This has been addressed numerous times: I think every single person puncturing DF as a license to evil has made this point at least twice. I've said it maybe as many as half a dozen: the deadline proposed, which is more liberal than current deadlines, is mitigated by medical concerns for the mother.
How nice. No, really, it's the stuff of rainbows and fairy floss.
Too bad reality is not as you wish it to be.
Women have died undergoing forced c-sections for the benefit of the "person" she was carrying.
Hospitals are taking out court orders to force women to undergo risky and dangerous and unnecessary surgical procedures for the good of the baby. The foetus is appointed a lawyer, while the parents are either not made aware of the proceedings or they are denied the right to legal representation.
Amber Marlowe anticipated an easy delivery when she went into labor on January 14, 2004. But after a routine ultrasound, doctors at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital, in Pennsylvania, decided that the baby--at what looked like 13 pounds--was too big to deliver vaginally and told her that she needed to have a cesarean. The mom-to-be, however, wasn't convinced: After all, she'd given birth to her six previous kids the natural way, including other large babies. And monitoring showed that the fetus was in no apparent distress.
After she said no to surgery, doctors spent hours trying to change her mind. When that didn't work, the hospital went to court, seeking an order to become her unborn baby's legal guardian. A judge ruled that the doctors could perform a "medically necessary" c-section against the mom's will, if she returned to that hospital. Meanwhile, she and her husband checked out against the doctors' advice and went to another hospital, where she later gave birth vaginally to a healthy 11-pound girl. "When I found out about the court order, I couldn't believe the hospital would do something like that. It was scary and very shocking," says Marlowe. "All this just because I didn't want a c-section."
She and her husband, John, turned to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), in New York City, for help in contesting the judge's ruling--the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. The couple is also considering legal action against the hospital. "It's not about us," says John Marlowe. "What's going to happen to the next lady who goes there? We want everyone to know what's going on. What they did was wrong, and our goal is to put a stop to it so that other women don't end up with c-sections they don't need."
Is this acceptable, yes or no?
Because you can claim that under your model how the woman's health and safety would remain paramount, but reality is vastly different. On the contrary, women are being forced to undergo unnecessary and dangerous surgical procedures that will limit how many children they have in the future and being denied the right to even have a lawyer represent them in court, since the court proceedings are happening without their knowledge most of the time.
When the researchers surveyed directors of 42 maternal-fetal medicine programs around the country, 14 percent reported that their hospital had used court orders to compel unwilling women to have O.R. deliveries. What's more, 21 percent of these specialists in the care of pregnant patients consider coerced c-sections "ethically justified" to spare a fetus possible harm--even over the woman's physical resistance, as long as her struggles weren't strenuous enough to endanger her or the baby.
ACOG adamantly disagrees. In 2004, its ethics committee ruled that it's never right for health care providers to subject pregnant women to physical force, even with a court order authorizing a c-section or other procedure. The committee also said that seeking such orders against a patient's wishes is "rarely if ever acceptable." The American Medical Association, another prominent doctors' group, has a similar policy.
So what should happen if a doctor is convinced that a vaginal birth would be disastrous? "Personally, I'm willing to counsel women very strongly in that situation--and bring in another physician to offer a second opinion about the risks of not having a c-section," says Dr. Lyerly. "I also tell patients that it's a very safe operation--and I should know, since I've had three c-sections myself."
However, doctors' opinions can also be tragically wrong. Years ago, a Washington, D.C., hospital got a court order to perform a c-section on Angela Carder, who was gravely ill with cancer. Since the mom was in such poor health, the hospital's doctors believed that delivering the 26-week fetus immediately would give it a better chance of survival than waiting for a natural delivery. The result? Carder and her baby both died soon after the operation. Later, in a landmark 1990 ruling, an appeals court overturned the order, finding that Carder had a right to make medical decisions for herself and her unborn child. Her family also received an undisclosed financial settlement from the hospital.
