When abortion bans misfire
I've recently written some things about human reproduction which probably turn some people's brains sideways.
I'm about to do it again.
I am categorically opposed to banning abortion. I don't care why the female person in question wants an abortion. I don't even care if it is a sex-selective abortion; I'm not willing to violate women's bodily autonomy just so a few million more girls will be born. (Are four billion female people worldwide not enough female people for you? Why ever not?) "I don't want to be pregnant" is a good enough reason for me and I will not debate it. The only times I want to see abortion limited are (1) when someone besides the pregnant girl or woman wants the pregnancy terminated, unless it's to save her life or health and she's not capable of consent (think "twelve-year-old child raped by her stepfather" or "comatose woman in nursing home") and (2) when the pregnancy is far enough along that an abortion would be more dangerous than carrying to term would be. And that's pretty late in the pregnancy. If you don't know anything about pregnancy, and most of you don't know nearly enough, you should be aware that it is much easier on a woman's body to abort the pregnancy early rather than late. Women don't get late-term abortions on a whim unless they are crazy, and if they're that crazy I would argue they probably wouldn't make safe mothers either. But when it gets more dangerous to abort than to labor, that's when I would limit it. No other time.
One thing about abortion bans that really chaps my ass is all the news stories I keep hearing about pregnant women in abortion-ban jurisdictions who wanted the pregnancy, wanted the baby, and then something went wrong. That's bad enough, but when she turns up with a dead fetus in her uterus and can't expel it, what do these fools do? Force her to wait until she starts actually dying to do anything about it.
A woman with a dead fetus in her uterus is a medical emergency. Even if she still feels okay: she won't forever. Even if sepsis (a really nasty bacterial infection in your body that shuts down your organs and kills you) hasn't begun yet: it will, and quite soon. It's an emergency. It is very easy to tell that the fetus is dead, too. We have several ways to check, some quite noninvasive and low-tech. Fucking do something about it.
From what I can tell, the reason they don't do anything about it is that the law is not clear on what pregnancy is. I've heard enough anti-abortion dumbasses opinionating about this issue to understand that they think pregnancy is just a matter of location. A pregnant woman is just a woman with a "baby" in her uterus, and that's all. No consideration is given to what's actually going on with that "baby" in the uterus nor to the biological relationship involved. And this is reflected in our laws, even when abortion is legal.
If we had actually scientifically literate people writing our laws, we would never see these crisis situations with a woman carrying around a dead fetus and dying from it.
Know why?
Because she's not actually pregnant.
Pregnancy is not merely having a "baby" in your uterus. Pregnancy is a whole process of literally being a life-support system for a developing embryo or fetus who is not mature enough yet for life outside the womb.
If the embryo or fetus is not actually alive? That means you are no longer their life-support system. There is no longer a life to support. Which means you are not pregnant.
Think about how we diagnose pregnancy. We test for the presence of a hormone called HCG. If you tested a woman carrying a dead fetus for HCG, her production of that hormone would be declining or nonexistent. Why? Because she's not pregnant. Because the fetus is dead.
So guess what.
No pregnancy? No abortion. You can't stop what isn't happening.
No abortion? No law broken. Get that poor dead fetus OUT of her.
Another thing you all need to understand, and not enough of you do, is that abortion doesn't mean "being a horrible devil-worshiping asshole killing babies in the womb." The word abort means "to stop," in this case stopping the process of pregnancy. It's true that it results in the death of the embryo or fetus, but that's mainly because most abortions occur before viability. It's not like we've perfected the art of pregnancy transplantation or anything. (And I hope we never do, but that's another essay.)
ANY ending of the pregnancy process is an abortion. Doesn't matter how it ended. When abortion spontaneously happens, the medical terms for it are spontaneous abortion and miscarriage. When we are not aware of the spontaneous abortion until labor, we call it a stillbirth. The kinds of abortions we usually refer to as abortions are induced abortions. We know they're happening because we make them happen on purpose.
The woman presenting with a dead fetus in her uterus has experienced what doctors call an incomplete abortion because something happened to end the life support process, but she has not expelled the fetus yet. It's kind of a misnomer because the abortion has happened. Done deal. Can't revive the fetus. What the doctor has to do for the patient at that point isn't "complete the abortion" but clean out her uterus. The alternative is her death from sepsis. She does not get a third option.
I could better believe that anti-abortionists cared about "LiFe" if they took this into account when writing abortion bans to pass into law. They never do. They want us producing babies or they want us dead. We do not get a third option there either.
I don't have any easy answers on this because I've been personally acquainted with people who are against abortion and they have no fucking idea what's going on. I can tell by the way they talk about it. All they know is they Have Feelings on the subject and I'm supposed to respect those Feelings because I'm a Progressive (no I'm not) who is supposed to Tolerate All Differences. So we're at an impasse.
And this is why Americans can't have nice things.
Especially not American women.