Disability And Abortion: The Hardest Choice CHANNEL 4

[Wouldloveanother]

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11155443/DOMINIC-LAWSON-Doctors-stop-pushing-mothers-aborting-disabled-babies.html

I’m planning on watching this in the next few days, but I’m getting increasingly concerned about the amount of anti-choice activity going on under the guise of ‘disability equality’.

You are very rude, and I don't have any desire to continue talking to you.

At full term it's not a "pregnancy", it's a baby.

When someone objects to 'full term' abortion because disabled children have a right to life too..

I think termination on the grounds of severe disability should be allowed for all the reasons you mentioned.

Termination of healthy babies after 26 weeks "for any reason" should not be allowed.

Laws can change :)
Hello from Ireland where abortions used to be against the law up until recently.
FWIW, I voted for allowing abortion, but I do not support late term abortion of healthy babies.

What changes specifically at 26 weeks?

Why 26 weeks?

Increasing numbers of babies born before 26 weeks are surviving. My friends DC just got their GCSE results they were born at 25+0 nearly 17 years ago.

But, being born at 26 weeks without extensive and invasive medical intervention carries an extremely poor prognosis.

So your statement, as with the current abortion limit, are purely arbritary, with very little evidence base.

In practice changing the law to allow termination up to term for any reason would not change the number of abortions. From threads like these I seem to recall that in the last few years there were something like two cases of women wanting to terminate healthy pregnancies very close to term, and in those cases there was severe mental ill health involved and the abortion did not go ahead. Given those numbers I would be in favour of allowing abortion to term - simply because I trust women not to make that choice frivolously.

Neither do I but there was discussion about disabled babies having the same rights as non-disabled babies and therefore not allowing abortion past 24wks no matter what the circumstances. The point was then raised that another way to make it equal would be to remove the 24wk limit entirely for all pregnancies and allow abortion to term for everyone. All evidence suggests that the vast majority of women would continue to abort prior to 10wks as they do now and that abortions post-24wks would continue to he very rare and for very specific reasons seeing as at present t women have until 24wks for more or less any reason but most don't wait that long (1%).

Pointythings, in 2021, there were just 2 abortions after 24 weeks for reasons other than disability. We have no way of knowing if it they were at 24 weeks or 40 weeks or what the precise reasons were. So the law does already allow for late terminations in very extreme circumstances. There doesn’t seem much point in changing the law if nobody is going avail themselves of it anyway.

Some women very sadly find out they’re terminally ill while pregnant.

and you’re perceptive.

‘Pregnancy’ - the condition and period of being pregnant, aka something that happens to an individual woman’s body, that should be entirely her business. If you’d like to call it a baby then go for it, it really makes no difference. Be content with governing your own uterus, you don’t need to extend to anyone else’s.

@CecilyP I agree with you, but changing the law would give the Heidi Crowters of this world the equality they say they want.

Not sure I’d want to give them what they say they want! I’d be interested in the BMA’s position!

Heidi Crowther is out there trying to deny women the right to choose which is a kick in the face when her own mother was afforded that choice, she was offered options and she was able to make the choice to continue her pregnancy. It's vile that she seeks to remove that ability to choose.

@CecilyP the Heidi crowd want foetuses with DS and other disabilities to be treated equally to foetuses where there are no medical issues, i.e. a 24 week cut-off, no abortion allowed after that.

So if it's equality they want, let's rack the limit up to 40 weeks for all pregnancies. Job done, equal rights for all.

Of course that isn't what they really want - they want to chip away at abortion rights. But I'd love to hear their arguments if we ever did get abortion to term for all pregnancies.

Some women very sadly find out they’re terminally ill while pregnant.

Yes, sadly they do, as well as other medical conditions which makes continuing the pregnancy a serious risk to life and health. However, after 24 weeks in most cases they will deliver the baby and provide care in the hope it will survive.

I don’t know if her mum was, I think I read somewhere her diagnosis was postnatal. In a way I can digest it better if it was a prenatal diagnosis and they willingly chose to proceed with the pregnancy - there’s a sincerity to it, and they practised what they preach, even if I don’t agree. But it’s hard seeing women who opted for the tests (even if they didn’t ‘work’) now try to limit the choices of other women. In many cases they also had testing for subsequent babies, but caution us against it!

Of course that isn't what they really want - they want to chip away at abortion rights

Yes I’m pretty sure of that!

Absolutely but I could understand if, for example, a pregnant woman found out she was terminally ill and felt she couldn’t manage a very poorly and extremely premature baby alongside her own health issues.

I'll let the professionals determine the cut off point.
20 weeks is too early, 30 weeks is too late.

Well, what do you suggest? Abortion up to 40 weeks or no abortion at all?
There has to be a cut off point somewhere which works for the majority of cases. 26 weeks sounds reasonable to me. But maybe 25 weeks or 27 weeks would be better. I'll let someone else do the research on that.

We are not writing laws here, ffs 😁

@FarmerRefuted (amazing username btw)

I comepletly agree with you. I've noticed that none of the forced birthers on this thread have commented on the reality that is currently being experienced by women in the USA and Poland who are now living this nightmare. No one has explained why its better for disabled people or indeed the baby that a woman in Louisiana is currently being forced to carry a baby to term that does not have a skull. This baby will die shortly after birth but not before suffering terribly.

I wish forced birthers could explain how disabled people benefit from this. How does the baby benefit? How does the mother of this child benefit?

I also noticed that none of the forced birthers on this thread, who are aghast that a woman would have an abortion on the grounds of disability, have told us how many disabled children they have adopted or fostered. What work are they doing to help support women looking after disabled children and adults? What are they doing to lobby the government for better services for disabled people. Are the financially supporting women who are raising disabled children? Providing respite care? Or indeed anything at all?

I suspect not. Its far easier to judge women from the sidelines and tell them what they SHOULD be doing, rather than helping with the actual practical reality.

I am a woman of faith. I also really resent forced birthers adopting religion to justify forcing women into truly barbaric situations. It especially rankles as the Bible is not actually against abortion, quite the opposite in fact. God has no issue with abortions only zealots do.

YellowRoad, The cut off is 24 weeks as determined in the U.K. by the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. This was reduced from 28 weeks which was the cut off according to the 1967 Abortion Act. This did not happen in a vacuum; 24 weeks is now determined as viability. Prior to 1990 a loss between 24 and 28 weeks was a miscarriage, now it is a stillbirth or a neonatal death. Would this not also have been the case in Ireland despite abortion being illegal?

Any further change would have to be made by an Act of Parliament, not by random mumsnetters.

But what is viability?

A 24 week fetus would not survive without very advanced and expensive modern medical technology. A 24 week fetus would not survive in afghanistan, and even in the UK if delivered prehospitally without access to steriod injections in utero. So I'd argue that 24 weeks is far from "viable" and actually the point at which the majority of babies would survive without any medical intervention is much much later. It is all arbitrary, let the women whose body it is make the decision.