Punished UMN wrote:The Caleshan Valkyrie wrote:That issue is irrelevant. Fetuses are not children. Physical separation is a critical delineation.
Why, exactly? What is different in terms of sentience between a fetus ten minutes before birth and ten minutes after birth?
Only
1% of abortions are performed after 21 weeks (which is still within the second trimester, and before the foetus can feel any pain, incidentally).
Abortions performed after 30 weeks (when the best research indicates foetuses begin to be sentient) are likely to be
like this tragic case:
Dana Weinstein was 31 weeks into her second pregnancy, preparing to welcome a daughter, when she and her husband were given horrible news: A critical piece of the brain had not developed properly.
"[We were told] that our baby would have seizures 70% of the time — that was a best-case scenario; that when we delivered her, that we'd need to have a resuscitation order in place because she would most likely seize to death," Weinstein said.
[...]
She still tears up when she talks about that diagnosis and the difficult decisions that surrounded it. Fearing a short and painful life for their baby, Weinstein and her husband chose to travel to Boulder, Colo., to end the pregnancy, at one of the few clinics in the country that offer third-trimester abortions.
Women who have reached the third trimester of pregnancy want their baby.
So, asking what is the difference ten minutes before birth and ten minutes after birth really misses the reason why third trimester abortions occur.
The question is: what is the tragedy in that far-less-than-one-percent of cases that means the women cannot go through with their pregnancies?