Wednesday, January 30, 2019

I Have to Agree

Cartoonist Tom Stiglich makes a comment on New York's new law making abortion fully legal up until the moment a mother would give birth at a full term.  The law also removed requirements that a doctor perform the procedure opening the possibility it could be done by midwife or anyone convenient.   


With all the cheerleading and enthusiasm in the coverage it's hard to get a succinct summary of what's in it.  The cheering is because New York's law used to end abortions at 24 weeks, and some news organizations just don't understand why anyone thinks this bill is anything but good.  The thing is, 24 weeks is more like the actual Roe vs Wade decision, which legalized abortion in the first trimester.  In general, the US is so far past Roe that we can't see it in the rear view mirror.  (We're also past what most other "enlightened" countries allow)   This summary from WQAD here:
Not only will the law preserve access to abortions, it also removes abortion from the state’s criminal code. This would protect doctors or medical professionals who perform abortions from criminal prosecution. The law also now allows medical professionals who are not doctors to perform abortions in New York.

“The old law had criminal penalties. It was written that the doctor or professional could be held criminally liable,” Cuomo said during an interview on WNYC Wednesday.

The law also addresses late-term abortions. Under New York’s Reproductive Health Act, they can be performed after 24 weeks if the fetus is not viable or when necessary to protect the life of the mother.
That OB/GYN in the first news article linked  above is not the first OB/GYN I've read who says there is no such thing as an abortion required in the final trimester to save the life of the mother.  Modern medicine is way past that.  The day after that law was passed, several commentators said that if a baby should survive an attempt at an abortion, rescue or resuscitation was not required.  The law allowed someone to simply kill the child.  .

Faced with this expansion of abortion up to the end of pregnancy (which will only be if the mother's health is endangered - including her mental attitude?) Virginia is apparently saying "hold ma beer" and working on a bill that goes farther.

From the Legal Insurrection Blog:
On Monday, Virginia Democratic Delegate Kathy Tran introduced the “The Repeal Act“, an extreme legislative proposal that would significantly loosen Virginia’s abortion restrictions, particularly in the third trimester:
Tran’s legislation would have loosened rules on the legality of third-term abortion, which is currently only allowed if three doctors conclude a woman’s life or health is at a severe risk. Tran’s bill would have significantly lowered those standards, allowing third-trimester abortion on the advice of one doctor who could allow an abortion by certifying a pregnancy would “impair the mental or physical health of the woman.”
The bill would also loosen second-trimester abortion safeguards by doing away with the requirement that a state-licensed hospital performs them.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) is a big supporter, and most of the news I've heard today involve this rather shocking quote:
“If a mother is in labor…the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother" pic.twitter.com/cc15pVLjIQ
It's not exactly a long stretch to read that as,  "If a mother is in labor…the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable.  Then if the mother and physician decide to terminate the process, the infant will be euthanized".  Perhaps they'd say "the infant will receive a post-natal abortion." 

Legal Insurrection points out that Tran’s proposal is part of a nationwide push.  Democrats seem to be terrified that the Supreme Court may be turning away from them, and their highest priority seems to be to ensure abortions are still available.  Elected Democrats in several states including Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Mexico are pushing to make “the right” to get a late-term abortion much easier.  Of course, we've already seen New York is involved, too.

I've recently heard that since Roe, the US alone has had 60 million abortions.  Five dozen million children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, cousins and others who never had a chance at their "right to life".  What a different place this country would be with them.  Remember when the rallying cry used to be "safe, legal and rare"?  That cry apparently went out the window years ago. 

As Mark Steyn once put it, "If abortion were the respectable medical procedure its proponents insist it is, there would be no such thing as "Planned Parenthood", anymore than there is a Planned Hernia megacorp."  The fact there is a PP says there's something else going on. 


15 comments:

  1. What is absolutely obscene isthe fact that New York had a law - as some other states are actually making the law for their people - that required giving medical care to any baby born viable, even from a failed abortion. Cuomo signed a _repeal_ of the New York law, which means even if a baby is actually delivered - healthy and whole - during or after an abortion attempt, it can be killed. The new law states there is no requirement to give any medical care or to make any attempt to sustain an otherwise living, breathing, viable baby.

    I don't care _where_ a person stands on the subject of abortions - THAT is murder, plain and simple.

