Typically a resort to insult means you have no valid argument to make.

None of this has anything at all to so with this legislation. The fact that abortion is not universally and absolutely allowed in every circumstance has no bearing on the fact that the legislature and the court substituted their opinion for the expertise of the doctors. This legislation does not address the legality of abortion and will not prevent one single abortion. It merely punishes a handful of women whose doctors would have recommended this procedure as the safest for them.

If you continue to discuss this legislation as if it had something to do with preventing abortion then I really don't see any point in continuing.

__________________
The most important political office is that of private citizen.
Louis D. Brandeis - First Jewish Supreme Court Justice

Men shouldn't have a say in these matters. How many women on the Supreme Court? They can shut the fuck up, I say.

I'm not so sure about that.
Think about it: If before in a given circumstance the doctors would have said that the safest abortion procedure was an Intact D&E abortion (meaning, extract the whole baby and kill it at the last second), then now, if they're consistent, the doctors would have to say the the safest procedure is not to have an abortion, but just to do the Intact D&E and not kill the fetus/baby.
If the baby happens to be viable, then a life has been saved and one abortion prevented (huzzah!).
If not then it dies whether it's skull is crushed or not, so the end result is the same.

But the result isn't the same. The woman (parents?) involved are given a false hope about the possibility that the infant will survive. That can result in significant psychological trauma.

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

I'm not quite sure I follow you here.
If it's "false hope", wouldn't that assume that they want the infant to survive? In that case, wouldn't they want to take a chance and hope rather than guarentee that it won't survive by purposefully killing it?
It would be a strange mentality that said, "Since there's a chance that it will die, we'd better kill it and remove any doubt."

These particular types of (extremely rare) abortions are done for 2 reasons: threats to the mother's health (done before the viability of the fetus), and a clear lack of a viable fetus (not because of a stage of development, but because of an illness or defect). In either case, bringing the fetus out and telling the mother that it might survive only submits her and the fetus to extended and unnecessary pain.

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

If you are correct in saying that this procedure is never done on a viable fetus, then there would be no reason to ever tell the mother that that it might survive. Right?

But I haven't seen any sign that this procedure can't be or will never be done at a stage when the fetus is viable.

To the best of my knowledge, it isn't.


You're confusing people being told something by a doctor to what they'll actually believe. There are many clear cases of the lack of congruence between doctor's predictions and patient beliefs.

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

Let me get this straight, are you saying that people who (despite what their doctors tell them) believe their baby might be viable, will be better off psychologically hearing the doctors say "Your baby died because I stabbed it in the head with my forcips" than if they heard the doctor say "Your baby died because it wasn't developed enough to survived outside the womb"?

I can't imagine that anyone who actually believe their baby has a chance of survival is going to be OK with a procedure in which the doctor plans to actively kill it.

Ah. That's clearly what I'm trying to say.

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

Well, I didn't think so, but you never can tell when people will just lose it

I just don't see how anyone who thought their baby was viable would sign on to a procedure if they knew that it included the intentional killing of the baby without any health gains to themselves.

Apparently I'm not being very clear, and for that I apologize.

Let me preface my response with this: I abhor abortion. I think it is wrong, except for a very limited number of cases. But, I also believe in a woman's right to choose.

This particular form of abortion is, to the best of my knowledge, only performed to prevent suffering or death. It is not a widespread practice, and certainly not used in abortions of choice. As a result, it's not used on viable babies, unless the woman's life is in jeopardy. And, to the best of my knowledge, even in those cases when the baby is viable everything is done to try to keep it alive.

So, perhaps we're on the same side?

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

What insult, it is a 100%, spot on, perfect analogy. If you took it as an insult, it must be something in your subconscious at work.

That you completely ignore the actual validity of the comparison demonstrates that you have NO (valid or otherwise) argument to make.

If this law wouldn't prevent a single abortion, than how is it substituting the judgement of legislators and judges for those of doctors? Get your arguments in order before you continue to prattle on.

Find me a single doctor or medical organization that has ever said that late-term ABORTIONS are ever medically neccesary or superior to NON-abortion alternatives to early-termination of pregancy. The AMA has definitively said they NEVER are. You keep falling back on an intentionally disingenously worded statement by another professional group which was designed to create a misperception among people either too ideologically predisposed, or just too fucking stupid, to question why their wording cleearly excludes NON-abortive alternatives when judging the MEDICAL neccesity or efficacy of ID&E. Even if ending the PREGNANCY is deemed medically neccesary for the life or health of the mother, by the point in a pregnancy where a ID&E would be performed it is NEVER a MEDICAL neccesity to abort the pregnancy in order to terminate, or even marginally safer to the mother.

How about this, you cite something that explains exactly how finishing the delivery puts the mother at any greater risk then halting it and killing the 75% delivered baby just to avoid the current arbitrary legal distinction of being fully versus partially delivered.

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Perhaps so, or at least very much so if not perfectly.

I bolded that one sentence in your post because it stood out to me as a reason why I support banning this paricular procedure. In the particular procedure banned by this law, there is not even the slightest attempt to keep the baby alive. Just the opposite, in fact. The procedure described involves the active killing of the baby.

But perhaps we're merely talking past each other here. As I see it, there are two main parts to the procedure in question. The first is the intact extraction, when the baby is extracted whole prior to the time of a normal birth. The second, performed just before the first is finished, involves actively killing the baby, generally by piercing the skull and suctioning out the brain.
As you can see, there's no way to perform the second part of this procedure while trying to keep the baby alive.
I have no problem with the law allowing the first part of the procedure if its medically necessay. But I cannot see how the second part could possibly be medically necessary. And I can certainly imagine how it could be abused. It serves only to kill the baby.

Now, it may be that no one ever uses this procedure to kill an otherwise viable baby. But, without this law, there would be no legal statute against it.
Without this law, we face the absurd notion that a woman who has a baby and then immediately stabs it to death is a murderer, and a murderer of the worst sort.
But if she had paid a doctor to stab the same baby a split second earlier, just before it completely emerged, the law could classify it as a "medical procedure" and neither of them would be guilty of anything.
That tells me something is deeply wrong with the system.

This law is, as I understand it, meant to fix that (at least to some extent). It says that you cannot kill a baby simply because it hasn't quite made it out of the birth canal yet. And it does so (as best I can tell) without endangering anyone's life or health.

EDITED:
But now I need to go to sleep. I'll check back in the morning. 'night pram

In the cases you're describing, IIRC, it's a question of fetal viability. The fetus has a defect or disease that will lead to a few days/weeks of suffering and then death. The procedure is done as a preventative.

To the best of my knowledge, it is not performed as you are describing.

__________________
When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears