I gaped at 2shoes's post about raising the abortion limit to birth. And then I realised what (I very much hope) she was getting at. If a disabled baby can be aborted right up to birth, then why should a non-disabled baby be treated as more of a person?
Once a child is capable of surviving outside the womb then, as Greensleeves said, the line between abortion and infanticide starts looking very fine indeed. Obviously there are situations where a child might be capable of survival based on gestation, but so seriously disabled that it could not survive, but where the issue is one of quality of life, I don't really see why abortions up to birth are even relevant. If you are going to find out about a serious medical condition, you are almost always going to find out between 14 and 22 weeks. How many people are realistically going to sit on that information until 37 weeks and then decide to terminate and put themselves through that horrific experience of labouring to give birth to a dead baby?
I would actually like to see the abortion limit set as early as possible while still allowing for the current pre-natal tests to take place and be effective.
There may be circumstances where someone finds out later than 22 weeks that there is a serious problem. I think that an ethics committee might be the appropriate way to decide if it is appropriate to offer a late termination on a case by case basis.
I am aware that my views are almost certainly coloured by the fact that there have been a small number of late abortions for very minor, effectively cosmetic, defects including club feet. I was born with a very severely deformed club foot for which I had 14 operations. While these incidents are few and far between, I cannot be comfortable with a situation where it is legal to terminate a child with such a minor and correctable problem.
I actually have difficulty drawing any distinction in my own mind between aborting a viable baby late in the pregnancy and killing that child. I can't imagine that any mother who has had to make that hideous decision for medical reasons, feels that there is much of a difference either. I feel that by allowing abortions up to birth for disabled children, we are encouraged to think of a disabled child as disposable, and their death as less of a tragedy for the parents. I wouldn't imagine that bereaved parents who are forced to terminate a much-wanted child feel any less bereaved than someone who loses a child after birth, but I wouldn't think that they would receive anything approaching the same level of sympathy.
Hope some of that makes some sense.