You are so obsessed with "DF" that you don't really know what that argues. It argues for the woman to determine her reproductive fate. Abortion, especially 3rd trimester abortions, is very restricted. By restraining it further and assigning personhood, women and their babies will die.
Is this acceptable to you or not?
We have already seen case after case of women being denied every single one of their Constitutional rights while their unborn "persons" is assigned those very rights that should also apply to the mother. These aren't one off cases.
Nor are they made up scenarios that so many of you prefer to rely on. These things actually happen.
Now, what do you think will happen once you legally declare the foetus a "person"? Because if a hospital can go to court and force a woman who is gravely ill to undergo a c-section that it knows will kill her and her baby (as advised by her treating physician), in their bid to save her baby, and it ultimately killed both her and the baby, how far do you think it's going to go if a woman wants to abort the baby, GeoffP? Think within the realms of reality for once. They are already literally strapping women down to operating tables without their consent after going to court, without advising her first or allowing her to have legal representation, and they are then cutting her open to take her baby out (sometimes, they are even granted custody of the baby because she dared to want to deliver naturally)..
So I ask again, what happens to the mother's rights when you grant personhood?
Did you somehow miss this yet again? The reality of this is that everyone here has discussed those rights and each one has taken up a reasonable position on the protection of the mother.
And who are you all again?
Whatever you all discuss is beside the point and moot. Because you all don't run the world, nor do you have any power except for over your own bodies... if you are male that is. Those of you who are female and of child bearing age, this could happen to you.
Whatever you all agree to here means nothing in the real world outside, where women are being denied even their Constitutional rights, the rights to self determination and to decide their own medical treatment because they are pregnant.
They can even take your corpse, without consent, to keep growing a baby in it..
This is reality and not made up scenarios.
So I ask again, in the realms of reality and not what you decide here or what you think should happen, what happens to the woman's rights when the foetus she is carrying is declared a person with full legal rights and protections? Keep in mind, hospitals and doctors and the courts are already granting personhood rights, sometimes to the mother's death.
I'm disappointed - again - that you have - again - ignored the arguments and comments of those on this thread opposed to your reprehensibly-floated idea and instead substituted a misrepresentation (which by this point some would call an outright lie) that allows you to continue voicing objections to a conundrum which does not exist. The bottom line is that you want DF; we get it. Believe me, after pages of it, we understand your objective. But no one here, and I suspect nearly no one anywhere, would support such a dangerously extremist stance. You want a statement on the rights of the mother after our bright line? Shared. You know, shared, like that thing people do to make a properly social society, neither demanding dominance nor submission.
I'll put it this way, GeoffP, your continued misrepresentation of the "DF" model as you call it is not only unwelcome, but it is steeped in intellectual dishonesty. You refuse to accept reality and you are arguing based on a fantastical scenario imagined by someone who wished to go to absolute extremes while ignoring reality.
So how about we dial it back and deal with reality and not the gross misrepresentation you have decided to leap on? Hmm? Would that be acceptable for you?
Here is the facts of DF:
1) No woman is allowed to abort as what you think DF means. In other words, the reality dictates and the doctors who perform late term abortions clearly state that they will not abort past 33 weeks unless there is something catastrophically wrong with the foetus.
2) There is no merit in the argument that a woman could or would abort as she was in the middle of labor. This is a myth and a misrepresentation of reality. Your continued assertion that this could even be the case is an insult and only misrepresents fact. So please cease and desist.
Is that clear enough for you?
No abortion provider in the US will abort a foetus past 33 weeks. The only reason they will do it is if there is something horrendously wrong with the foetus which has only just been discovered. This was evidenced repeatedly in the other threads discussing this issue. So I don't really appreciate people not only miss-assigning something to me that I never argued, and certainly do not appreciate people demanding that I apparently support the killing of full term babies by abortion. I dare you to cite a single reference to such a comment by me.
Then effectively we - you and we - are in agreement. No woman would abort beyond this point save for overriding medical or other reasons, so there is no need to extend abortion rights to DF, which is a license to mayhem against viable fetuses.
