Roe v. Wade to be overturned?

I'm glad it's just women imaging bad things happening instead of just bad, extreme things happening ... Oh, wait

Abortion laws spark profound changes in other medical care

 

Biden abandons plan to nominate anti-abortion, GOP federal judge who McConnell pushed

 

yup

 

Don't those numbers speak, a bit, to the plausibility of the callous-late-term abortion phenomenon? I mean, women* do awful things to their children ... are we really to
believe that the last 20 weeks of a pregnancy is a time when such is unfathomable?

*And men, of course.

 

I reject the notion that there is a phenomenon. In any given year, abortions after 21 weeks account for somewhere between 0.8 and 1.2 percent of all abortions. Of those, the majority are people whose life is in danger if the abortion goes to term or where something catastrophic has occurred in the child's gestation.

Even if I accepted the premise, most children are in foster care due to neglect or their parent's unavailability (death, incarceration or whereabouts unknown) and not because of abuse.

I think we're far more likely to see harm done in utero - as we already do now - during the late stages of pregnancy due to substance abuse and other dangerous behavior than we are to see a rise of post-21 week abortions as a matter of convenience if we lifted restrictions on those.

 

To be clear, I'm not anticipating a rise in such abortions. Rather, I'm simply addressing the oft-repeated assertion that post-21-week "convenience" abortions simply don't happen (or don't happen often enough to be of interest). I find that hard to square with such numbers as the foster care total.

Even noodling with your numbers leads to some head-scratching with regards to the "that doesn't happen" position. Let's say there are 750,000 abortions annually (the CDC reports one number, Guttmacher reports another ... 750,000 is a good "split-the-difference" number). And let's stipulate your 0.8% for the proportion of those that are done after 21 weeks. Finally, let's say that 80% (not just a mere majority) of these are of the "mother endangered/gestation catastrophe" variety. That still leaves 1,200 plus.

Now of course that's a small number relative to the overall picture ... but it's not zero. Further, if that occurrence rate is interpreted as "effectively" zero, there are some other phenomena that occupy a lot of political bandwidth that similarly don't happen.

 

Oh, Amy Comey Barrett
She remind me of a Handmaid's Tale
Growin' up in Metairie
She livin' a life just like a religious zealot

Oh, Amy Comey Barrett
She used to teach at Notre Dame
Promoted by a fake messiah who was
Played by Donald J. Trump

She won't stop the pollutin', stop the shootin'
Six votes from the Federalist Society
See as the rich is getting richer
The poor is getting poorer

See that Amy on the bench
Not thinkin' of ways to make it better
In my mailbox there's an eviction letter
Signed by the justice said, "See you later"

 

Not worried, as @Batman assured me these things won’t happen.

 

I'm going to go there. They really don't happen. If they do, they are before viability (21 weeks is not that, if you want to noodle numbers -- how many of these are before viability?), and if someone found out late or something along those lines. A healthy pregnancy after viability is going to result in a birth.

If a woman has carried a baby that long, she wants to have the baby. Period. These happen because of really, really bad circumstances. They are terrible situations that none of us want to be in and most here can't even picture. Why people can't wrap their minds around this is crazy.

Doctors are not pulling out viable, healthy babies and ending them. They just aren't.

This is one of the ridiculous anti-abortion, far-right, maybe not even that far-right GOP, stupid scare tactic talking points that caught on and are clouding the whole freaking argument.

 

I've said it here before, if a mother doesn't live, neither does the fetus. So what is the point here? Other than ultimate control?