Medicine adds to debate on late-term abortion
By Diane M. Gianelli, AMNews staff. March 3, 1997.
Abortion rights leader urges end to "half truths"
"WASHINGTON -- Breaking ranks with his colleagues in the abortion rights movement, the leader of one prominent abortion provider group is calling for a more truthful debate in the ongoing battle over whether to ban a controversial late-term abortion procedure.
"In fact, Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, said he would rather not spend his political capital defending the procedure at all…
"The pro-choice movement has lost a lot of credibility during this debate, not just with the general public, but with our pro-choice friends in Congress," Fitzsimmons said. "Even the White House is now questioning the accuracy of some of the information given to it on this issue."
He cited prominent abortion rights supporters such as the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, who took the movement to task for providing inaccurate information on the procedure…
“What abortion rights supporters failed to acknowledge, Fitzsimmons said, is that the vast majority of these abortions are performed in the 20-plus week range on healthy fetuses and healthy mothers. "The abortion rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else," he said.
He knows it, he says, because when the bill to ban it came down the pike, he called around until he found doctors who did them.
"I learned right away that this was being done for the most part in cases that did not involve those extreme circumstances," he said. The National Abortion Federation's Vicki Saporta acknowledged that "the numbers are greater than we initially estimated."…
posted on March 15, 2001 11:33:10 AM
mzalez, please,quit with the propaganda. Not one soul here has said that PBAs should be used in any but the most extreme cases. If that is not being done then that is the part that needs fixing. It is not a reason to ban a procedure that does, at times, have a reasonable purpose. No one here is saying to let women have them on demand I see just the opposite. You are going overboard to prove a pointless point.
posted on March 15, 2001 11:41:26 AM
I found this interesting:
Some legislators have said that all cases of D&X are 'elective', meaning that they are being used as birth control or for non-medical reasons. Not so, says the New York state chapter of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: "In medicine, an elective procedure means a procedure that does not have to be done on an emergency basis. The term does not imply that the procedure is `not medically necessary.' It means it is safe to schedule the procedure when appropriate physicians are available or when the patient is in a stable condition.
The operation can be necessary to save a patient's life and still be classified as elective."
The Planned Parenthood site also indicates that 90% of all abortions are done during the first trimester, and only 1% are done later as D&Xs.
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/abortion/intactd-e/the%20truth/s-6-4.html
Lisa
posted on March 15, 2001 11:41:36 AM
maybe it is time to return the regulation of conception to the 'wise women' of the villages.
Prior to men's dominance in medicine--every village had the 'wise woman' with herbs, remedies and treatments--and many of those for were for the termination of a pregnancy or for contraception--easily obtained for a resaonable fee. Men of religion and men of medicine were threatened by the power these women had and they became 'witches' and banished to the woods with their imagined familiars and demons.
posted on March 15, 2001 11:42:50 AM
Conclusion from JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Assoc.) 1999 American Medical Association. Vol. 280, pp. 744-747, Aug. 26, 1998
Medical professionals have an obligation to thoughtfully consider the medical and ethical issues surrounding pregnancy termination, particularly with respect to intact D&X and late-term abortions. Having done so, we conclude the following: (1) Intact D&X (partial-birth abortion) should not be performed because it is needlessly risky, inhumane, and ethically unacceptable. This procedure is closer to infanticide than it is to abortion. (2) Abortions in the periviable period (currently 23 weeks) and beyond should be considered unethical, unless the fetus has a condition incompatible with prolonged survival or if the mother's life is endangered by the pregnancy. (3) If a maternal medical condition in the periviable period indicates pregnancy termination, the physician should wait, if the medical condition permits, until fetal survival is probable and then proceed with delivery. Such medical decisions must be individualized.