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    1. Now picture what would happen if a dog had a litter of pups, and the owner gathered them all up and killed them.

      Owner is probably going to jail and have their life ruined.

      But if Mom has a healthy and whole child but decides it's just a bundle of not as joyous as she wanted and says to abort it, nobody says a word. Nothing happens.

      Delete
  2. there is no such thing as an abortion required in the final trimester to save the life of the mother

    I don't know anything about medicine. But it sounds like you've legislatively decided pi equals 3 and therefore common problems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclampsia don't exist. Making a baby is a complicated process, and stuff goes lethally wrong at each and every itty-bitty tiny little step. Mother's Launch Escape System is less than comprehensive. Have you visited a NICU?

    Game theory considerations tell me the child must be the chattel slavery property of the mother, from conception until the offspring has set up a separate, economically-independent household. Otherwise the mother is the property, the slave, of whatever thing you have constructed to forcibly override her judgment.

    The embryo/fetus/baby/child is a pawn, because it isn't sufficiently mature to have the military capability to successfully defend against the mother. Until it does by running away and successfully begging for help in its own voice from strangers. Children gain property rights in themselves by homesteading, by open and notorious possession of themselves.

    Do I like this? No. I suspect my emotional reaction is similar to yours. We can hold each other and together we can scream and cry. But my rational reaction is that constructing a government has an objectively worse overall track record. Governments murdered 260 million in the 20th century. This was a better outcome than ... what, exactly? Hobbes' _Leviathan_ is supported by exactly zero experimental evidence.

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    1. Excellent attempt at a reductio ad absurdum, but a glorious smoking-hole-in-the-ground failure, nonetheless.

      Childhood is childhood. It imputes rights to the baby, and lays responsibilities onto the parent(s) and the state, which do not constitute chattel slavery, nor have since the dawn of recorded history (at least, amongst civilizations that do not practice child sacrifice, which subset no longer includes NY and VA society).

      And Hobbes' Leviathan is supported by the hundreds of thousands of years before history was recorded, which is why it's unrecorded.

      Ignorance of that historical reality is no excuse, and you don't get to claim agnosticism of the facts as a rationale for pretending they don't exist, Baby Duck.

      No points for posing the obvious reality so fucktardedly.

      Supporting abortion on children up to the 100th trimester used to be a joke punchline, not societal SOP.

      Clearly, that was B.C.: Before Cuomo.

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    2. And BTW, a baby in the third trimester is viable outside the womb.
      That's what NICUs are for.
      So you don't abort it, you deliver it.
      Try using your not-knowing-anything-about-medicine Google-fu and look up ceserean", and perhaps even the etymology of that word.

      Delete
  3. tfat seems to be implying, if we count all the persons who are libertarians except for that one issue they find emotionally indigestible and "requires" forcible control of others, we get 300 million. That is, actually, how we got here. Government is the union of all the controlling impulses. A bans abortions, B bans drugs, C bans profit. Each is accurately reporting an emotion which cannot tolerate some thing.

    Libertarian is correctly defined as choosing to support no forcible control, even for that one issue which makes me vomit.

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    1. In what way are these abortion laws not laws? Not "forcible control of others"? Try violating them.

      Murder is one of those crimes that's pretty much recognized by any civilization ever seen. The only exceptions to that are built around making it acceptable to kill certain undesirables or "others", such as the way Islam allows murder of non-Muslims.

      One of the tricks in allowing abortion is to define the baby as "non-human" so that abortion isn't murder. Hence the debates over when life begins and the "it's just a clump of cells" argument.

      A helpful concept is "alternation of generations", which anybody who took college biology (maybe even high school biology) knows about. Bottom line: sperm and eggs may be considered to not be human life because they're not a complete genome, so biology says that as soon as fertilization takes place, that's a person - a human life. To define it arbitrarily at 13 weeks or 20 or whatever your favorite number is to say the start of life depends on our technology and on the luck of circumstances.

      I've known a woman who was born so small that her incubator was a shoe box kept in a dresser drawer, but that was the best technology they had. She turned into a fine, fully functional adult.

      Delete
  4. The NY and VA laws are legislated infanticide, and nothing less.
    They strip all human rights from born babies.

