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Banning abortion after 20 weeks

Jill

An excellent article in the Times about the push to ban abortion after 20 weeks, and how bans are based on mostly made-up “facts” about fetal pain but pro-choice groups can’t fight them because the current Supreme Court is fairly hostile to abortion rights. As a result, women aren’t able to get abortions when they need them:

Last fall, Danielle and Robb Deaver of Grand Island, Neb., found that their state’s new law intruded in a wrenching personal decision. Ms. Deaver, 35, a registered nurse, was pregnant with a daughter in a wanted pregnancy, she said. She and her husband were devastated when her water broke at 22 weeks and her amniotic fluid did not rebuild.

Her doctors said that the lung and limb development of the fetus had stopped, that it had a remote chance of being born alive or able to breathe, and that she faced a chance of serious infection.

In what might have been a routine if painful choice in the past, Ms. Deaver and her husband decided to seek induced labor rather than wait for the fetus to die or emerge. But inducing labor, if it is not to save the life of the fetus, is legally defined as abortion, and doctors and hospital lawyers concluded that the procedure would be illegal under Nebraska’s new law.

After 10 days of frustration and anguish, Ms. Deaver went into labor naturally; the baby died within 15 minutes and Ms. Deaver had to be treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that developed.

Very few abortions occur after 20 weeks — only 1.5% of all abortions performed in the United States. Most of them are for medical emergencies. But the drafters of the anti-abortion bills are careful to outlaw any abortions other than those to avert death or “serious physical impairment of a major bodily function” of the pregnant woman. Physical impairments that are not “serious” enough, or that don’t impair a major bodily function? Not good enough. Infections that can damage your fertility or your kidneys apparently may not qualify as “serious physical impairments.” The psychological anguish of being forced to carry a pregnancy where the fetus has no hope for survival and the lasting trauma of being legally compelled to give birth to a dead or dying baby definitely doesn’t qualify.

These regulations aren’t saving fetal lives. But they certainly are injuring women.

8 thoughts on Banning abortion after 20 weeks

  2. Someone should ask forced-birth supporters who they think seeks abortions after $number_of_weeks, and why.

    I think the worst I ever heard of was a man who claimed a woman might have a late-term abortion because she didn’t fit into an expensive dress.

    In the UK political support for the right to choose splits fairly cleanly down party lines with a few notable exceptions – Margaret Thatcher, while a thorough-going Tory in many ways, was a solid supporter of the right to choose abortion: Frank Field is a Labour MP who routinely votes with the Tories on denying women abortion-related healthcare. Frank Field’s latest gambit is to claim he doesn’t want to prevent women from having late abortions, he just wants to make sure at least three doctors agree that it’s medically necessary.

    The main non-medical reason for late-term abortions in the UK is what it is everywhere: a girl raped who didn’t realise she was pregnant for months, or a woman who had to travel and save up to pay for her abortion. Frank Field’s “three doctors” rule would damage worst the poorest and the most vulnerable – something I’m quite sure he’s never bothered to think about.

    Sadly unless you live in Birkenhead (I don’t) Frank Field need not respond to any emails or questions about his poisonous anti-women stance.

  3. The idea of this occurring is one of my actual, real, nightmares at the moment. That anyone can do this to a family is completely horrific. I’ve read other stories of people having to give birth to dying children without being able to mercifully terminate them and going through this horror.

    If the fetus CAN feel pain what on earth is the justification for forcing it through hours of labour and then a death like that? And why does everyone act as though the act of someone giving birth is completely mentally neutral for someone – just a minor inconvenience instead of a massive physical event?

  4. I assume the pro lifers think nothing never, ever, ever goes wrong in the millions of wanted pregnancies. Ever. NEVER EVER.

    Makes me sick thinking about the people who fall in the cracks of this holy war of theirs.

  5. I used to be against late term abortion because I thought they were like any other abortion. But then I got educated about late term abortions.

    It makes me very sad how we don’t understand the process of preganancy or its complications. All my school cared about was STDs.

  6. The one thing I’m always wondering about reading such reports is always: Why has this issue been so radicalized and become such a culturally defining topic in the US?

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  8. @Yonmei
    Where do you get the idea that support and opposition to aborton in the UK splits down party lines? If that were the case abortion would have been banned or at least heavily restricted in the 1980s when the Tories had a substantial majority. A least one attempt was rejected much to the surprise of the anti-abortionists who had assumed that nearly all the Tory MPs would vote that way.

    It’s far more a religious split with Roman Catholic MPs and those representing constituencies with a large RC vote opposing aborton in most circumstances and pressing to restrict it as much as they can get away with.

    The bulk of MPs of all parties just don’t want to get involved in an issue on which whatever they do is going to offend as many people as it pleases. So while parliament is unlikely to vote to reduce the red tape around abortion they are equally unlikely to restrict it further.

    Saving up to pay for aborton is usually unnecessary in the UK as most are carried out by the NHS. Only residents of Northern Ireland have a problem with travelling as no hospitals in the province do abortions. Even there there are charities which will help make arrangements. Everywhere else there’s a hospital within easy travelling distance.

    I really feel the US practice of demanding a woman carry a dead or unviable baby until her body rejects it to be a grusome perversion of medicine.

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