This is a major fear of "pro life" legislation: women are reduced to birthing vessels and failure to reproduce warrants intense legal scrutiny. I have friends that could, in today's legal environment, be facing life in prison because they've had three or more miscarriages.
[?] I may have misread something, and cannot find a source on this on second reading. Leaving it in place for the sake of transparency.
That's not in the article.
> but I see no evidence mentioned that she followed through on the purchase
This article is about abortion rights. I think it's fair game to call a 35 week abortion what it is.
> women are reduced to birthing vessels
There isn't some conspiracy to turn women into birthing vessels. The only thing under debate is at what age a baby becomes a legal person afforded rights to life and at what age a women loses her right to end that life.
These new laws make it clear that a pregnant female, who is already a participating member of humanity, has only one purpose. To carry out the pregnancy, even if it is high risk and likely to kill or disable her. If she fails to produce a new living member, she may now go to jail in some states because the quiet-bad-faith part is made into law; that her Life, is not nearly as important to them as possibility of the not-yet guaranteed new young human. There is nothing pro-life about that.
Oh please. Cool it with the strawman arguments. It's boring.
They aren't owned by the state. They simply can't kill the human growing inside them. That's it, that's all it is.
We don't need to drop to analogies and hyperbole, we have the language to describe what is happening. A woman, in most instances, chooses to have a baby grow inside of them. But regardless of how it got there, at a certain point that baby deserves human rights.
That point is all that's up for debate. At what point does a baby become a human with rights to life.
One side argues birth, one side argues conception. The vast majority decided viability 22 weeks (disturbing imo but neither here nor there).
My human right to free speech stops at the point it harms someone else.
I don't see why these rights would be any bloody different.
If you want to debate this issue you need to be willing to define when a baby becomes a human, because THAT is the only thing being debated here.
In particular, please edit out flamewar swipes like your first sentence here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
> I think it's fair game to call a 35 week abortion what it is.
I think it's fair to presume innocence until guilt is proven.
Edit: I think I misread one of the articles, apologies
At the same time I think it was a bit of a suspect situation. It's pretty rare to end up with a full term baby dead in the toilet.
Do you have another source which is saying that? This article says:
> Paramedics arrived at Latice Fisher’s Mississippi home to find a baby in the toilet, lifeless and blue, the umbilical cord still attached. The child — roughly six pounds and more than 35 weeks along — was rushed to the hospital, where it was pronounced dead.
> Fisher, a mother of three, told paramedics she had not known she was pregnant. But she later admitted to a nurse that she had known about the pregnancy. And after she voluntarily surrendered her iPhone to police, investigators discovered that Fisher, a former police dispatcher, had searched for how to “buy Misopristol Abortion Pill Online” 10 days earlier.
It may have been a case of the woman earnestly not knowing she was pregnant for months (don't laugh, this happens with very obese women) and thinking she had just recently gotten pregnant. But it doesn't say anything about a nuchal chord.
What an extremely weird thing to get wrong. Pregnancies are 40 weeks long.
Anyhow looked it up, Russia only allows elective abortions up to 12 weeks. So way more conservative than the US or even much of the EU.
I sincerely hope that American abortion activists and supporters will reconsider the ethics of late-term abortion. It's barbaric. I think most people just haven't done the research / internalized the cruelty.
"In 2015, almost two thirds (65.4%) of abortions were performed at ≤8 weeks’ gestation, and nearly all (91.1%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation. Few abortions were performed between 14 and 20 weeks’ gestation (7.6%) or at ≥21 weeks’ gestation (1.3%). During 2006–2015 the percentage of all abortions performed at >13 weeks’ gestation remained consistently low (≤9.0%). Among abortions performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation, a shift occurred toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage performed at ≤6 weeks’ gestation increasing 11%."
That's ~91% of abortions at less than/equal to 13 weeks.
What's more:
"[T]he abortion rate for 2015 was 11.8 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 188 abortions per 1,000 live births."
There were 638,169 total abortions, with only 9% (~57,500) occurring after 13 weeks.