    Bad and unconstitutional (but if you can find the word "trimester" anywhere in the constitution or BoR, I'll recant, and give you $1) as Roe v. Wade is, 'tis but a fond memory of saner times now.

    Next stop: Forget what's happened to date, because it's church picnics compared to what's coming; Planned Parenthood clinics, and their staff members in toto, will shortly be treated as terrorist base camps, in 3,2,...

    And I'm here to tell you, you don't have enough cops or courts anywhere for that war.

    Dred Scot decided negroes weren't actual human beings.
    Roe expanded that to fetuses to a certain age.
    Cuomo has now defined that certain age to be after the beginning of life after birth.

    This is madness, and the history of similar forays into such insanity has already been written in blood by previous generations.

    We are now legalizing killing actual born babies.

    Next stop: the bat-crap insane.
    Then the handicapped and the depressed.
    Then the infirm and elderly.

    This is NY and VA going out to the slippery slope to genocide, and power-washing the slope with 500 tons of lard.

    And you've turned hospital Labor & Delivery wards and abortion clinics into the battlefields in the inevitable actual war this will incite.

    This should be great theater: the Morlochs vs. Eloi.

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  5. The Virginia proposal was for abortion through the 40th week.
    Yes, you did the math correctly. So did the vile Democrat who proposed this disgusting law.

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    1. It used to be a joke that the answer to "when does human life begin?" is "when they get their Medical Doctor degree".

      It's getting closer to the reality.

      Delete
  6. In case you are interested, here is the actual text of the bill. Everybody should read it - it's only 240 lines long.
    https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/s240
    The actual legal change is to add "health" of the mother to "life of the mother" as a justification for abortion in the 3rd trimester. Note that, like in other states, "health" is undefined; I believe this is purposeful so that it can include whatever is needed as a justification.
    FYI, in NY home birth is a felony and midwives are technically illegal, though like many laws in liberal states there is uneven enforcement.
    My understanding is that expanding who can do an abortion was intended to allow physician's assistants and nurses to do them. Note that under the FDA approval, RU-486 and similar drugs are required to be given under a doctor's care - it is widely ignored. Technically, NY widening who can do an abortion doesn't override federal law but in effect it will.

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  7. Murder is a perfectly legitimate tool as far as the left is concerned. Anyone and nothing that is an inconvenience to them is an acceptable
    target for their violence. Gun owners, white people, climate change skeptics, babies....ALL are worthy of elimination in the lefts quest to
    impose their socialist workers paradise.

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  8. see also Kermit Gosnell for not just where this leads, but where it's actually been. If your stomach is strong enough.

    nick

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  9. Replies inline not working, so posted here at the bottom.

    "Safe, legal, and rare" is the New York city gun carry permit issuing policy. All we want is safe and effective regulation of guns. What could go wrong?

    Windows ships from Microsoft with many bugs. The unstated portion of the argument is the moral case why consumers are required to use Windows. Human brains contain a genetically-transmitted instinct to protect children and organize politics like we have seen in history. So what? The presence of that code in the dna is not a moral or engineering argument for that code being the best possible way for seven billion humans to relate to each other. The Frankenstein argument is: "that domain belongs to God" AND "God is good". How do you know that? Show me which high energy physics or SETI experiment has extracted stone tablets from this universe's creator. Then show me how you know that creator isn't running a medical experiment.

    The science in Leviathan must be replicable. I don't see archaeological demonstration of many cases where human groups deprived of a government, such as wagon trains heading West or pirate ships on the high seas, break down into a mutual orgy of murder. If your source of proof/truth is that people in the past believed it, then you've proven the Earth is flat.

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  10. If you accept proof by majority vote then you've approved of Nazis and Commies; if you accept proof by religious revelation then you've approved of Sharia and the Spanish Inquisition; if you accept proof by historical weight then you cannot reject proof by majority vote and religious revelation. If you accept proof by genetic instinct then you're toast; the technological singularity is almost upon us.

    Fallacies are intellectual mistakes. The function of intellectual, rational thought is to incorporate disgusting truths. Rational thought mediates between conclusions made by non-rational brain functions.

    Early humans on the African plain didn't evolve with seven billion tribe members who could all talk to each other on cell phones. I'm not surprised the software is showing strain.

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