Andrew Marr says "abortion safer then birth, but obviously not for babies"

[darleneconnor]

I'm to have just heard this on his BBC1 show this morning.

He was reading out the newspaper headlines. One was "abortion safer than birth", which he quoted then quipped "but obviously not for babies".

Now I'm not what I'd call pro-abortion but I still think this was a very inappropriate thing for him to say. Firstly using the terminology 'baby' instead of 'foetus' or 'embryo' is very loaded. He is taking a very biased stance on a sensitive political topic- I thought the BBC were supposed to be neutral????

When I was at school someone brought in a 13 week foetus in a jar. I don't know where the hell she got it from. It was interesting to see at the time and ever so slightly gruesome.

Also puzzled by the reaction to Helly's post - no idea why it's offensive. Maybe some of the objectors weren't aware that foetal specimens exist? Not just in a school science lab but in any number of places. If you simply don't believe it, go and visit the Hunterian Museum.

btw, you know those pictures of week-by-week foetal development they show in pregnancy magazines? Afraid many of those images are taken from dead foetuses, too.

yes,helly post doesnt warrant "is you troll".

nope, a foetus becomes a baby when it is born.

tot agree with edam: what's offensive about dead foetuses in jars in a science lab ?...unless one is an awful prude [the type who eats meat but doesn't want to admit it's adead animal]perhaps that's what objectors are like:abortion's ok but dont let's discuss it realistically

What he said is true. Intellectually, it was just to point out we are always thinking from the mother's perspective, not the baby's. I don't think he used 'baby' in any pro- or anti-abortion way, just a knee-jerk way.

I don't see the need to read any more into what he said.

no, in YOUR OPINION it is a baby. IN my opinion it is not. There is no wrong or right answer there.

And a foetus doesn't have a perspective, what with the total inability to have a thought process about anything.

There is always going to be a divide in the way people see this issue.

For example, my DCs were my 'babies' from the time I discovered I was pregnant (5 weeks).

When I got pregnant following an assault it was a 'thing' that I wanted out of me as soon as possible.

Wanted pregnancy = baby
Unwanted pregnancy = bunch of cells

forgive my lack of science, but wouldn't it be fair to say that there is a huge surge in development between 6 week embryo and 12 week foetus?

An unscientific anecdote: i had a scan with dd at 7 weeks and could not see anything resembling a human in anyway. it looked like a prawn. at 12 weeks however, well yes, it was a fully formed human baby.

i'm sure (but happy to be better informed) that most abortions take place well before the 8/9 week mark, let alone the 12 week. and if they do take place after this, it's probably more to do with nhs availability than the woman's choice.

i don't think it's unreasonable to say that before this point, it is a string of protein and DNA, and that rapid development occurs within the 8 - 12 week timeframe. so marr's comment was, i feel, wrong and inappropriate.

the key word here is clearly potential. abortion is the deliberate ending of a potential human life, but then, so is the map, if by taking the map, you are deliberating stopping a fertilised egg from embedding in the uterus. But few of us (except maybe observant catholics) would describe the map as abortion.

it was not a fully formed human baby. You can tell this is true by the fact that it cannot come out of you and live independently. And the fact that it is not fully formed/

Yes, Buzz, I concede it was not a viable human baby, but it was fully formed in the way that it wasn't at 7 weeks.

it was more formed, it was not fully formed. If you want to talk definitions, you need to aim for as much precision as possible.

If all Andrew Marr was doing was reading out the headlines, he can't be helped for pointing out the bizarreness of one of them. Those weren't two of his opinions, that was A) reporting and B) observation of facts.

Interesting discussion. What should we do, then, with the term 'unborn baby'?

Normally I agree with edam

"People say 'baby' when they are talking about wanted pregnancies, because that reflects their emotions. They are not giving anti-abortionists permission to use inaccurate language."

but I don't require people to be accurate in their language when they are making a joke.

(which actually means I do agree with edam completely)

It doesn't matter what you call it. It just doesn't. The terminology used doesn't change facts of the process. Abortion is something that should be available to all women within the law. That doesn't mean we have to pretend it's all sweetness and light.

Well, babies are living at 22 weeks now, and abortions are available up to 24. So what do you call it when it could live independently, outside of you, but you choose for it not to?

You call them what you want, I'll call them whatever I want, because its ambiguous. The technical term for a foetus in the womb is just that, foetus, not baby.

I just wondered, because of your comment up the thread about it not being able to live outside the womb. But in some cases, it could. So it was just a curiosity thing :)

That's the crux of it CY isn't it? The point as which a baby can survive unassisted is getting lower and lower all the time due to better ante-natal care, and the gestation at which a prem baby can survive (and live relatively healthily) is getting lower still, and work is constantly being done to improve those chances all the time - so there is a bit of an uncomfortable disconnection with that, and current legal limits on abortion. I am very much pro-choice but I do think this is causing a very real moral dilemma.

I'd disagree that "babies are living at 22 weeks" gestation now - they can occasionally be kept alive at that stage but really they are swapping one form of natural incubation for an artificial version.

Right, but life is possible, whereas it's not in the first trimester. I'm pro-choice too, but I do think it's an interesting, as FN said, moral delimma. Suppose you scheduled a 24 week abortion and went into pre-term labor a few days before? Would the doctors try to save the baby, or not? Because it'd be a baby then, not a fetus, right? The mind boggles.