The decision to restrict abortion in the legal code is based on the idea that there are people who want to kill babies, and the law exists to prevent killing. The conviction that we should instead regulate abortion medically is rooted in the proposition that late-term abortions happen not because women and doctors want to kill babies but because circumstances conspire to make late-term abortions necessary, and that the women who are in these situations, and their doctors, are the people best suited to decide when those circumstances have arrived.
Katrina Kimport, a research sociologist and associate professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, has, over the past couple of years, been conducting the most comprehensive research on late-term abortion to date. People have certain assumptions about late-term abortion, she told me.
They imagine a woman spontaneously getting cold feet in her third trimester, or an indecisive dawdler who decides, on a whim, at twenty-seven weeks, that she's simply done. "But, in reality," Kimport told me, "these are people who were planning to continue the pregnancy and obtained a piece of vital information that made that change. Or they're people who just did not know that they were pregnant - people with other existing physical conditions, or people without typical symptoms - who then knew they didn't want to continue it, and then a series of obstacles pushed them over the line."
In the study that Kimport conducted with Diana Greene Foster, her colleague at U.C.S.F., women who sought late-term abortions were twelve weeks pregnant, on average, when they discovered the pregnancy; women who sought first-trimester abortions were five weeks along, on average.
"We expect people to know immediately when they're pregnant, and to know exactly how to handle it," Schalit said. "We don't take into account the possibility of ambivalence, that they're minors, or that they have to figure out how to take off work and get childcare, or that they might be in a coercive, unsupportive, or abusive relationship, or that they might not have the financial or logistical or bodily autonomy to access real choice at all."
www.newyorker.com
This is Bellringer and those like him. They only see the absolute worst in people whom they disagree with. They have no understanding, no empathy, no compassion when they disagree. They live to force others to follow their notions and ideals while simultaneously screaming to high heaven when others' wants and needs are even given due consideration when in conflict with their own, always claiming to hold some higher ground or purpose where restricting others' liberties is justified.