Arizona decides that pregnancy begins even before conception
By Virginia SmithApril 11th, 2012, 12:00 pmComments (25)
Arizona went on a tear of anti-abortion legislation yesterday, passing three new bills, each one crazier than the last. One bill bans abortions any time after the eighteenth week of a pregnancy, another prevents lawsuits against doctors who purposely keep information from patients in order to prevent abortions, and the last would mandate that birth and/or adoption be advocated as the best outcomes of unplanned pregnancy in sex-education programs. After passing in the Senate, the bills are now headed for the desk of ultra-conservative Governor Jan Brewer.
Besides creating an unusually harsh policy — for late-term abortions, the cutoff in most states is twenty weeks — the first bill also changes the definition of when a pregnancy begins: it will now be "calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman," which could be as much as two weeks before a baby was even conceived.
Though the bill actually lines up with the common medical definition of a fetus' approximate gestational age, "it will reduce access," said an official from reproductive-health research organization the Guttamacher Institute. The bill also violates constitutional rulings both by failing to provide adequate options for medically necessary late-term abortions, and mandating a questionably early cutoff date for such procedures.
"I imagine it will be a legal dispute," said Democratic State Rep. Matt Heinz. "If medical science can only determine gestational age with ten to fourteen days, how can a superior court judge do it?"
The depressing but not altogether surprising conclusion here? Arizona legislators are so committed to the rights of fetuses over those of living, breathing, voting women, that they want to make sure they're covered even before they actually exist.
Commentarium (25 Comments)
The legislation is stupid and likely unconstitutional, but it actually doesn't say life begins before conception. As the post notes in the middle, it is how gestational age is calculated by doctors. That means that both the headline and concluding sentence are misleading. I'm vigorously pro-choice, but it doesn't help the cause to mischaracterize what our opponents are doing.
Good point, the headline and end of the article have been tweaked a bit for accuracy.
This bill is so ignorant, unconstitutional and just plain insane that calculating the age of a fetus from a point before conception is the least wrongheaded thing about it. Tell us, Arizona GOP, how will this fantasy-based nightmare of a bill create jobs?
Duh! It creates many jobs for fund raisers and advocates and potentially for lawyers, process servers, law enforcement officials, and prison wardens....
...and Fox News reporters. Yep, you're right.
Prebortion: the abortion of a yet-to-be-conceived fetus.
this is almost like backing up into my vas deferens (sp) to regulate whether i can jack myself off or not too. WHY MUST THESE BONEHEADS KEEP TRYING SNEAKY STUPID SHIT LEGISLATION LIKE THIS?
It's how thy get themselves reelected.
How is changing from 20 weeks to 18 weeks "unusually harsh"? You should've made your decision long before five fucking months have gone by. It's one thing to scrape a small cluster of cells from your jizz intake chamber, but there's no way you can look at this and not say this is a human baby:
https://images.medicinenet.com/images/SlideShow/fetal_20_week_fetus_s7a.jpg
If it were up to me abortion would relegated to a state issue, not Federal, but there would be a Federal restriction on abortions after 10 weeks, 12 tops.
Jizz intake chamber? Really?
And, for the record, I did just look at that photo and decide that it is definitely not a human baby. It's a fetus. Not a baby. It doesn't become a baby until birth.
And you're totally fine killing it?
No, I'm not fine killing it. I think 20 weeks is too late term for an abortion to still be acceptable, at least for me personally. I just find it illogical to call it a human baby when it's clearly a fetus.
If you have any familiarity with obstetric practice, you should know that at 20 weeks there's a morphology ultrasound examination that will identify serious birth defects. I am certainly bothered by the use of second-trimester abortions for birth control, but I would not deprive parents of the ability to choose whether or not to bring a child into the world whose life would be marred by great suffering, both for the potential child's sake and for the parents'.
I agree and I was going to list that as one of the circumstances that I find late term abortions acceptable. I'm firmly pro-choice, although I think I personally would have a harder time opting for an abortion at 20 weeks.
