Nazis are in the previous thread.
I'm finding the language about "being born unwanted" kind of weird. It seems to make a lot of assumptions about why a woman has an abortion. Sure, maybe the woman just didn't want a kid right then. But maybe it's a lot more about a lot more circumstances than "want."
I also wish the article would go the next step of saying, Hey, maybe those abortion-seeking women knew something about whether it was a good idea for them to have a kid right then! Maybe women are making considered decisions!
I'm going to be horribly rude and throw another link into the conversation early -- if we're going to talk about reproductive justice I feel obligated to mention the recent story about the Indiana woman sentenced to 41 years in prison for "feticide" (I almost sent this link to you earlier, and it was just too depressing, but this seems like the thread for it)
During the same week Vásquez was pardoned in El Salvador, Purvi Patel sat in a courtroom in South Bend, Indiana, and waited for a jury to decide her fate. In July 2013, Patel presented to the emergency room of St. Joseph's Hospital in nearby Mishawaka, bleeding after an apparent miscarriage. Almost immediately, her request for emergency health care triggered a criminal investigation against her. She told health-care workers that she had miscarried, but did not bring the fetal remains with her--she had disposed of them in a trash bin. Questioning whether Patel had really miscarried or delivered a full-term baby, hospital staff contacted law enforcement. One of the hospital physicians even rushed to participate in the search for the remains.
But despite intensive investigation, many questions remained unanswered, including how far along Patel was in her pregnancy. Throughout, Patel has maintained that she experienced a stillbirth. What the investigation did reveal, however, was that Patel had texted with a friend about her ambivalence toward her pregnancy. With these texts as key "evidence," Indiana prosecutors charged Patel with two seemingly mutually exclusive crimes: neglect of a dependent for allegedly giving birth to and abandoning a live newborn, and feticide for allegedly "knowingly terminat[ing] ... her own pregnancy by ingesting medication." Each charge is punishable by decades behind bars.
The article in the OP makes slightly more sense to me seeing in the byline that the author is, "Chief of the Abortion Surveillance Branch at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)"
It feels like it's trying very hard to avoid drawing political conclusions and just offer a summary of the available research, which makes sense for someone who works at the CDC.
I'm going to be rude by responding to the rudely inserted link.
Was she convicted of both? That seems like something Scalia would present as an example of the majesty of the law in being able to hold two contradictory findings as true.
I also heard other parts about that story, that there was a dispute about the age of the fetus, 23 vs. 25 weeks.
Somebody should do a study of babies put up for adoption to find out just how many are descended from Nazi war criminals.
SP, she was and yes, they're mutually exclusive.
I have stuff to say about the rest of this but am thinking about how. I think "unwanted" is (usually?) the wrong word.
8 -- It seems to me that the charges can be understood in a non-exclusive way: (1) Terminating a pregnancy by chemically inducing the birth of a (legally, if not actually) viable fetus and then (2) killing the resulting baby and tossing it in the dumpster. I didn't follow the case, but this seems to be the prosecution's theory.
In reality, she was being punished for having an affair with a married man, and not accepting nature's penalty for this.
10.last: Isn't it harder, though, to have affairs with men who aren't married?
10.1 is right. I don't want to defend anything about this awful case, but the statute in question defines feticide as "intentionally terminat[ing] a pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus". So you can violate it even if you're unsuccessful and end up with a live birth. That's what I understood the prosecution's theory to be. How the hell that statute stands can pass a constitutional sniff test (at least when applied to the woman carrying the pregnancy), I have no idea.
What happens to an abortion denied?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
OR DOES IT EXPLODE?
3: I'm finding the language about "being born unwanted" kind of weird. It seems to make a lot of assumptions about why a woman has an abortion.
Indeed. It's more than just kind of weird: it seems to suppose that it's the degree to which a child is "wanted" that determines that child's life outcome. This shifts the burden for bad outcomes onto the mother's psychological state: surely not a promising direction for pro-choice advocacy.
I'm not inclined to read past the opening segment of that piece.