Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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I don’t think it’s strange. Our inadequate law now (sort of) allows abortion up to 20 weeks, and even after 20 weeks to save the life of the mother or to prevent serious permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the mother.
I would like the law up to 20 weeks to be removed/altered/whatever is necessary so that women don’t have to jump through all the hoops currently required to access abortion. But maybe it’s because I think the current hoops are so obviously stupid and wrong that I’m jumping straight to considering the post-20 weeks realities.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Lilith __,
Lilith, you’ve raised another relevant point here, indirectly. There’s a difficulty in that those who have had abortions may not wish to disclose that fact on a public message board, if only because of all the crazies out there. An abstract of a study from the Christchurch Health and Developmental Study shows 41% of women “had become pregnant on at least one occasion prior to age 25, with 14.6% having an abortion”, but as I’m at home I can’t check whether that’s 14.6% of 41%, or 14.6% total. Either way, with the additional fact that well over half of abortions now are for women over the age of 25 (http://abortion.org.nz/abortion-statistics), there’s a strong chance that at least some of the women who post here have had an abortion, whether or not they wish to say so.
Given the above, personally I think it would be helpful to treat all women’s comments here on the basis that they may have had an abortion - whether they say, don't say, or deny they have - because I’m not comfortable with ascribing the additional validity of experience only to comments from women prepared to disclose.
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I'm not suggesting that people have an abortion "for fun", or even lightly. Nor am I suggesting women be forced to carry on a pregnancy to the detriment of their own health.
The problem is the translation of theory and philosophical viewpoint into reality. If there were a *baby disappears* pill, I'd feel quite differently about late term abortions. But as there's not, who do we expect to carry them out?
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Envirologue: Swamp Monsters – the…, in reply to Henare,
Was just going to say the same thing, that I'd heard Teisberg saying it was based on the circumference, and I remember thinking at the time that that seemed an odd way to define a stump, and I couldn't imagine foresters thinking that was an economic point at which to cut a tree.
The Forests Act is pretty darn clear that it's the diameter, not the circumference, and the diameter makes a whole lot more sense as a maximum. -
Yes, well aware of that Lilith, I have edited the text to make it clear I was talking about late-stage abortion at that point.
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Not many, certainly, but there’s always the chance there might be some. Maybe some of those women who don’t find out they’re pregnant until very late in the pregnancy, for example (or until they’re giving birth…).
But maybe it’s a different question then. Maybe it’s a question of if a woman chooses to abort, but the foetus survives, how much medical assistance/intervention do we give it? For me that’s the primary difficulty – even if we decide that women have the right to terminate at any stage, how much assistance do we expect others to provide towards that termination.
If [ETA for clarity: late-stage] abortion was simply a matter of taking a pill, and *poof*, the baby disappears, it would be a different proposition. But abortion requires more than one other person to perform, and very late stage abortion could put a heavy emotional burden on those who perform it. I think again of my friend the ex-abortion nurse, and her occasional distress over the 16 week foetuses.
Maybe there would be some equivalent of a Dr & Nurse Nitschke of abortion, but maybe there wouldn’t. The alternative would be expecting the mother to “terminate” the life of the foetus herself after it was born, and I think that would be expecting too much as well. -
Bart, I understand your concern about placing the limit at “viability”, given ongoing medical advances. What about viability without medical intervention? Or possibly without some particular type of intervention – respirator, perhaps? I realise that will include some full-term babies, so we’d be talking averages here.
If a reallly late-term “abortion” were induced, and the baby were born alive and continued to live after birth, I don’t think it would be right to expect any doctor or nurse or other person to end that baby’s life, or even to deny it the basic necessities of life (food) when it’s clearly alive. So there is a point where the rights of the woman/mother start to impact on the rights of others. I don’t think that’s so much thinking that the life of the fetus is more important that the freedom of the mother, as that at some point the life of the fetus, and the rights of others, are as important as the freedom of the mother.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Craig Young,
Certainly conservative Catholics don't believe in contraception, but conservative Catholics are only a subset of people who are anti-abortion.
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I could be wrong, but I think that was the original idea behind Birthright. But yes, I'd tend to think that anti-abortionists would better serve their cause by helping such organisations, and providers of contraceptive advice, so as to reduce demand for abortion.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Emma Hart,
I’ve always assumed that anti-abortion sentiment comes from a place where ignorance, lack of empathy, and a massive sense of entitlement cavort merrily together through the fields.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I know a very good woman, a good Catholic. By good, I mean I think she does all she can to live by all the best bits of the Bible, not to show other people how good she is, but because she believes, modestly and quietly, that it is the right thing to do. She’s by no means virulent about it, but I know she doesn’t like abortion. I am quite sure it’s not out of any desire to punish women for their sexuality, or to make the child suffer or anything like that. She just sees an embryo, or a foetus, as life, and the thought of that life being ended makes her sad.
She is not ignorant, nor lacking in empathy, and certainly shows no signs of any sense of entitlement. I don’t think she would ever judge a woman for having an abortion (see above about best bits, and thus “judge not, lest ye yourself be judged”). You can feel sad about something happening without judging the people who do it.
She has worked, over the years, to advance many rights of women, and that work is not diminished just because of her feelings in this area. In any conversation I’ve had with her about women’s rights, we have agreed wholeheartedly. We have not disagreed about abortion because we haven’t had any conversation about abortion, hopefully because we respect each other too much to have any need to convince the other that she is wrong – that’s certainly how I feel about it anyway. I have gathered her feelings about it through observation, and mostly through what she doesn’t say, rather than what she does.
So while there are plenty of anti-abortionists who fit your description, I wouldn’t like to see all of them described that way.