Originally Posted by Diuretic

Of course, you'd be silly to refuse the procedure due to its "ugh" factor. It's much better to work out a risk analysis and go from there.




Can I make reference to my own jurisdiction? I'm not dodging your point (I haven't read even a summary of the latest ruling so I'm in blissful ignorance here). Community standards don't apply here. And you know I'm quite okay with that. If you can bear an overly legalistic analysis then here it comes (if you can't then just ignore this bit).

Abortion is illegal in my state.

Pretty unambiguous I would have thought. But wait, there's more:

We've got all the bases covered, I tell ya.

But abortions happen and they happen a lot. How can they? Well they can because of this:

It's not an issue here. We do have a "Right to Life" movement here but no-one takes much notice of them. Abortion is not seen here as a religious or moral issue in the main (a minority does but they don't have the numbers to persuade the state parliament to change the law), it's seen as an issue between a woman (and her partner) and her medical practitioner.

I know that abortion in the US is a battleground occupied by religious zealots, right wing nutters, evangelicals, political conservatives, misogynists and political opportunists on the one hand and on the other side, lunatic Dworkinist separatist feminists with hairy armpits and legs, the ACLU, effete leftists, ordinary leftists, moderate women's groups and soccer moms that don't want to see their daughters get knocked up at high school and see their lives spiralling downwards because the state wants to force their sixteen year old daughters to give birth.

Yes I'm exaggerating for effect and quite enjoying it. But, I'm trying to make a point. I'm not claiming moral superiority for my community as against your society. That would be arrogant and very rude. I'm simply point out why I don't like to stray into the abortion debate. For me it's a non-issue. I'm happy with our - I have to say this - rather ingenious way out of the dilemma that American society has forced on itself.

But if I do get into the debate in the American context I want to be able to argue it logically (well as logically as I can). Roe v Wade was about privacy. It was about limiting the right of the state to intrude into the life of the individual. It confirmed what your nation's Founding Fathers had so cleverly put into your Constitution. The Right in America want to destroy Roe v Wade because they need the evangelical conservatives' support. The political Right don't really care about abortion, but they do know if they don't attack it - lately through the now reactionary US Supreme Court - that their evangelical supporters will desert them. And given America is the most religious country of all the Western liberal democracies that's important to them. So, regardless of the hypocrisy of their professed preference for putting the individual above the collective state, they will, bare-faced seek to use the the coercive power of the state to force a woman to have a baby. She has no choice, the state says she must give birth. Stalin would be pleased.

So, for me the debate from the Right is rank hypocrisy. The constant playing with words, is it "unborn human" or is it "foetus" are just distractions from the real game. The Right of course will attack the "medical establishment" because medicos will trot out scientific evidence - not opinion - about the stages of human development and try and wrestle with both the medico-scientific evidence and the ethical issues involved. That's far too hard for the Right. They need to keep it simple because they know that the average voter in America (or anywhere else for that matter) doesn't want to listen to heavyweight debates about medical ethics and scientific knowledge about human development. Nope, no sir. Can't have that when all that's necessary is to show pictures of a foetus sucking its thumb in the womb, a picture that naturally appeals to our human emotions (we're instinctively conditioned to be protective to human life, especially when it looks like a baby).

So the debate in this forum and in any other forum you care to identify - including the mainstream media - focusses largely on the irrelevancies surrounding this really difficult topic.

And that's why I don't like to get involved.