this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Do you have any ideas how few doctors are going to be willing provide care if this is the state of abortion law?
As someone who has never been involved with an abortion and would not want that choice made, I am not.
Why wouldn't doctors want to? The first trimester is essentially a blank check (the vast majority of abortions), and everything after that has a pretty high bar (intent plus sealed medical history). The likelihood of anyone getting charged is incredibly low, especially if they can point to any form of medical expediency.
It would be similar to the self-defense laws in many red states, they're so loose that charges almost never stick if there's any possibility that it was self defense.
The short answer is liability.
Here's where we already are in the current circumstance, just pick the article you want: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ob%252Fgyn+leave+red+states
But why start out with a goal of "technically illegal but defacto legal" - that seems inherently bad no matter what the issue is. The laws should be what we agree the laws to be, not what we agree them to be but then wink and fail to enforce.
The "goal" here is to respect the rights of both the mother and the child. The mother has a right to her body, but the fetus also has a right to life. Usually it's easy to craft policy such that "my rights end where yours begin," but they overlap in this case.
It doesn't make sense to me to give the woman priority just because she can communicate her wants and needs. I think pro-life people generally go way too fast in prioritizing the rights of the unborn, and pro-choice people go too far in prioritizing the rights of the mother. So that's why I have this compromise, it:
I think it's a fair balance. It does prioritize the mother, but only when the alternative involves likely harassment of many innocent innocent people (like in the article), so I think it's a fair compromise.
There needs to be exactly two groups involved in deciding to terminate a pregnancy: The pregnant person, and their medical team, with the pregnant person's choices taking precedence over everyone else's. If they want an abortion, they get one. If the doctors believe that the pregnancy is non-viable or carries an extreme risk to the parent, then the decision to terminate should be made only by the pregnant person.
And the doctors now risk getting arrested and having their mugshot published for everyone to see, having to go to court to fight it, possibly spending time in jail while waiting for trial. There's a saying "You may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride".
I agree, but only for the first half of the pregnancy.
Also agree. Abortion for medical necessity should be allowed for the entire pregnancy.
Only if they violate the above. Doctors can already get arrested for malpractice, and I see this as essentially euthanasia of an unwilling patient. Police would need to prove intent to violate the law.
I think it's incredibly unlikely that doctors would actually be arrested unless they're knowingly doing a lot of illegal abortions.