- Terrible and cowardly. I expect doctors to know all the rules and regulations regarding their profession, just like I’m expected to know mine (or really any other profession). If there is confusion and you know these laws are coming, then hospital lawyers should be contacted to clear any of that up. In what other aspect of life do we allow this excuse to fly? Ignorance and fear of a law is not an excuse and certainly not a good reason to end a human life.
- The language needs to be changed. I suspect the whole reason these things are classified as abortion is to muddle the waters intentionally. Most laws specifically make these exceptions and I’m willing to bet they are even in the old Mass Law. Either way, we need to stop defining these things as abortions.
- I don’t even understand this argument. I would say it’s letting feelings dictate the law, but I know it’s a little more complicated than that. Either way, you have to argue that killing a baby based on a mental state is in the best interest of all parties. It’s certainly not for the baby, and most people don’t handle death well.
- This might be the closest one to a good argument. I’m against it for the same reasons I’m against euthanasia or killing a comatose patient, but I’ve also performed a funeral for a 45-day-old baby who was classified under these circumstances. I will let someone more rational argue here.
- Sounds like a good reason just to kill all Down syndrome babies, right?
- Another argument I don’t understand. Even under the old law, you still had 24 weeks to figure it out (not that it wasn’t a good excuse). Why is the government concerned with this at all? Also, why does not being able to travel permit you to kill your viable baby?
- This one kind of negates number 1. If it’s between the doctor and the mother, then it’s really the mother pulling the strings.
- Eight is just the abortion debate at large. If you determine a fetus is just a stage of human development (which is it) why is it okay to kill it at this stage and not any other stage?
- If part of the government’s job is to protect innocent life, then it has no greater obligation to protect unborn babies. In this way, the government should be involved.
- I suspect this is really why this law is here.
- I have seen this argument come up many times. This only makes sense if you define stillbirth or miscarriage as an abortion, but not if we are talking about a viable baby. I have seen no good argument for delivering a premature baby over killing it. The process for delivering is even less intrusive and easier. No state mandates that you have to keep the baby.
In summary, or TLDR, there are no good arguments. Only people are so obsessed with sacrificing their children at the altar of Moloch. I’m mostly done with it and them. Our society can’t survive with this mindset.
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Ethics Alarms 
through my decades of medical practice, miscarraiges that neccesitteed surgical intervention (i.E A D& C) were classified as sponatanoeus abortions,a correct medical term. What this law, and the current mindset, is unethuically advocating is elective abortions for a myraid of reasons or no reaon except inconvenience at the moment.
The medical community (the AMA) develops and charges (a lot) for the insurance codes for procedures. The AMA has decided that a D&C is the same as an abortion for insurance coding. This is why the ‘there are no hospitals in area x or states y that perform abortions’ argument is mostly garbage. In the paperwork, you can’t tell a D&C from an abortion. In states or areas that restrict abortion, hospitals can just use the code an no one can tell that an abortion was performed.
Now the opposite can also be true. After my wife’s miscarriage, her insurance paperwork from Blue Cross informed her that she had had an abortion! My wife took the miscarriage very hard and this paperwork was devastating. Blue Cross informed us that they had recently decided to describe all procedures with that code as abortions.
Now, the next time she conceived, they pushed us to abort the baby because of bad test results. We refused and it turned out that the bad test results were because of bad tests. For 6 months, they had been urging women to abort perfectly healthy babies. For some of those women, statistically, it would be their last chance at motherhood. We only found out about 6 months after our son was born because she was telling a woman who worked in the lab about it and she went white when my wife said the OB/GYN urged an abortion.
I repeat … ghouls.
I have made this exact point about the dividing line being arbitrary, especially when referring to things like the number of weeks involved. We came to very different conclusions though… I’m not convinced that birth isn’t equally arbitrary. What’s the distinction? Sure, the kid is now outside their mother, but there’s been no material biological change. In the case of a healthy birth, they could have been induced two weeks earlier and they almost certainly have been born two weeks earlier without complications, and so would have had rights two weeks earlier? People’s rights tend to not depend on the actions of third parties. Conception seems like a much more obvious dividing line… The moment where the gametes zipper together the first line of genetic code, where something that didn’t exist the moment before does now, in a measurable way.
All that aside – I think “arbitrary” gets a bad rap. Sure. Something is arbitrary. Now what? A lot of what we deem arbitrary is still necessary. Speed limits are arbitrary. School zones are arbitrary. The age of majority is arbitrary. And so what do we do? We try to negotiate an arbitrary position that has some level of justification, because if we don’t people will reject the rules.
I agree and there are cases where premature babies have lived and thrived outside the womb way earlier than term. A quick search said one baby born at 21 weeks survived. Astounding. Soon we will have artificial wombs, if they don’t exist already, and that opens an entirely new set of ethical issues of we are clearly not ready for.