Consider that this includes fetuses with deadly/debilitating defects (including, but not limited to, Down's Syndrome, cystic fibrosis and spina bifida) as well as other issues that threaten the life of the mother, doom the fetus to a painful death after birth and/or condemn such a child to a lifetime of misery.
Many/most of those cannot be determined without an amniocentesis[1], which isn't performed until 14-20 weeks.
It's not clear how many >13 week abortions are performed in those cases, but it's likely that a significant portion are fetuses that will likely die before/soon after birth, have debilitating defects and/or threaten the life of the mother.
As such, the truth is that the vast majority of abortions are performed long before a fetus is much more than the length of your middle finger.
So no. "Late-term" abortions are extremely rare, with only ~1.3% (~9,000 out of ~4.6 million pregnancies) performed after 21 weeks. And likely many (most?) are fetuses that have been found to have serious defects/abnormalities and/or a full term pregnancy threatens the life/health of the mother.
I'm not sure what you think "abortion activists" are advocating.
I'd say they're advocating giving women the opportunity to save their own lives and/or prevent enormous suffering among babies with debilitating/life-threatening conditions.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6713a1.htm
[1] https://americanpregnancy.org/prenatal-testing/amniocentesis...
Edit: Fixed typo, de-gerundized "prevent".
Overturning Roe v Wade doesn't change anything related to these types of abortions. It only allows states to make up their own laws. Most of which won't change from what it is now and most of which only ban elective abortion.
Sounds great - but would that matter?
Roe vs. Wade showed that laws made and ‘democratic’ decisions settled upon in the USA can be reversed with no warning, no voting, nothing but funding from evil people.
I fail to believe these Christian extremists wouldn’t repeat the process with the constitution.
After all, these are people who take ‘wives be submissive to your husbands’ as literal Gospel.[0]
Absolutely disgusting and appalling.
That verse and many, many more - shows to me that Women’s rights or gay rights can never even be important to these people, sadly. In fact, as long as we have rights; they’ll fight against it. They think they have to, or they’ll go to hell!
God told them to take away our rights.
I mean, Christianity is a patriarchy, by design. (‘God the Father’ and all of that…)
Outside of Catholicism, there isn’t any sort of Divine Feminine figure, and the Bible doesn’t speak much upon Women’s rights. (having been raised by a Baptist Minister I do actually know quite a hit about the Bible)
It will be a constant uphill battle against these people, sadly.
[0] Check out this crockpot doozy of bullshit from Ephesians 5:21:
“ Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.”
We've had to ask you not to do flamewars on HN several times before. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it recently–that's good!
There is a lot in your post that could be responded to, but, if I may, I'll talk about the most important.
There are a LOT of people who don't understand what "The Gospel" is. The Gospel is the bare minimum knowledge to be saved. Here goes:
God made us people to be in a relationship with Him
God is perfect
We are not perfect - and this imperfection prevents us from being with a perfect God
There is nothing we can do to be perfect, or to be with God
God sent Jesus to earth to die for us, so we don't have to die for our imperfections
If we accept Jesus' death for us, we can be in a perfect relationship with God -forever-
That is it. There is no mention of being gay, having abortions, murder, church, voting republican, loving others, believing in evolution, submitting to a husband, respecting a wife. Zilch. Nada.
I say this so that you might know what is the Gospel- and to know it is open to you, but also so that others might know what is the Gospel and what it isn't.
To be clear and relevant: Christians don't need to expel abortion to spread the gospel. And people who have had abortions can still receive the gospel. We can actually come together, while disagreeing about abortion.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her”
And verse 28 says:
“In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”
The ultimate idea of these verses is better expressed in Ephesians 5:31, which says:
“However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
And then there's First Timothy...
"But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint."
God created us in His own image, and we decided to return the favor.
Roe vs. Wade wasn't a law, or really a democratic decision -- it's decision in the first place was pretty much an example of overturning those democratic decisions with no warning or voting (e.g. the texan laws that were placed by those democratically elected members of texan legislature).
We need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's rights.