No one has ever argued that abortion rights be extended to when it's about to pop out, Geoff. No one. What was argued was within the realms of what happens in reality. So cease and desist with the continued misrepresentation.
What I argue for is that personhood not be granted to foetuses because of the precedents already set by hospitals and courts assigning personhood, all of which resulted in women being harmed, killed and denied their Constitutional rights.
Because you took it - actually or farcically - as an actual option, rather than a rhetorical-satirical tool. This is an elementary mistake, and it is not validated by further screed or pretension that the circumstances of the satire means Capracus wants women to die.
Please tell me, how one could take 'a woman has the right to determine her reproductive choices while pregnant' to an analogy that would equate her to be a turducken. The dry foot policy was explained to Capracus in detail, but for some reason, he went off on a tangent and asked about scenarios that would murder a woman and her child. In short, he rendered the woman into the status of a dead bird that one consumes for your national holidays or Christmas.
Because going from a woman has the rights over her body and has the rights to make choices to asking 'what if you reattached the umbilical cord and stuffed it back in, could you abort it then?' is a bit of a ridiculous stretch.. It was a ridiculous and stupid argument to make in the first place. When it was explained to him that 1) it would murder the woman and her baby and 2) how does this even equate to what happens in reality? Because what woman have you ever heard of who is at full term or in labor trying to find an abortionist to abort her full term baby as its in the process of coming out? Not only does this not happen in reality, but no doctor would even perform it because it would be illegal to do so - since it would be murder. So the request that the argument be held within the boundaries of reality continue to be played out as the gross and frankly obscene misrepresentation has been adopted by so many without fully understanding the history or the unrealistic and frankly sick argument made by someone who got caught out by his own stupidity in the other thread.
You and Tiassa both express this unrealistic and absolute belief in not so much as a slippery slope of personhood - and this would be wrong enough - but a simple cliff: once personhood at a stage is granted, you feel it must inevitably apply to all stages, or specifically that there exist those that will take it so. And? These people exist anyway and it is a cert that they take support from the existence of any limitations at all, which they churn into a personhood argument. We are not they, which you and Tiassa seem to have finally, grudgingly realised after many long pages of patient and sometimes not-too-patient explanation. Our reconsidered definition would move the deadline back in the ontological scale, a move that could only be taken as support for an integral FAP argument by idiots. Such people do exist, but our stance cannot possibly support fertilisation-line-individual personhood (FLIP) as it moves away from their preferred target date, and because the thinking elements of society have to do their bit also: legal challenges will occur. They must be fought.
Pure and utter bullshit.
No one advocated for what Capracus claimed we advocated.
As for personhood, there is a list of cases where women have been denied their Constitutional rights, some even leading to their deaths, because the hospital and/or the courts assigned personhood to the foetus. This is the reality of the precedents that come before your decisions of what personhood would mean.
Personhood can never mean what you think it should mean. Sure, it's noble to declare that the mother would not lose rights. But there are legal precedents from across the US and around the world, for that matter, where women do lose their legal and Constitutional rights. They lose the right to determine their health care, to losing the rights over their own bodies as they are being arrested, strapped to a gurney with their legs tied together to stop the baby from coming out, and taken to a hospital where a court hearing is already underway to deny her her rights while providing her unborn baby with full constitutional rights that are denied to her and her husband for that matter.. She is then taken into a theater, tied to the operating table and the baby cut out of her by force. This is what is happening now.
So it's all well and dandy that you all determined that the mother would have rights if personhood were legally declared by law. It's a shame that even without such laws, courts, hospitals and doctors are assigning personhood and doing whatever they please, often to the detriment of the woman and her rights.
