Tonight I watched a recording of the third presidential debate, wherein the topic of abortion was discussed. Specifically, I wish to address McCain's classification of the Pro-Choice movement as the "Pro-Abortion" movement.
Which I absolutely and in no uncertain terms condemn as ignorant, selfish, arbitrarily inflammatory, and false.
Obama: But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision.
And I agree.
McCain: He's health for the mother. You know, that's been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, "health."
How dare he. How dare he think that there is an entire movement of women out there who have late-term abortions "just because" and use any medical excuse to justify it. So he thinks that the government can make a better call than a woman in counsel with her doctors concerning what level of risk she can take before aborting a pregnancy that could kill or maim her.
The LDS church's statement concerning abortion:
Church leaders have said that some exceptional circumstances may justify an abortion, such as when pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, when the life or health of the mother is judged by competent medical authority to be in serious jeopardy, or when the fetus is known by competent medical authority to have severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. But even these circumstances do not automatically justify an abortion.
I don't agree with abortions of convenience. I don't agree that such a thing should be condoned, supported, or encouraged. But where is the line? I've seen the example of the 16 year old girl who gets pregnant, but has an abusive father who would beat her to death if he found out. This is the example that has been given to keep medical facilities from informing parents of an abortion performed for a minor. In such a case, is the health of the mother as much in jeopardy as from toxemia or other pregnancy induced disease? What about women with thrombophilia, for whom a full term delivery could be fatal but causes little other ante-partum complications?
I understand that McCain is talking about late-term abortion. He's talking about termination of a pregnancy after 20 weeks gestation, though 23 weeks is the earliest age at which resuscitation will be attempted. Circumstances such as these are more rare than your garden variety abortion. According to wikipedia (don't hash my buns, I'm doing some lazy citing at 11pm) 1.4% of abortions occur after 20 weeks gestation. 1.4%. By then you've heard a heart beat, you've seen an ultrasound photo, you've felt your baby kicking for a month, and the hormones hammering through your veins are doing everything they can to help you start bonding with that child NOW or as soon as possible after birth.
Here are the stated reasons for later abortions according to a survey: link.
I can understand how a few of them might seem a little weak. Most of them are preventable. Some are a matter of ignorance. Some of those reasons might be lies. But how many of us understand that 1.4% of abortions also means .06% (someone, check my math) of all pregnancies end in late term abortion. Yes, each pregnancy counts, but it's not like a raging epidemic of baby-hating women murdering their viable fetuses is consuming this nation.
And yet, how many lives of women are we willing to sacrifice in the mean time, by banning them altogether until we get our legal terms straight? If one Soldier's death in Iraq is too many, then isn't one woman's preventable death too many? Here's a news flash: if the mother dies, so does the baby unless it is successfully delivered immediately. There will always be someone around using loopholes to their advantage. That is unavoidable. What I can't stand is this man thinking that we have to cement laws around those women who just don't seem to have the morals or backbone to make that decision without the Federal government's help.
Here's a heartbreaking story for you:
Flotsam.
She spent a lot of time and money trying to get pregnant, and finally conceived twins. Her little boy, Twin A and thus the one closer to the outside world, passed away in utero. He was dead for almost 4 weeks before the risk of carrying him longer could have killed his sister and mother. Technically, she had to abort her pregnancy to save herself and attempt to save her other baby, Simone. She makes a valid point: where do you draw the line between the health of the mother and the life of the mother? There are some very clear and hard lines in medicine but laws can't even come close to appropriately regulating what judgment calls must be made in the event of late-term complications.
Some might say that this case was a heart breaking exception. And you'd be right. But this is an exception we must take into consideration when penning laws declaring all late-term abortions to be cruel, unnecessary, abominable, and illegal.
I hear the ones out there who are saying "it wasn't an abortion, since it was an early delivery intended to save the life of the baby." Here's a definition for you --
abortion: Termination of pregnancy and expulsion of an embryo or of a fetus that is incapable of survival.
And remember that she would have had to make the same decision regardless of how mature Simone had been at the time crisis set in. Had the infection spread just two weeks earlier, she wouldn't have been viable and it would have been an abortion indeed, merely to spare the life and health of one heart-broken mother. If a ban on late term abortion goes through, that heart-broken mother would have been dead as well, and three lives lost instead of the two.
I consider myself Pro-Choice, in that the decision should ultimately rest with a mother who has received medical counsel and, ideally, kind and wise counsel from clergy. I am not Pro-Abortion.
And I am not voting for John McCain.
And before you do, think about someone else in Christian history who wanted to remove choices from people to save them from themselves. His name was Lucifer.
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