Reform and abortion

[Craftymam]

Just a public service announcement as I missed this last week and find it quite shocking that coverage was so low.

Nigel Farage has said he wants to ‘open a new discussion’ on abortion rights.

Considering everything that’s gone on in America, the rise in popularity of reform and this alleged 100 Million donation from Elon musk; I felt I had to bring this to everyone’s attention.

We should just let them die? Is a life not worth living if you have disabilities?

Depends of the level of disability I suppose. I wasn't expressing an opinion anyway merely quoting the figures that are published on the Tommy's website

But you said that preemies may suffer a couple of months then MOST of them go on to live normal lives. These figures state otherwise

You and your friend survived. Other women did not and will not. That is why we need late term abortion - for the ones who aren't lucky like you. My cousin had pre eclampsia last year and nearly died having her precious IVF baby. She also pulled through - but she isn't stupid enough to use that to deny other women choice and a chance at life.

No, we should let their mother decide whether or not she is able to be the parent of a disabled child. Hence: choice. Because the task of caring falls on women.

Sorry but I really don't understand, why can't a mother who needs to 'get the baby out' due to health issues for the mother not be given the opportunity to birth a live child, even if it's a section under a general, rather than abort the healthy late term fetus.

Because of the very high risk of severe disability in a very premature baby. Judge me all you want but I always knew I couldn’t cope with a severely disabled child and would have done anything to avoid the possibility. I believe in quality of life, not quantity.

Anyway, all rather hypothetical as no one, but no one, thinks oh I am in danger of dying due to (serious pregnancy related condition developed late in pregnancy) so let's kill my healthy child rather than try and get them out alive.

Because before 24 weeks, she has the choice. In practice the pre-eclampsia cases will involve much wanted babies and yes, all efforts will be made to save both. Assuming that those very early babies are 'healthy' is a hell of a stretch, by the way. Most are not.

Tinkering with the law is the start of a slippery slope towards chipping away at abortion rights, and that is why it should not be done. The law is fine as it is.

In any case, this discussion is not relevant because the 99%+ majority of post 20 week abortions are for health reasons, most to do with foetal abnormality.

So you'd abort a late term fetus just in case it had a disability? Wowsers. What if it didn't?

Again, choice. At 22 - 24 weeks, the risks of serious lifelong disability and death are very, very high. You cannot force a woman to take on the care of a severely disabled child when she does not want to or does not feel able to do so. It is for the woman to be informed of the risks and then to take an informed decision. You cannot force someone to deliver a baby on the very small off chance that it might be fine when the likelihood is that it will not be.

Prematurity increases the risk of disability by a large margin. Just because a foetus is healthy in utero doesn’t mean it will remain that way if born prematurely. So, yes, if the odds were high that it would be severely disabled, I would. I knew you’d judge me - it’s easy to judge someone when you don’t have to deal with the consequences, isn’t it? It’s easy to play Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.

I’m not sure I get your post.

Are you saying if you went in to premature labour you wouldn’t want to the doctors to try and save it?

I don’t think you’d have a choice tbh

Does anyone have a better breakdown of the disabilities counted as severe disability? Things like blindness and deafness obviously have a major impact on life, but few people would say those lives are not worth living, or that their be so disabled to not live a 'normal' live, but birth are counted as severe disabilities for prematurity stats.

I'm not minimising the impact of this disabilities, but being frank, when most people think of severe disabilities from prematurity they are now thinking of babies who will never walk, talk, limited cognition and who will need care for life. This isn't deafness...

The law doesn't define or provide an unequivocal list of what is to be deemed serious. Doctors take into account the availability of treatment, self-awareness, communication, suffering, need for care into adulthood if that's likely, that sort of thing. Deafness or blindness in themselves would be unlikely to be regarded as such, but as they could come along with other issues (some forms of deafness are associated with kidney failure, for example), they would be taken as part of the overall professional judgement of the prognosis - would an infant or child who then had to undergo multiple painful procedures throughout their life be able to communicate they were in pain or understand what was being done to them, for example.