Now, that doesn't mean it actually agrees with your DF stance. DF is chosen precisely because it puts all choice with the mother, abrogating any reasonable societal protections to the fetus under the assumption that all mothers will behave ethically because they're mothers. This is a bit tautological and not really supportable. Lots of very nice people make very nasty decisions under pressure and it is part of a social society's job to prevent people from being put in such scenarios by making some actions illegal. So, no, I appreciate your sentiments, but it's not what one would call a particularly smart deadline. The support argument has has - if you'll excuse me - it's legs cut out from under it by the advance of viability. How could it be otherwise?
And you are still failing to deal with reality.
As I said, what you think or what rights you think a woman has means squat.
Because it is not reflecting reality as it stands now. The reason pro-lifer's and religious pro-lifer's go for personhood is because it will provide the foetus with full legal protections, which renders the mother's rights as being null and void while the foetus is still inside her. Those rights cannot compete.
S: The baby is reliant on me, and I'm aborting it.
R: The baby is biologically independent of you at this phase, and can be recovered. So we'll take it, and find someone who wants it.
S: No, it's still in me, so I'm killing it.
It's not a trespasser or a parasite. How exactly can you argue for its death at this point? Will you invoke a kind of prenatal "stand your womb"? This among other things does not seem logical or ethical.
I don't know what you can possibly argue against the biological line at this point: all angles have been dealt with. You can't raise "medical reasons", for one thing. What is there left?
Now provide me with 1 case from a scientific or reputable unbiased news source where a pregnant woman aborted in the 3rd trimester using the argument you just made in that little scenario. Just one.
And I do not know why you are arguing against a made up scenario in another thread you have not even read because one poster decided to misrepresent reality and instead delved into the realm of sick fantasy and then applied it as fact and declared this is what we were arguing.
Quite the contrary, we argued based on reality - you know - real life. Where it is generally recognised that the myth perpetrated by pro-life groups that women are aborting while they are in labor is not really what happens in reality.
Balerion said:
Ah, so context matters when you say something out of line, just not when others do.
Keep pretending that your behavior is acceptable, Bells. it's working out wonderfully for you.
This has already been addressed numerous times. I have no time for your self righteous complaints Balerion. Nor do I actually have the patience for them. While I am required to pay attention to your non stop complaints in the SFOG sub-forum, I am well within my rights to completely ignore you when you do nothing but complain in normal threads. You are already down to about 3/4 of the staff refusing to even acknowledge your many complaints. You are about to lose one of only about 3 who actually even bothers to read them now.
Except it has been addressed, by everyone on this side of the debate: the health of the mother comes first, always, regardless of viability. None of us would endorse the scenarios listed above, and granting legal status to a viable fetus does not necessarily leave the door open for such.
Those were not scenarios.
Those actually happened, in the United States. So they were not made up, nor are they hypothetical.
While you may declare the woman's health always comes first and her rights always comes first, regardless of viability,
what is happening in the real world is vastly different.
After two cesarean sections, Rinat Dray wanted to give birth naturally.
But when she arrived at Staten Island University Hospital in labor, the doctor immediately began pressuring her, she said, to have a C-section.
The doctor told her the baby would be in peril and her uterus would rupture if she did not; he told her that she would be committing the equivalent of child abuse and that her baby would be taken away from her, she said in an interview this week.
After several hours of trying to deliver vaginally and arguing with the doctors, Mrs. Dray was wheeled to an operating room, where her baby was delivered surgically.
The hospital record leaves little question that the operation was conducted against her will: “I have decided to override her refusal to have a C-section,” a handwritten note signed by Dr. James J. Ducey, the director of maternal and fetal medicine, says, adding that her doctor and the hospital’s lawyer had agreed.
Mrs. Dray is suing the doctors and the hospital for malpractice, charging them with “improperly substituting their judgment for that of the mother” and of trying to persuade her by “pressuring and threatening” her during the birth of her third son, Yosef, in July 2011.
But more broadly, her case is part of a debate over the use of cesarean sections. It also raises issues about the rights of pregnant women to control their own bodies, even if that might compromise the life of a fetus.
Across the country, nearly 33 percent of births, or almost 1.3 million, were by cesarean section in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization recommends that the rate should not be higher than 10 to 15 percent.
