood turns into when the child has no forebrain and (quoting the wiki, which quotes the NINDS), "is usually blind, deaf, unconscious, and unable to feel pain." It's not as if the child were born missing an arm, or with even some much more substantial physical deformity, sad though that may be: With everything gone that makes us human, is the fetus still human? what justification can someone have for forcing a woman to bring such a fetus to term? is it a kindness to anyone, even the fetus, to do so?
I know the parents of a child who was mildly and unavoidably brain-damaged in the birth process. They love their child dearly. But the degree of impairment is very much an issue, and unless one introduces some church-inspired rhetoric about when a soul is installed in a human, one must admit that many defective fetuses are just plain not human in any meaningful sense. As we have societal scruples (and a darned good thing) against doing anything to harm these "babies" after birth, the mother simply must have the option to terminate the pregnancy that has gone so horribly wrong. It's an agonizing decision. But it's her decision, not, say, Bill Frist's, and most certainly not Randall Terry's.
(ellroon, I suspect you'd make even a burka look good. But I agree, you surely shouldn't be made to wear one!)
Think Terry Schiavo and realize what these religious wingnuts would do with these defective fetuses.
Besides blaming the sinful woman for somehow deserving this experience, they would force the family to pay for institutionalizing the baby until it died.
All of which could have been avoided when the defect was identified in the womb....
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