Physicians must preserve their role as healing, compassionate, caring professionals, while recognizing their ethical obligation to care for both the woman and the unborn child. In July 1997, the ACOG Executive Board supplemented its policy on abortion toward this end, stating, "ACOG is opposed to abortion of the healthy fetus that has attained viability in a healthy woman."[36]
We hope that with thoughtful discussions regarding specific issues such as those considered in this article, the opposing forces in the ongoing, stagnant abortion debate will find middle ground on which most can agree. The question is often asked, "But who should decide?" Ultimately, at least in the United States, the public will decide. The results of an August 1997 national poll showed public opinion firmly in the camp of "drawing a line" on abortion rights, with 61% believing that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances, and 22% defending the legality of abortion under any circumstances.[37] Society will not continence infanticide. According to Boston University ethicist and health law professor George Annas, JD, MPH, Americans see "a distinction between first trimester and second trimester abortions. The law doesn't, but people do. And rightfully so."[38] He explained that after approximately 20 weeks, the American public sees a baby. The American public's vision of this may be much clearer than that of some of the physicians involved.
------------------------------
{{Me desperate? Seems that some of you are desperate, because the truth is that there is no need for PBA.
...Speaking up for those who can't speak for themselves...}}
posted on March 15, 2001 11:46:45 AM
I don't see desperation on this end. Only from the one who insists by shoving in faces and ignoring opposing views.
posted on March 15, 2001 11:48:20 AM
mzalez, What is your opinion? Not the opinion of others. Not this rhetoric of the extreme right that you keep putting out here. Do you have an opinion? Based on what? Personal experience?
I am sorry that you are "wringing your hands and crying" over something you may have done in the past. If you choose to wallow in it-wallow. Please do not try to drag all of womankind into your personal mud.
edited to add smiley
[ edited by rawbunzel on Mar 15, 2001 11:50 AM ]
posted on March 15, 2001 11:48:35 AM
ah---but there was only one wise woman per village---you'll have to pick one of us to be banished....though men don't have the power they use to, so I don't think you'll be able to budge her.
posted on March 15, 2001 11:54:07 AM
The banished one usually had it pretty good. The best chickens dropped off at her door, gifts of fruit in baskets left on the door stoop, coins and jewels to pay for the "remedies" from the rich landowners wife/daughters.
Finally a reference! What took you so long? Was it the fact that your reference actually presents a rather complete argument for the continuation of abortion in first trimester?
posted on March 15, 2001 11:56:28 AM
Zazzie, remember that I said "my woods". Since I'd be where the wise woman would be, I think that I'd prefer the banned one to be one which the men of the village COULD budge.
posted on March 15, 2001 11:57:46 AM
"The claim is sometimes made—and it was made by President Clinton in his veto of legislation to prohibit this form of abortion—that this procedure is necessary at times to protect the life and health of the mother or to preserve her-fertility. But, as the "Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth" (PHACT), a group of more than 300 medical specialists organized to counter the misinformation provided by the abortion industry 'of the United States, pointed out: "Partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect the health of a woman or to protect her future fertility; in fact, the procedure can pose grave dangers to the woman"."
It includes this paragraph:
According to the most recent data collected by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), of the estimated 1.5 million abortions each year, 90 percent take place within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, or within the first trimester; and 99% within 20 weeks. No national data are available on abortions past 20 weeks, when the intact D&E procedure can be used. AGI has estimated, based on limited data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, that approximately 320-600 abortions in total are performed after the 26th week, when the third trimester of pregnancy begins.
Look at the numbers.
- 1,500,000 abortions each year
- 1,350,000 taking place within first trimester = 150,000 taking place in 2nd trimester or later
- 99% taking place within 20 weeks = 15,000 taking place after 20 weeks, or 5 months.
The page says "Ninety-nine percent of abortions are performed by the time pregnancy advances to 20 weeks, the mid-point of the second trimester and prior to fetal viability." This would suggest that terminations performed after 20 weeks are done on fetuses that could survive outside the womb, all things being equal.
This is from Planned Parenthood, which opposes the ban.
posted on March 15, 2001 12:03:15 PM
Sorry that you feel as if you are being attacked. I just simply stated my opinion.
Besides opening a thread on a hot issue as PBA or abortion what do you expect? If you feel posters are addressing you -an individual- rather than the issue than I suggest you report it.
Again sorry that you feel that way I thought we were discussing the issue but then again that is only my opinion.
posted on March 15, 2001 12:09:14 PM"Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth" (PHACT), a group of more than 300 medical specialists organized to counter the misinformation provided by the abortion industry 'of the United States
Those who seek a certain "truth" usually come up with a way to find it. Only impartial and unbiased studies can be said to have any real degree of accuracy.
posted on March 15, 2001 12:09:28 PM
"...in his classic novel `Crime and Punishment,' Dostoyevsky has his murderous protagonist Raskolnikov complain that `Man can get used to anything, the beast!'...