The rate has been climbing since 1996, despite warnings from health officials that C-sections are more likely than natural births to cause problems for the health of the mother and the baby. It has recently leveled off.
Indeed, in Mrs. Dray’s case, her bladder was cut during the procedure, according to court papers.
Her doctors then blamed her for the injuries she suffered while he was operating on her..
So no, you have not actually answered the question based in reality. Because if that is how they treat women who are in labor and want to have their baby, how well do you actually think they are going to treat women or respect their rights if they wish to abort a "person"?
On an emotional level, I think we can all appreciate that. And as we've all said, up to the point of viability, we respect that position with no questions asked. Beyond that point, we simply ask that consideration be given to the child. We still support the mother's primacy in any case where consideration for the child's health and mother's result in a conflict.
Suggesting that restricting abortions beyond where necessary results in a loss of personhood is nothing more than hyperbole. It's useless beyond being a rhetorical device for the stump or picket line, since it is inherently amd demonstrably false. I would suggest abandoning it if you mean to have a worthwhile conversation on the topic.
Not a single person has argued that consideration is not given to the "child". The doctors who perform those abortions certainly do not not consider the "child". The women who are forced into having to have an abortion at that point are usually devastated. It is treated like a birth. I have provided you with interviews about what actually happens. How it is treated. Many of these women have funerals. Others have been forced into having one after 27 weeks because they were literally unable to access an abortion in the first trimester. No woman gets to that point and does not consider her child and what her choices are. And the very minute few doctors who offer these services under threat of death do not ignore the child either. Far from it.
Third trimester abortions are very restricted. You can't get one past like 33 weeks unless there is something catastrophically wrong with the foetus - I provided links about this in the other thread and instead of anyone actually reading it, I was accused of literally supporting the murder of 'babies' and the DF supposed policy reared its ugly head with accusations that women could apparently abort at full term or while in labor or even after, regardless of what reality actually dictates. The arguments made about the DF "policy" are based on absolute myth and not based on reality at all. The doctors have to agree to perform it even before then. It is not guaranteed. I have yet to hear of a single case where a woman gets to that point and simply changes her mind and calls up an abortion doctor several States away, pays the close to $10,000 to have it done on a whim. I think people who portray women as being like this have their own agenda.
What clearly happens with legal personhood is that the foetus is legally recognised as a "person", and as such, gains all the Constitutional protections that you enjoy as a citizen of the US. And as is clearly demonstrated, women's rights go out the window, they are even denied the right to legal representation and are being cut open by force and without their consent - many times to their detriment or their death.
Plus we have seen in countries where religion dictates that personhood begins at conception, women are literally dying from miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies because it is illegal to treat these women if there is still a foetal heartbeat. And that is not just in other countries. Catholic hospitals are denying pregnant women treatment if they are ill, if they miscarry and that miscarriage is not complete and it hasn't come out of her uterus and instead remains in there, while she bleeds because there is still a heartbeat.. so they do not treat these women.. Why? Because they recognise the foetus as a person.. And I don't need to tell you how dangerous that is to the woman. One woman was forced to catch a taxi for 90 miles when she presented at a Catholic hospital in the US, with clear rupture of the membranes and the arm of the foetus sticking out of her cervix and she was bleeding.. The hospital refused to treat her so she had to travel for 90 miles for treatment for the clear and obvious miscarriage.
In another case, Dr H, from the same Catholic-owned hospital in the Midwest, sent her patient by ambulance 90 miles to the nearest institution where the patient could have an abortion because the ethics committee refused to approve her case.
She was very early, 14 weeks. She came in … and there was a hand sticking out of the cervix. Clearly the membranes had ruptured and she was trying to deliver… . There was a heart rate, and [we called] the ethics committee, and they [said], “Nope, can't do anything.” So we had to send her to [the university hospital]… . You know, these things don't happen that often, but from what I understand it, it's pretty clear. Even if mom is very sick, you know, potentially life threatening, can't do anything.