Also, I'm really curious about why 10 or 12 weeks is a magic cut-off. What happens at 10 or 12 weeks that suddenly makes abortion unacceptable, if it is acceptable beforehand? I think that's the hardest issue to determine when talking about abortion. And I think it muddies the argument to call a fetus a human baby.
To an extent, using the arbitrary age of 10-12 weeks is the same as using the arbitrary age of 18-20 weeks. How can you decide when a person exists, if not by the actual birth when it's finally it's own being independent of the mother? Even if the fetus could feasibly live outside the womb at 18-20 weeks, unless there are doctors who will deliver a fetus at 18-20 weeks and put it up for adoption, there has to be another option to terminate the pregnancy if that's what the woman decides to do.
Logically, there cannot be two equal entities in one body with equal rights. If a woman is denied the right to have a procedure on her body because it's infringing on the rights of a fetus, the woman's rights are being infringed upon. Within one human body, full rights need to be given to one or the other; they can't be split.
That is one of the more logical arguments that I have heard about the abortion debate. Thanks for this!
Fetuses/babies can survive outside the womb around 24 or 25 weeks IF there's lots of medical intervention and technology and some luck. I believe it has something to do with lung development and when it can actually breathe air, though I don't know much about the short and long-term issues that arise if a baby survives birth that prematurely. Before that, it's completely dependent on the mother and her body for survival. That seems like a logical cutoff point to me -- if the fetus cannot survive outside the mother's womb, then I don't see the problem with aborting it.
Agree that this "article" is super deceptive. The law tracks current medical technology. The logic of the vulgar poster above seems right that the key question is when life (conception) occurs. The rights of the baby should begin at the time when birth is expected absent some intervention by medicine or a biological/medical mishap.
in Species, that baby is born like the same day.
Personally, I do think a 5 or even 3 month old fetus deserves some right to life.
Maybe so, but how can someone reasonably and fairly divide rights between two "people" in one body? Which rights should the fetus have and which should the pregnant woman and at the end of the day, whose rights are more important?
There's no course of action that will give one of them rights without taking them away from the other. Are there?
P.S. @Grat, who is the "vulgar poster" you're referencing?
Not counting those situations where the mother's life is at risk, or pregnancies as the result of rape, the rights of one body would be violated by inconvenience. The rights of the other would be violated by death. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I'm not absolutely anti-abortion (although I would favor extremely limited access), but it horrifies me how cavalier so many people seem to be about it, seemingly unfazed by the concept of any rights for the unborn or for the father of said human spawn.
These are not easy questions by any measure, but I feel like far too many people feel the answers are.
Just as you say that maybe many people feel that they have all answers, how can you categorically say that if someone was denied an abortion, the only violation of their rights would be that of an inconvenience??? There are so many other factors that go into the decision to continue with a pregnancy, other than "the inconvenience" of just, you know, growing another person inside your body. As if women are only concerned with the mere inconvenience of carrying a pregnancy to term? It's not like having a suitcase without wheels in an airport or forgetting your lunch on your way to school...It's more than just one of life's meaningless irritations, since there are innumerable ways it would affect the mother's life and body.
I would wager that going through with a pregnancy that one does not wish to continue with would become more than a mere inconvenience for most if not all. And when you are able to go through with a situation like that and decide how much of an inconvenience it is or not, you can tell all the women who may or may not need an abortion at some point in their lives that they should just suck it up and deal with the "inconvenience" it provides.
Not to mention, who are you to decide whose rights are more important? Between a fully formed human and a combination of cells that can't exist on it's own, I would wager that a fully formed person has more right to decide how they want to live their life than something that by all scientific and legal definitions does not exist as anything more than a parasite.
When will people stop treating women like children and decide that they deserve the right to decide their own future as it pertains to their own bodies, just like men have?
What happens if your periods are irregular? Or if you skipped a month before you got pregnant? Do you then have an extra 4-6 weeks tacked on to the gestational age?
And how do they monitor that anyways? I can't even remember the last day of my last period. And how would I ever prove when it was.
Now you say something