How's this for a novel concept - how about we let medical professionals determine what constitutes "the health of the mother" instead of politicians? This country's growing disdain of expertise is very concerning.
Because "the health of the mother" is a (likely intentionally) vague standard which leaves a lot of room for subjectivity/personal beliefs/politics. Debating the impact of such a vague standard on an important morality/rights issue should not require an MD.
Every single day, doctors have to determine what constitutes an acceptable level of risk for every procedure that they perform on every patient. Late-term abortion is no different. Doctors simply have to assess, given the sum of medical factors involved, whether or not labor represents an undue risk to the mother. The only other voice that matters in this discussion is that of said mother.
I must be missing something about your point or the underlying purpose of the law.
My reading of it is that it permits late term abortions where necessary to protect the health of the mother. Stated in the negative, it prohibits only those late term abortions that are not necessary to protect the health of the mother.
I guess my confusion about your point could be cleared up if you gave me your impression about why we're prohibiting any late term abortions at all, regardless of the mother's health? Why should a statute prevent a mother from deciding just before birth that she wants an abortion for no reason at all?
That's not what's on the table. The new NY law only permits abortion after 24 weeks if the mother's health is threatened by either the pregnancy itself or the labor process. This whole "walk up and get an abortion the day before your due date because you changed your mind" thing isn't permitted under this law.
Of course. I asked because I think we're disagreeing about an implicit but fundamental purpose of the law.
The law offers a condition upon which doctors can abort late term fetuses, effectively stating the following (paraphrasing so forgive me if i'm not using precise terms): "We only allow those late term abortions that are necessary to protect the health of the mother." Implicitly, the law says we can abort some late term fetuses, but not all: we can only abort where mom's health is an issue. Stated differently,
some late term fetuses
have to be born. Where mom's health is not an issue, her late term fetus must be born. Why? Because those are the rules we decided to impose.
It seems logical to me that the "health" condition exists because, implicitly, we, as a society - experts and non-experts alike - have decided that we don't want doctors performing late term abortions in every single instance the mother desires. If society was OK with doctors performing abortions in every instance, then what's he point of the "health of the mother" condition? We'd just write a law that allows late term abortions full stop. If we wanted to give doctors complete discretion about when to perform abortions (at the mother's will), we ought to have just given them that -- we didn't need any health condition in the first place. Instead we imposed a standard that doctors must follow.
Now, if the standard set by society is too vague for doctors to possibly interpret and carry out properly and consistently, then I think there's an obvious and legitimate problem with the standard which ought to be addressed.
I don't think discussing or understanding any of the above concepts requires anyone to attend a science class.