In residency, Dr P and Dr H had been taught to perform uterine evacuation or labor induction on patients during inevitable miscarriage whether fetal heart tones were present or not. In their new Catholic-owned hospital environment, such treatment was considered a prohibited abortion by the governing ethics committee because the fetus is still alive and the patient is not yet experiencing “a life-threatening pathology” such as sepsis. Physicians such as Dr H found that in some cases, transporting the patient to another hospital for dilation and curettage (D&C) was quicker and safer than waiting for the fetal heartbeat to stop while trying to stave off infection and excessive blood loss.
I don't need to explain to you what the inherent dangers of waiting for a woman to become septic before treating her..
Another woman
was denied treatment in a clear case of miscarriage and was sent home 3 times because the hospital she went to for her miscarriage refused to treat her because the "person" inside her had a heart beat.. she developed an infection and they gave her some aspirin and sent her home. These things are happening in the US. Because the foetus is deemed a person by the hospital administrators.
And in some cases, even when the woman becomes septic, they will still deny treatment:
Dr B, an obstetrician–gynecologist working in an academic medical center, described how a Catholic-owned hospital in her western urban area asked her to accept a patient who was already septic. When she received the request, she recommended that the physician from the Catholic-owned hospital perform a uterine aspiration there and not further risk the health of the woman by delaying her care with the transport.
Because the fetus was still alive, they wouldn't intervene. And she was hemorrhaging, and they called me and wanted to transport her, and I said, “It sounds like she's unstable, and it sounds like you need to take care of her there.” And I was on a recorded line, I reported them as an EMTALA [Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act] violation. And the physician [said], “This isn't something that we can take care of.” And I [said], “Well, if I don't accept her, what are you going to do with her?” [He answered], “We'll put her on a floor [i.e., admit her to a bed in the hospital instead of keeping her in the emergency room]; we'll transfuse her as much as we can, and we'll just wait till the fetus dies.”
And it gets even worse..
Some doctors have decided to take matters into their own hands. In the following case, the refusal of the hospital ethics committee to approve uterine evacuation not only caused significant harm to the patient but compelled a perinatologist, Dr S, now practicing in a nonsectarian academic medical center, to violate protocol and resign from his position in an urban northeastern Catholic-owned hospital.
I'll never forget this; it was awful—I had one of my partners accept this patient at 19 weeks. The pregnancy was in the vagina. It was over… . And so he takes this patient and transferred her to [our] tertiary medical center, which I was just livid about, and, you know, “we're going to save the pregnancy.” So of course, I'm on call when she gets septic, and she's septic to the point that I'm pushing pressors on labor and delivery trying to keep her blood pressure up, and I have her on a cooling blanket because she's 106 degrees. And I needed to get everything out. And so I put the ultrasound machine on and there was still a heartbeat, and [the ethics committee] wouldn't let me because there was still a heartbeat. This woman is dying before our eyes. I went in to examine her, and I was able to find the umbilical cord through the membranes and just snapped the umbilical cord and so that I could put the ultrasound—“Oh look. No heartbeat. Let's go.” She was so sick she was in the [intensive care unit] for about 10 days and very nearly died… . She was in DIC [disseminated intravascular coagulopathy]… . Her bleeding was so bad that the sclera, the white of her eyes, were red, filled with blood… . And I said, “I just can't do this. I can't put myself behind this. This is not worth it to me.” That's why I left.
So it's all well and good to say that the woman's health would come first. And if that was the case, this thread would not exist. But
in reality, it is often not the case and women are dying and their lives being endangered because someone, somewhere, deems her foetus a "person".
And if they are treating women who are miscarrying this way, if they are even denying life saving and essential medical treatment to women who are miscarrying because there is a foetal heartbeat and denying these women their rights in this way, what are the chances of a woman wanting to abort maintaining any of her rights?
I'm curious to know what it is, given the number of times I've had to restate my position, again and again, as if the other side weren't reading it or something. But surely that's impossible.