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Does Personhood Begin at Birth?
Published in Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion, 2023
In briefs to the court, some claimed that partial-birth abortion might be necessary to secure the health of the woman. However, the American Medical Association weighed in that partial-birth abortion was never medically necessary and that the procedure was more dangerous for women since it involved (partial) breach birth. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not identify any circumstances under which partial-birth abortion would be the only way to preserve the health or life of the woman.
Fetal pain and the law
Published in Jennifer Corns, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, 2017
Any discussion of fetal pain laws by the Supreme Court will follow many past discussions and amendments of the original Roe ruling. Past cases include Harris v. McRae, 1976 (allowing bans on the use of Medicaid for abortion); Belloti v. Baird, 1981 (allowing pregnant minors to seek an abortion without parental notification); Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989 (upholding bans on the use of public employees and facilities to perform abortions); and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992 (allowing state involvement before the end of the first trimester, enforced waiting periods, pre-abortion counseling, and parental consent laws). Following these rulings came the partial-birth abortion arguments, described earlier, which opened the way to the current fetal pain bills and an expected further clash in the Supreme Court. Thus, legal arguments over fetal pain in the US are part of a procession of legal arguments stretching back to Roe.
Conflicts of Rights at Life’s Beginning
Published in Gary Seay, Susana Nuccetelli, Engaging Bioethics, 2017
Enacted by Congress in 2003, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act made illegal Intact Dilation and Extraction (D&X), a procedure developed as an improvement over previous methods for late-term abortions. D&X consists in the extraction of the entire fetus through the birth canal by first dilating the cervix and ‘collapsing’ the skull because it is too big to pass through. Legislators dubbed the procedure ‘partial-birth abortion,’ a term later adopted by US Supreme Court but rarely used by obstetricians—perhaps because D&X is also the procedure of choice for removing fetuses that die of miscarriage or feticide.
Abortion, Science, and Morality in the Turnaway Study: New Perspectives for the Helping Professions
Published in Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2022
Scientific knowledge helps us detect and reject the misleading terms and usages concocted by abortion foes. The worst defilements of precise language, perpetrated in service to the anti-abortion cause, are the oxymorons “unborn baby” and “unborn child.” They are as silly as “not-yet-dead adult” and as absurd as a claim that ikura caviar is the same as a ten-pound salmon, but those expressions are emotionally powerful nonetheless because they excite a primal urge to protect the helpless innocent, typically amplified in messaging by photos of adorable infants several months old. Similarly, the wildly imprecise term “partial birth abortion” was devised not by medical specialists but by abortion foes hoping to replace medical specialists’ terms like “dilation and extraction” (Rovner, 2006).
A narrative analysis of anti-abortion testimony and legislative debate related to Georgia’s fetal “heartbeat” abortion ban
Published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2020
Dabney P. Evans, Subasri Narasimhan
However, these outrageous claims served a purpose – building a clear case to challenge Roe v. Wade. Surprisingly, the current strategy appears to take a positivist law approach where lawmakers are asked to consider tenets of Roe v. Wade in the contemporary context and time that has passed since prior precedent. They propose striking down tenets of Roe v. Wade based on advances in our moral understanding of abortion, and in ultrasound technology. They argue that because newer, more sensitive technology can detect the “heartbeat” at earlier stages of pregnancy, the standards for our understandings of viability should change. This same strategy was successfully employed in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.34 It may also be employed in the forthcoming case of June Medical Services LLC v. Gee where the US Supreme Court has agreed to revisit TRAP laws.