I think it’s they can only measure and see certain things. And if one or a few things are looking not right then there’s a near certainty that lots of other things are going to not right.

I don’t think they can tell whether someone is deaf or blind. Unless they are missing eyes/ ears or the formation of them are not correct.

There are no lists kept of who is disabled or how severe disabilities are, they aren't accurate or necessary. Disabilities don't exist on a neat sliding scale, and as the previous poster mentions, they are sometimes co-morbidities.

People who lack experience with disabilities tend to have a simplistic and reductionist view - 'disabled' means you are in a wheelchair; and being in a wheelchair means you are unable to stand up and walk at all. Or being 'blind' means you live in pitch black and are completely unable to see anything.

In this debate, the views of the pregnant woman are also taken into account. Her ability to cope might be limited if she has a disability. Or she might have to give up work, have no support, live somewhere unsuitable, or already have one or more disabled children.

No, they are listed as examples of severe disabilities in their own right. There's a list upthread, I've pasted it below:

*In one study of 241 children born before 26 weeks' gestation the following was found (9):

22% had severe disability (e.g. cerebral palsy and not walking, low cognitive scores, blindness, profound deafness)

24% had moderate disability (e.g. cerebral palsy and walking, IQ/cognitive scores in the special needs range, lesser degree of visual or hearing impairment)

34% had mild disability (defined as low
IQ/cognitive score, squint, requiring glasses)

20% had no problems*

I've read this before, and it was clear those were examples of what is meant by severe, moderate etc, not that it only applied where they occurred together. So, for example, Fury (TV Gladiator, deafness caused by prematurity), would be counted as 'severely disabled'.

The stats need breaking down.
The question that is in most people's minds realistically, when they hear the chance of a child born with a severe disability, is whether their child will have a good quality of life, will they be able to live independently etc. I'm not sure they current categories of disability actually let people assess that.

No, but the research behind those statistics clearly has those numbers. This isn't about a list of disabilities in general life and I agree with you there.

It's that it's 21% of these very premature babies are left with disability a, b and c, then knowing how many are in each of those is possible and informative given the different impact on both the person and their parent.

I see what you mean now - those are called health statistics, and they are based on the records of medical outcomes.

For anyone interested, I've partially answered my own query. i still don't know the breakdown from the study cited by Tommy's, but this literature review gives a different breakdown, by areas of disability rather than degree

It states:

The rates of surviving unimpaired or minimally impaired are 6% to 20% for live-born infants at ≤25 weeks' gestation and <5% for infants born at 22 and 23 weeks' gestation. Long-term adverse outcomes after extreme prematurity include intellectual disability (5% to 36%), cerebral palsy (9% to 18%), blindness (0.7% to 9%), and deafness (2% to 4%). Milder degrees of disability involving cognition, behavior, and learning are increasingly recognized among older preterm children, teens, and young adults

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0887899414006584

Intellectual disability looks most common followed by CP, then blindness then deafness. Reading the two seta of numbers together, it's not going to be the case that a large proportion of those in the severe group are deaf with no other impairments. It's not surprising, but I do think it's useful data to have when assessing quality of life of those around the edges of viability.

Yes, but that article covers extremely premature babies born between 1999 and 2013!
Babies born in 1999 are now 25 years old and those born in 2013 11 years old.
The Science is developing all the time and outcomes are improving.
I would be interested in recent developments from 2013 onwards.

Me too! We also don't know the date of the Tommy cited study.

What is clear though is that for extremely premature babies, a decent number are either surviving with no, or only minor disabilities, and thats amazing!

I wasn't reading the Tommy's website, I was reading the RCOG Working Group report into termination for fetal abnormality here.

That link didn't work. The same stats are mentioned by Tommys, hopefully the RCOG has thr actual study referenced as it would be interesting to look at.

Here's the link to the report, its a PDF you can read online;

www.rcog.org.uk/media/21lfvl0e/terminationpregnancyreport18may2010.pdf