Admittedly grotesque? Really, how so?

I ask because both termination and delivery, just like most procedures, involve tissue trauma, bodily fluids all over the place, pulling and tearing, etc. What exactly is grotesque about safe and effective medical procedures?

Gotchaye,

…[an abortion] that they can exercise even without a compelling medical reason.

This reinforces my observation that totalitarian propaganda is most effective.

Medically, carrying a pregnancy to term is riskier than terminating a pregnancy. The extraordinary thing isn’t that some women terminate (as the propaganda would have you believe); it’s that so many women throw compelling medical reason to the wind, assume the risk, and carry to term.

…let’s be clear that abortion bans with vague ‘health of the mother’ clauses don’t yield significantly different real-world outcomes than does ‘abortion on demand’, and that at least some of the reason for this is that a defensible case can be made that the normal risks of pregnancy constitute a threat to the ‘health of the mother’, which is clearly in violation of the spirit of the law.

Here’s what a typical health exception looks like*:

[abortion is banned except] to save a woman’s life or to avert a “substantial and irreversible” maternal health risk of impairment to “a major bodily organ or system.”

The patient has to be on the brink of death or a millisecond away from catastrophic organ failure. [As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if politicians would propose that any group of patients, other than females of reproductive age, would only be permitted access to proper medical care if, and only if, their condition has deteriorated to the point of almost no return.]

And here’s a risk-management assessment addressing your point that these clauses don’t make that much of a difference:

[Abortion ban legislation with a health exception clause] requires physicians to choose between possibly committing a felony or subjecting a pregnant woman to a higher degree of medical risk than what would otherwise be clinically desirable.”

Since you think that there are lots of [physicians] that would do that (base medical care on their personal/political beliefs, rather than the standard of care), just imagine what all these unprofessional physicians will do when the choice is between committing a felony or committing malpractice.

Progressive Conservative,

I don’t think most liberals are ‘pro-abortion’ ….

Are you saying that there are some liberals who explicitly support passing forced-abortion legislation? That is news to me. (Do you have a source?)

My impression was that those (liberal or otherwise) who support allowing the government to prohibit female patients from making medical decisions don’t so much advocate forced-abortions as they trust that the state will only target pregnant patients who need, or elect, to terminate.

*[OK to link to sources?]

While conservative disrespect for, and fear of, medical judgment is nothing new, to impute to doctors and women a desire to end fetal lives “just because” crosses the border into tin foil hat land.

Even in countries with the most permissive abortion rules, there is no evidence whatsoever that women have abortions for frivolous reasons. The anti-choicers are already in tinfoil hat country. (I spent most of my life in Utah. I know these people.)

I’m, personally, fine with the “health exception” being the only route to abortion in the third trimester. I’m also fine with burdens on the second trimester. But I’m on the side of most of the American people, fortunately, when I express doubts about the desirability of government bans on the first trimester.

I would be fine with a well-defined ‘health exception’ if it meant ending the other 90% + of abortions that happen for social reasons.