that you still didn't really lay out any qualities that you would use to guide this decision. yes, you gave some examples of some very silly reasons some women gave for wanting abortions, but this just makes me say... women should not have to tell you why they are getting an abortion.

why should they? we don't discuss any other medical procedure like this. a patient coming in for a kidney transplant doesn't have to give a rationale for why his kidney needs to be replaced. if you can afford plastic surgery, there are damn few surgeons who will hassle you about why you've chosen to reject your nose. there is an expectation that people are entitled to sovereignty over their bodies... unless they are pregnant women.

and that attitude is risky. i'm sure you're aware of the examples of women forced to have c-sections against their will: to save their babies. these are women who didn't want to abort, but just wanted to have their children without surgery.

and tellingly, when the court took on this question (can a person be compelled to submit to surgery to save someone else?)... the answer was "NO". this was a man who had a cousin who needed a bone marrow transplant. the court ruled that he had the right to refuse, even though it meant someone's death.

why are pregnant women different?

Has anyone actually read this? It has provisions for exactly what the article is talking about. The majority decision says

""We acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy; of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians. ... The right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."

Are we just using this as a political tool, it is settled law.

It saddens me that so many people are willing to call it "immoral" without even trying to understand it.

Especially those who supposedly read Salon, but obviously missed this:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/06/01/late_term_abortion/index.html

This article rings true for almost everyone who identifies him/herself as pro-choice. Many of us are not at all comfortable with the idea of allowing abortion "at any time, for any reason". The ethics of abortion are complicated, and we all need to realize that most people fall somewhere on a pro-life - pro-choice contiuum. Not so many people believe that abortion is always bad, all the time. Many in the pro-life camp agree that there are certain cases (i.e. woman's life is in danger, woman was raped, etc) in which abortion is acceptable, the lesser of two evils. Likewise, there are plenty of us in the pro-choice camp who believe that 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions should occur only if something has gone badly wrong with the pregnancy. And defining "badly wrong" is a challenge in and of itself.

I appreciate the author addressing the fact that this issue is far more complex than most political pundits make it out to be.

While I think 5656....'s view of that happening is over-concerned, there are more immediate concerns that women might be legally sanctioned for behavior that might injure a fetus. Back when the crack epidemic seemed the major concern, there were proposals (and perhaps instances) of jailing mothers who wouldn't stop using. There was some headline yesterday about dealing with wine drinking among pregnant women. And the insufferably preachy Law & Order SVU, preached about the horrors of an evil alcoholic mother a couple of years ago, at various times trying to jail her, etc.

There is a legitimate fear that emphasis on fetal rights, combined with a society that wants children packed in bubble wrap (see various articles on parenting in Salon)might give expectant mothers even less personal control over how they live their lives.

Hinging false justification for the pro-abortion agenda to this genetic deformity is certainly stretching it since the numbers are minute. Of the 9.2 births, I would guess that more than have of the parents choose life -- giving birth to these babies regardless.

Certainly many parents do choose to complete a pregnancy even though the fetus has Down Syndrome, and that is their absolute right. It's my understanding that the decision hinges in large part on whether the diagnostic tests show that the baby will need a number of surgeries for heart deformities or installation of a esophagus. And you're absolutely correct that the numbers are low - which is why late-term abortions are also low. You are incorrect on the percentage who choose life, however.

Termination rates varied across conditions. They were highest following a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome (92 per cent; CI: 91 per cent to 93 per cent) and lowest following diagnosis of Klinefelter syndrome (58 per cent; CI: 50 per cent to 66 per cent). Where comparisons could be made, termination rates were similar in the 1990s to those reported in the 1980s.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10521836?dopt=AbstractPlus

I am not 'pro-abortion'. I would never advocate that parents who receive a Down Syndrome diagnosis be REQUIRED to have an abortion. I am instead ProChoice, and trust parents to make the best decisions for themselves.

They must let Carrisima out of the mental ward once in a while to post here.

It's no surprise that Carrisima can't use logic or say anything remotely sane or comprehensible--given she's psychotic. So instead what we get are the ravings of a lunatic, demented rants, babble. Like, "Abortion is the ultimate HOLOCAUST" --crackbrained hyperbole if ever there was any. (You could almost see her head spinning like Linda Blair's in "The Exorcist" when she spouts forth vile abuse like that).

