Cross posted from my own blog:
I hate it when graphic, difficult medical situations are manipulated by anti-choice wing nuts to tug at the heart strings of people who would otherwise be a good fit for a democratic vote, based on their soft heartedness. Some classmates of mine seem to be concerned that Obama supports "infanticide."
You can read all about the bill he opposed here at factcheck.org, but in a nutshell, it was one of those anti-choice bills that try to take isolated incidents in medicine and define the entire abortion debate with their gross misrepresentations and disgusting insistence on playing some sort of "what's grosser than gross?" contest with women's rights and medical ethics. If first trimester abortion is one of the most common medical procedures in the country, and late term abortions make up a minute fraction, about 4% according to the Guttmacher institute of abortions, why do they get so much attention?
In the link above, anti-choice activist Jill Stanek claims that she was not allowed to "save" a 22 week gestational age Down syndrome fetus from a termination of pregnancy. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:
"Nevertheless, most neonatologists would agree that survival of infants younger than approximately 22 to 23 weeks' estimated gestational age is universally dismal and that resuscitative efforts should not be undertaken when a neonate is born at this point in pregnancy."
Illinois law already protects viable infants. With Stanek's definition, the American Academy of Pediatrics are baby killers too.
This is the same woman who rails against the birth control pill constantly. She has issues.
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FOX: Only babies that are about to die deserve to have their right to health care protected.
That's the anti-choice way: Play up the rare cases so that everyone believes they're the norm. Have you ever read the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act? Over and over again it says how rare the procedure is, how unnecessary it is, and how nobody even learns how to use this procedure. All that says to me is that there doesn't need to be a ban at all. Same thing with this born alive thing. It's probably more likely that a fetus would survive during a spontaneous abortion, but where's the law making sure that doctors give that fetus medical attention? It's a no-brainer that doctors would give that fetus medical attention, so why would a doctor treat a fetus living through an induced abortion any differently? It's a complete non-issue so there's no point in having the law.
Here's the way I see it: women have the right to make medical decisions for themselves (at least for now). Women also have the right to make medical decisions for their children.
If a fetus shows signs of life after an abortion, the mother has the right to decline heroic efforts to prolong its life. Since early-term abortions involve non-viable fetuses and late-term abortions involve fetuses with gross abnormalities or other birth defects, in either case declining medical attention is (to my mind at least) the merciful thing to do.
We all understand that quality of life counts. At a certain point we understand that the humane thing to do is to let someone pass. Why go to heroic measures to briefly prolong the life of a fetus which will be short and painful?
For such infants, who will never survive anyway and will have a short, painful life, the parents should be offered the option of euthanasia. THAT would be humane, not this forcing them to live for a few hours, days, weeks, then having them inevitably die anyway.