This is actually not entirely true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

"Safe-haven laws (also known in some states as "Baby Moses laws", in reference to the religious scripture) are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants with statutorily designated private persons so that the child becomes a ward of the state. All fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have enacted such statutes.[1]"

I assume these are meant to prevent infanticide among other reasons but yeah, you can just give up the baby. Apparently you can't just drop them off in most cases, as I thought you could, I think in the movies they show parents just leaving them on the steps. You have to find a responsible party to hand them too.

Post 32 week abortions are debate within a debate because people aren't really talking about the same thing, much more than other parts of the abortion debates. Many on the pro-forced-birth side would have you believe that this is a common occurrence. The pro-choice side would say that abortion is a difficult decision in and of itself and if someone is choosing abortion after 32 weeks, it must be an exceptional case, and we should respect the parent-doctor relationship to make that decision.

Being in a situation where I'm at the 32 week mark with my wife, I can't imagine many people choose to knowingly wait this long, and then just have an abortion for "funsies". Pew Research suggests it is less than 1% after 21 weeks (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...).

But I also think it's helpful to cede some ground to the moderate pro-lifers. If we can acknowledge that 32 week fetuses are empathetically "infants in a difficult locale", to me it's clear that there is some legal burden there. I don't think the opinion of one woman and that of any one doctor she can find willing to agree with her are sufficient grounds for killing a fetus at that stage. Not all people make good choices, and thinking things deserve protection from bad choices.

I'll also add that the criminalization of late-term abortions rests heavily on

1. Guaranteed access to early-term abortions regardless of circumstances

2. Mid-term abortions under specific circumstances.

3. Affirmative defense for late-term abortion given even narrower circumstances, i.e. bodily risk to mother.

With those guarantees, and only with those guarantees, I think the argument can be made that a mother with a late-term pregnancy has willingly undertaken the responsibility to carry that pregnancy to term, and therefor aborting that late-term pregnancy may be treated similarly to a parent harming an infant. But I'll reiterate: only with those guarnatees. And, of course, lots of places don't have those guarnatees right now, which is why this is a "debate within a debate", as you say. And this is the smaller and less impactful of the debates.

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/abortion-laws/

By definition, a fetus becomes viable if it is likely to sustain survival outside of the uterus. It has to be able to survive without extraordinary medical measures.

Doctors determine whether a given fetus is viable. They make this decision on a case-by-case basis.

Typically, a fetus becomes viable around the 23rd week of the pregnancy. Doctors also consider a fetus to be viable once it weighs at least 500 grams.

At the end of the day childbirth is dangerous and expensive and our US social safety net is terrible. If we truly respected life in this country there are better ways to show it than outlawing abortion.

Since you've cut off the only other option available to her it is on you to come up with the solution that works nationwide for hundreds or thousands of mothers every year.

Not exactly 32 weeks, but close:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/abortion-doctor-kermit-gosnell-gui...:

> "Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered. ... The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping,'" the report alleged.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/doctor-kermit-gosnell-found-guilt...:

> Prosecution experts said one was nearly 30 weeks along when it was aborted, and it was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked it could "walk to the bus." A second fetus was said to be alive for some 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped its neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee grabbed it and severed its spinal cord, according to testimony. Baby E let out a soft whimper before Gosnell cut its neck, the jury was told; Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death.

IIRC, all that stuff was done in an actual licensed abortion clinic.

Also you have a weird kind of argument that seems to pivot on the false assumption that the issue is how gruesome the act is, not the act itself.

It was implicit in your response. The acts I cited were gruesome, and your response implied the response should be to replace them with better-regulated, more antiseptic version of the same act.

It's possible the interpret your comment as an extremely aloof statement of fact without implicit policy advocacy, but that interpretation strains credulity.

Unless you somehow believe that doing so without providing a safe/regulated alternative will magically result in women no longer having health-threatening pregnancies or reliably deciding to persist with their pregnancies no matter what (despite all the evidence to the contrary from other parts of the world with very limited legal access to abortion), then I can't see how you could not advocate for better-regulated facilities.

And just in case there's any doubt as to my position - if a woman pregnant at 30 months were to decide she was no longer able to continue the pregnancy, such that live birth was not an option for whatever reason, and there were a way that the foetus could be safely and readily aborted with no risk of harm to the mother, then absolutely she is the only person who can reasonably make that choice. The rest of us have no right to insist we know better, no matter how much we may dislike the result (and yes, I would absolutely be saddened to know that foetus was robbed of its chance to develop into a human).

So your issue isn't so much with snipping the spinal cord at 30 months, but but whether the scissors are dirty or clean?

> it's hard to imagine there's a significant number of mothers of sound mind who would deliberately abandon their child such that it has no chance of survival.

I don't see how either of these quotes fit into a discussion about abortion/childcare law. Shouldn't the law make as clear as possible when it is illegal to abort a pregnancy or give up the care of an infant? The argument that "nobody will ever/has ever (that we can think of) do something so horrible as that" does nothing but muddy the water.

Let's just assume that at least one person in the future wants to abort their healthy 39 week fetus, and at least one person in the future wants to abandon their infant. These would hardly be the most surprisingly immoral things ever done by human beings.

Criminal laws exist in part to express society’s moral norms. Abandoning babies to die isn’t illegal because it’s a widespread problem. It’s illegal because it’s wrong.

But if your point is that the Venn Diagram intersection between pro-choicers and folks who want to decriminalize infanticide is not a null set you’ve made it.

I can't say I have a strong position on infanticide. There are undoubtedly cut and dried cases where an adult deliberately terminates the life of a newborn baby that should be classified as criminal acts. Abandoning your own child probably deserves a separate legal classification.