Anonymous wrote:So not one person will think to herself...
Hmmm, if we have sex this weekend, we might make a baby. So maybe we better not, because we’re not ready for a baby.

Some of you are ridiculous with your narrative.

So not one person will think to herself...
Hmmm, if we have sex this weekend, we might make a baby. So maybe we better not, because we’re not ready for a baby.

Some of you are ridiculous with your narrative.

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Wondering how you put this in perception given our southern border today? Will the 5000 crossing daily be held to the same standard? Inquiring minds wish to know?

I guess we'll put them in cages until we figure it out?

One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Wondering how you put this in perception given our southern border today? Will the 5000 crossing daily be held to the same standard? Inquiring minds wish to know?

Anonymous wrote:so after it's illegal, what will we do with all the unwanted children born to moms who can't take care of them? Are we going to give them mom-friendly jobs? What if the mom is a 13year old? How do we make the dads support them? What if the dads run off to another state? Are we going to have orphanages staffed with caretakers to help out?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Again, we've discussed how using abortion to change women's behavior is not the reason for banning abortion. If you truly wanted to change women's behavior, you'd chose the more effective and less coercive route: sex ed and availability of birth control AND social supports to make having the baby feasible.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

The answer is zero. There will be zero fewer unwanted pregnancies. We know there will be more. We go through this exercise a lot. Cannot wait for those kids to grow up knowing no one wanted them!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Truly awful story of an OB in Kansas being required by hospital lawyers to speak with the legislator of an anti-abortion bill before being allowed to perform the procedure on a critically ill patient.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/opinion/abortion-laws.html
I was asked to perform an abortion for a very sick pregnant women in her first trimester. She had a medical condition that was deteriorating much more rapidly than expected because of her pregnancy. She was not seconds away from dying, but her medical specialists were concerned that, in the next day or two, she would be likely to develop kidney failure.

While kidney failure can be managed with dialysis, preventing that from happening is the best medical course. Not only in the short term, but saving my patient’s kidneys also would prevent a cascade of medical events that could end her life prematurely in the long term. After all, life expectancy is shorter on dialysis. That’s why we do renal transplants.

My patient’s specialists believed that, if she were not pregnant, they might be able to avoid dialysis. Ending her pregnancy would not save her life that day, but it might next week or next month or in five years. We don’t have crystal balls in medicine, so we often can’t say with certainty who will deteriorate with a given medical condition or precisely when.

But that year, the Kansas legislature had passed a law banning abortions on state property, which included the medical center where I worked. But under the law, an abortion would be allowed to save the life of the pregnant woman.

So when I received a call asking whether I could help this patient, my next phone call was not to the operating room to make arrangements — instead I called the hospital’s attorneys. They did not know how to interpret the law either. Unless my patient was actively dying — for example, we were running a code for a cardiac arrest — an abortion would most likely be illegal. If I did the procedure, I would be fired.
To reconcile our disagreement, the hospital’s attorneys felt the only course of action was to get the opinion of the legislator who wrote the law. An attorney set up a conference call with this man so that I could plead my patient’s case.

I began to explain the medical situation, how ill she was. He interrupted me after a few seconds: “Whatever you think is best, doctor.”

My patient got the abortion and her health improved as a result. But I was furious. How dare some legislator applaud this monstrous law in public all the while deferring to a doctor’s expertise in private.

And yet I'm not surprised. I know someone who is extremely pro-life, does not believe in exceptions except for mother's life in imminent danger, yet when I suggested certain examples that might happen in real life, with detail, he flipped towards what he regarded as "common sense". I suspect this is often the case with other highly controversial issues--just like how conservatives in some red state town are dismayed when the undocumented guy who's run the local steakhouse for 20 years and is known for his volunteer work gets a deportation order. Hard to understand how the extreme points of view get their political attention.

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One can only wonder... if abortion is no longer available as birth control, how many fewer unwanted pregnancies might there be?

The answer is zero. There will be zero fewer unwanted pregnancies. We know there will be more. We go through this exercise a lot. Cannot wait for those kids to grow up knowing no one wanted them!