Posts by B Jones
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Again I am quite taken aback that none here would join me in condemning the Chinese government.
Grant, perhaps you missed it when I said:
Pro-choice means you're against forced abortion as well as prohibited abortion. But the entire Chinese government isn't here
You're not being ridiculed, your inconsistency is being pointed out, even though you might not see it as such. Just as you're trying to suggest pro-choice people are being inconsistent by not protesting sufficiently about another country's tangentially related policies. It's no more relevant than questioning pro-life people on their approach to warfare or the death penalty.
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Not being Deborah, I could still have a stab at the latter - it's slightly better than female infanticide being used to get rid of useless and unwanted girls. I think we underestimate the degree to which infanticide or infant negligence (baby farming etc) was used as population control in pre-surgical societies.
That's one of those complicated situations, like overpopulation, where the explicit choices of individuals add up to a societal cost that's probably greater than the individual benefits. I understand India has attempted to ban sex selection abortions, but that's not easy to enforce. Black markets always pop up when there's unmet demand and an artificial choke on supply. The longterm solution should be in changing the demand rather than making it harder to meet. I suspect that anyone wanting grandchildren in those societies might reconsider as the impact of widespread sex selecton plays out on demographics.
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James - your baby son's helplessness and marginal awareness of what's going on around him don't seem to fit that definition, which is why I'm not convinced of that definition's usefulness as a bright line distinction. It's a balancing act - you're entitled to surrender responsibility for his care just as a pregnant woman is entitled to stop providing life support for a fetus, but after a baby has been born, it's possible to transfer a baby's care to another person who's willing to take it up.
The viability line is somewhere around 24 weeks - most abortions are performed before 10 weeks and the later ones are almost always about serious danger to the health of the mother or severe abnormality to the fetus. While transferring care is theoretically possible there (from the pregnant woman to the incubator) it's usually not practicable for those reasons. There are certainly plenty of cases of birth being induced early because of the health risks of continuing a nearly completed pregnancy. Sometimes even that is too unsafe for the mother. Women have died in recent years while doctors have tried (against the woman's wishes) to save the fetus.
You're in the US - many parents and doctors there consider it's appropriate for their baby sons to be circumcised without anaesthetic on the basis that they're too young to remember the pain. That doesn't seem like a strong recognition of their personhood to me.
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Sofie, I'm sure your dog is a lovely dog, but is she spayed? If so, did you ask her permission? If not, have you let her keep all her puppies? The answers to these questions sound very different when applied to even an intelligent animal versus a human.
I think there's a risk of confusing the issues at stake when we veer into arguments about animal rights and overpopulation. Pro-lifers say pro-choicers don't respect human life; it's almost a fair accusation if the arguments we raise compare humans with locusts and dogs. I'd rather we respected human intelligence.
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Grant, I think you've missed proving the argument that if something is alive and human, it deserves the full legal protection of personhood.
Pro-choice means you're against forced abortion as well as prohibited abortion. But the entire Chinese government isn't here telling us we can't accept facts without offering any evidence or argument in support for their propositions.
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Mark, I have trouble following most of your posts and questions, but your pie anecdote has a horrible, bleak, surrealness all of its own.
I think counselling is entirely appropriate for everyone involved in making a decision like that. No health service that involves people making traumatic decisions is improved by a conveyor-belt approach by the health provider. There's nothing to stop people seeking counselling together, I suppose, but perhaps more could be done in connecting it with the procedure itself. The purpose of counselling as I see it is to help people work out what they really want to do.
And I think there's definitely a role for men who have been bystanders/participants in an abortion decision to have their feelings recognised and supported. But that doesn't mean they need decisionmaking powers. The solution to patriarchy, if I understand you correctly, isn't more patriarchy. I can't think of another circumstance in which one person can prevent or enforce the medical treatment of another adult of sound mind.
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She hasn't posted recently on this, but Maia wrote some good pieces over the last couple of years on what access to abortion really means to women in New Zealand. Including one reference to a woman with a heart condition who died in 2004 after being refused an abortion.
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But, as you rightly suggest, it is 'your house'. I'll not deny your right to delete as you see fit.
That sounds suspiciously pro-choice to me...
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The mental health criteria means that women seeking an abortion need to convince a couple of certifying consultants that continuing a pregnancy would harm their mental health. Like anon above, I'd choke at having to declare I was a mental health risk in order to make a perfectly rational decision, but that's by the by.
The group of women who've had abortions in NZ are therefore selected to include a large proportion of women who have already declared themselves at risk mentally. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that after what is at least a big upheaval in their lives, they continue to report mental health issues. Perhaps there's something about the study's methodology that's excluded that effect - I've not heard about it though.
I wonder what the study says about the mental health of new parents. Post natal depression is a far more widely recognised condition than "post-abortion syndrome."
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There are very detailed Wiki pages on prenatal development and so on. I'm not qualified to comment on their accuracy, but they're certainly thorough.
According to that, the twin window is shorter - if it happens after day 9, it's more likely to result in conjoined twins.