Oh yeah, the surgical removal of a non-feeling fertilized ovum is the same as the systematic extermination of fully developed, live, feeling Jews, by Hitler! (Wow, you really don't have any scruples, do you, Carissima?)

Somehow I don't think the Elie Wiesel foundation or the US holocaust memorial council would be pleased to find Carrisima manipulating their harrowing past and tragic history for her own dubious ends; you really do have to be a cynical shit to abuse the Jewish Holocaust like this just so you can score points off it.

There's obviously no correlation between Nazis and pro-choicers but falsely implying there is enables Carrisima to smear the latter and elevate her own silly position. It's a device used by the unscrupulous to paint those they oppose as black, and themselves for opposing it, as heroic. Because the evidence shows explicitly that the embryo is not a person, the only way that those who oppose abortion can maintain that it is, is by clinging irrationally to this view in spite of the evidence. Hence pro-lifers will just ignore the facts or try to make the facts fit their theories. Persisting that what they believe is true, despite evidence to the contrary, they produce spurious arguments and put forward theories of their own which they find more attractive to persuade others that they're right. Hence Carissima, with all the honesty of a car salesman, uses the deceptive ploy of claiming that "giving birth can prevent certain cancers in women" to push her anti-abortion barrow. Notice she prefaces this falsity by saying 'it's been proven' to make the lie convincing; it definitely has not been proven but has in fact been discredited by a number of medical and scientific journals. Similarly, she misleads by citing the third Reich--which is obviously just a weapon she uses to shoot down anyone who is pro-abortion whenever they say anything that doesn't accord with their beliefs. The belief that not giving birth causes cancer is really no different from Africans believing that ill fortune is caused by witches. Both derive their belief from superstition--as Carissisma demonstrates every time she cites 'the Lord' and fulminates in his name. After all, how different is her slandering and false portrayal of pro-choice advocates as "terminators" or Nazis from that of Nigerians madly denouncing children as witches.

As stigmatizing children as 'wicked', or identifying them as witches, gives Nigerians permission to kill them with machetes, so referring to doctors who perform abortions and pro-choice advocates as 'murderers gives Carissima and her like permission to think of such people as being less than human, which is just a step away from thinking it is okay to harass, stalk and even kill such people.

What such ploys are really meant to do of course is get Carissima and her ilk off the hook of having to come up with a complex justification for believing as they do that 'life begins at conception' or that zygotes are the same as born infants, which is, when examined closely, a ridiculous thing for anyone to claim. The more they can avoid having to provide a coherent explanation, other than ensoulement, for not ending a pregnancy before the fetus is viable, the more they can mystify the process between conception and birth and thus polarise opinion. Emotive language is also employed by them, rather than reason, to manipulate people's sympathies and get them to agree with them (for instance, 'unborn baby' is slyly used to confuse people so that they begin to think that what is being sucked from the womb is not a few undifferentiated cells but an actual bouncing baby so naturally they begin to feel conflicted).

It's probably a waste of time explaining to this moonbat that the third Reich was anti-abortion, rather like herself, which if we were to use her logic against her, would mean that she was one too (so the Nazi turns out to be Carissima after all so who's surprised), since that's what she implies when she lumps all pro-choicers with Margaret Sanger because she's pro-abortion: that they're racist like her (well, actually, she was pro-birth control but then Carissima isn't interested in facts or truth, since distortion works so much better for her religious ideology).

As for me, I think that abortion becomes immoral the latter it happens, when the fetus has developed consciousness and is aware or alert and closer to having developed the capacity for separate life. So it would seem that aborting a 9 month fetus is very different from aborting a fertilized ovum or a fetus at six weeks. Similarly we don't kill dogs but kill ants because the former is considered to be a sentient, intelligent creature with sensibilities while the latter is considered to not be, which doesn't mean we should get our jollies drowning them (don't worry Carissima will try to twist this around to mean that I think saving seals is more important than human life, the usual nonsense loons like this try to use against you to win themselves a point because they can't reason). So we abort a clump of cells but not a viable fetus because the former is insentient, has no cerebral cortex, and thus no capacity to think or feel while the latter can. (that already happens outside of America since legal abortions usually occur before 20 weeks). That distinction matters.