From: cookc@aix.rpi.edu (rocker)
Subject: Re: "Snapple" Anti-Choice?
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 19:16:42 GMT

bskendig@netcom.com (Brian Kendig) writes:

>Muriel, you have some good points, but this leaves me in a quandary.

            [...]

>But I don't want to allow a woman to say, "Oh gee, seven months
>pregnant... you know, I really don't feel like having a baby at all."
>with no better reason than this.  This just wouldn't be fair to the
>person within her; she should have made up her mind before the fetus
>had a mind.  ;)

Brian, you're getting very, very close to understanding us here.
Now, just a couple more points.

1.  Do you have any evidence that this has ever actually happened,
    anywhere?

This possibility is beaten to death on this group, with some people
even claiming that a woman would have no problem getting an abortion
for this under current law.  (Hint: She'd have to find an equally
capricious doctor first.)

I discussed this with Ms. Bartley.  She used the analogy that, say,
it was not illegal to kill your child on the child's seventh
birthday.  She said she would be uncomfortable with that being
legal.  My response was, ok, say that it's been legal to do that
for the last 20 years.  Say that we have absolutely no evidence
that large numbers of children are being killed at 7.  Actually,
we have no evidence at all that any child had been killed at 7 just 
because it was legal.  Now, I'm fine with it being legal, but
not done.  She wasn't.  She seemed to want a law against it "just
in case".

In case of WHAT, I say!  IF it becomes a problem, then we make it
illegal and deal with it.  But I'm uncomfortable with passing lots
of laws just because they sound good or make us feel better.  I
want to know that the law is dealing with a real situation.

There was a story posted here about a woman who had an abortion.
She suffered from a severe mental illness, but functioned pretty
normally in society by taking medication to keep it under control.
The medication was teragenic.  She faced three options - going
off the medication and being deeply psychotic by the time the
child was born, continuing the medication and most likely having
a deformed fetus, or having an abortion while continuing the
medication and hoping that some day her condition would improve
to the point where she could go off the medication and have a
normal pregnancy.

Would you want to expose this woman to a criminal investigation
to prove that she didn't have an abortion for any of the 
"unapproved" reasons?  (Assuming that, for some reason, she had
the abortion at seven months)

Or, to look at this from a more crass point of view - any woman
that decides to have a 7-month abortion "on a whim" clearly has
some responsibility problems.  If we make this abortion illegal,
we will soon be presenting this horrible, irresponsible woman
with a NEWBORN BABY to care for.  Perhaps this same woman (now
resentful) decides that the baby is "too much trouble" to take
with her when she goes to the beach all day, so she leaves it
at home alone.  In your opinion, is this a better alternative?

>So what's the solution?  Is there some way to construct a law that
>would prohibit third-trimester abortions without a "good reason"?

IMO, even if you manage to construct a law that meets your approval,
you can't enforce it without subjecting many women who are already
emotionally distressed and possibly physically ill to intrusive
and insensitive scrutiny.

There's the first rule of good engineering:  If it ain't broke,
don't fix it.

>     << Brian >>

                        -rocker
Newsgroups: talk.abortion