"It is not just the babies that are dying for the lethal sin of being unwanted or being handicapped or malformed. We are dying, and not from the darkness, but from the cold, the coldness of self- brutalization that chills our sensibilities, deadens our conscience and allows us to think of this unspeakable act as an act of compassion.
"...What kind of people have we become that this procedure is even a matter for debate? Can we not draw the line at torture, and baby torture at that? If we cannot, what has become of us? We are all incensed about ethnic cleansing. What about infant cleansing? There is no argument here about when human life begins. The child who is destroyed is unmistakably alive, unmistakably human and unmistakably brutally destroyed.
The justification for abortion has always been the claim that a women can do with her own body what she will. If you still believe that this four-fifths delivered little baby is a part of the woman's body, then I am afraid your ignorance is invincible.
I finally figured out why supporters of abortion on demand fight this infanticide ban tooth and claw, because for the first time since Roe v. Wade the focus is on the baby, not the mother, not the woman but the baby, and the harm that abortion inflicts on an unborn child, or in this instance a four-fifths born child. That child whom the advocates of abortion on demand have done everything in their power to make us ignore, to dehumanize, is as much a bearer of human rights as any Member of this House. To deny those rights is more than the betrayal of a powerless individual. It betrays the central promise of America, that there is, in this land, justice for all.
"The supporters of abortion on demand have exercised an amazing capacity for self-deception by detaching themselves from any sympathy whatsoever for the unborn child, and in doing so they separate themselves from the instinct for justice that gave birth to this country...
Taken from "Henry Hyde's Plea to Override the President's Veto of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban--from the Congressional Record,
September 19, 1996":
http://law.gonzaga.edu/people/dewolf/hyde.htm
The continuation of partial-birth abortion as a legal act in America should be a serious wake-up call to all citizens. If we cannot reject this as wrong, what will we reject? If this does not disturb us, is there anything that will?
posted on March 15, 2001 12:13:55 PM
Henry Hyde, mzalez? Henry Hyde?? Can you do no better than that pompus old hypocritical so-called family values windbag? Let's not get into HIS qualifications to speakon moral and ethical issues, shall we?
posted on March 15, 2001 12:14:04 PM
Well, I can't believe this issue is still being discussed.....!
We can all show documentation to "proove" our sides, but doesn't it just boil down to each person having the right to their own opinion based on what they feel is right for them?
That's why organized religion doesn't work. Every person on this planet is an individual with feelings and opinions that are theirs alone. When we try to group our opinions together to form one big opinion, it never works. Every single case should be treated on it's own merits.
In reading more of everyone's post, the one thing that I must say, is that at least you are trying to solve the problem at hand mzalez by adopting an unwanted child with handicaps. I think you should be applauded for that!
posted on March 15, 2001 12:16:43 PM
Kraftdinner? Where did mzalez say she was adopting a child with handicaps? Actually, when asked about that she gives no answer.
posted on March 15, 2001 12:19:01 PM
Thank you, Terry.
--------------------------------------
The Holy See Statement on the Partial Birth Abortion
VATICAN CITY, April 19, 1996 (VIS) -The following is the declaration made this afternoon by Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Holy See Press Office director, on the decision by the president of the United States with regard to "partial birth abortion":
"The Holy See fully supports the position taken by the cardinals of the United States and by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. This position obviously is shared by many other persons, including non-Catholics.
"As has already been stated by the American cardinals, this presidential decision is 'more akin to infanticide than to abortion' and thus it is not surprising that 65 percent of those who call themselves 'pro choice' are opposed to 'partial birth abortion'.
"This presidential decision, in contradiction to the position of the American congress is a 'shameful veto' which in practice amounts to an incredibly brutal act of aggression against innocent human life and the inalienable human rights of the unborn.
"The fact that this presidential decision legalizes this inhuman procedure, morally and ethically imperils the future of a society which condones it.
"Naturally, this situation makes ever more urgent a greater solidarity of everyone in defense of life of the unborn, who cannot speak for themselves."
