AIBU to think a foetus is alive before birth?

[Mmmchocolatebuttons]

I had a discussion with someone, who believes that a foetus is not alive, until the point they are born. They also asserted that this was not an uncommon view. I have a hard time believing this so I'm putting it to the AIBU poll.

To be clear, I'm pro choice, but I do believe that, for example, a 30 week foetus is factually, scientifically considered to be alive.

Surely, even if you're pro-choice all the way up until birth, you accept that the foetus is alive?

YABU = A foetus is not alive, until birth.
YANBU = A foetus is alive in the womb.

I think we're both disagreeing with PP 😂 Thank you for actually bringing the science

You do realise in the UK how low maternal mortality is? It's what 12/100,000? So in the vast vast majority of pregnancies both baby and the mother and child end up fine? I see both lives as equal as deserving of respect.

Men don't walk away with zero consequences. Child support is legally enforced in every UK and US jurisdiction. Child Maintenance Service requires payments and enforces via wage deduction orders, benefits deduction, court action, or Collect & Pay. Only 26% pay nothing. Enforcement and compliance is growing. And the answer is to increase enforcement, not to kill the child.

US states garnish wages, suspend licences, or jail deadbeats—even for rapists while stripping their parental rights.

I admit the whole incompatible with life is a nuance. Given it's around 0.3%-0.5% of pregnancies (and yes a very unfortunate tragedy) I don't think it's anything to base an argument on.

An online search tells me:

Families in perinatal palliative care programmes report profound peace from meeting their baby, holding them, and saying goodbye. In one Polish programme (72 families): 47 live births; comfort care allowed survival from hours to 262 days with dignity. Parents described it as healing rather than regret. Similar programmes in the US/UK show lower long-term grief and PTSD vs. abortion for anomalies (studies: Cope 2015, Kersting 2009, Korenromp 2005–2024 reviews). Abortion for fatal anomalies is linked to higher depression (up to 39% at 12 months), grief, and PTSD persisting years later.

So you really don't want to give me links, do you? And when you quote things, they date back 11 years. That says it all, really.

And women's wellbeing isn't just about maternal mortality. That is a very narrow view. It's about long term birth injury, it's about postpartum depression and psychosis, it's about all the things pregnancy and birth do to a woman's mind and body.

Mind you, my threshold for the number of women dying from being forced to birth a pregnancy they do not want is 0. You seem to think that some deaths are a perfectly fine price to pay - when safe, legal abortion could have prevented those deaths. In practice your 'both lives are equally valuable' boils down to 'It's OK if some women die as long as it isn't many'.

Pregnancies incompatible with life isn't a nuance. It's a thing that happens. I have a friend it happened to - she had an abortion at 29 weeks, due to NHS delays, after the amnio that showed her baby would die immediately after birth. So you think it would be perfectly OK for women like her to remain pregnant and then watch their much wanted baby die in their arms, when this was not what they wanted to do.

I call that pure evil.

I don't think that you can ever get equality between the mother and foetus, if their rights or wants or however you think about it conflict then one inevitably has to lose.

I think it’s clear that you have a moral position around every single conception being valuable and a life before birth, but you’re ignoring the life which comes after birth. What do you think life is like for an unwanted child? One who grows up knowing that their parent/s resent them, wish they didn’t exist, doesn’t have the capacity to care about them or love them? Once an unwanted child is born to a woman who would prefer to have aborted, and isn’t capable or doesn’t want to be capable of parenting, what do you think their life outcomes look like?

Women who had abortions had 81% higher risk of psychiatric hospitalisation, 157% higher for substance use disorders, and 116% higher for suicide attempts compared to women who gave birth. Risks were strongest in the first five years and for women under 25 or with prior mental health issues.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395625003309

Abortion linked to 49% greater likelihood of depression and 43% greater likelihood of anxiety versus carrying to term.

https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1471-0528.17889

Data from NHS England shows that 98.4% of pregnancies do not have serious complications.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/the-maternal-care-bundle/

Zero maternal deaths is the goal. You are okay with ending the life of the baby in utero, I am not okay with that.

Incompatible with life is under 1% of all pregnancies. So isn't really the standard to make a rule by and kill perfectly healthy babies.

Early integration (from diagnosis) improves parental satisfaction, clarifies goals of care, reduces aggressive interventions, and produces better bereavement outcomes. Families report profound peace from holding their baby, creating memories, and saying goodbye with dignity.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12515238

Your mistake is in thinking that women who had abortions would have had better outcomes from giving birth, but you don't know the reasons they chose to have an abortion.

Abortion is not an alternative to giving birth. In the third trimester all women must give birth - for those who have an abortion the only difference is the baby is killed before they give birth.

Third and second trimester abortions make up a tiny % of the total and are almost always for major conditions in the baby. They're always going to be traumatic, because those will be much wanted babies.

Early stage abortions, which are the vast majority, are nothing like giving birth. But nice false equivalence there.

I also think that if the baby is going to die at birth or soon after then it's much safer for the mother to deliver at 4lb or 5lb early or mid 3rd trimester rather than waiting until full term.

I think that’s why decriminalization was so unwarranted. Virtually all terminations at this point are for medically necessary (or at least, understandable) reasons. The status quo
worked

But it didn't. Women were being shopped by NHS staff and hounded by police.

Lords urged to ensure women criminalised for abortion are ‘not left behind’ | Abortion | The Guardian https://share.google/AiaOswxkAgKRjZmTS

You may think this is a fair price to pay for someone who didn't know she was pregnant. I don't.

The disturbing part of these stories is both used abortion pills at late gestations. So why is the change simply to decriminalize these late term abortions rather than require a scan to determine gestation? That would have prevented both of these women’s situations.

It's simple. Abortion doesn't belong in criminal law. This change doesn't change the time limits for abortions in any way, it just stops desperate women from being prosecuted, saves money by not wasting police and court time, and frees up the police to deal with crime.

The reasons for pills by post are easy to find. There have been a lot of posters going on about coerced abortions, but the one study into this found out that there were more coerced pregnancy continuation than the reverse. A small margin, but still. Pills by post are a route out of abuse and reproductive coercion for many women.

And this will continue irrespective, because because with second and three trimester 'diy abortions' at home, the police will have to investigate whether the baby was born alive and then was killed, so whether it's would be murder/infanticide. There'll be a post mortem, an investigation, and potentially, an inquest. I'd they'd is different suspicion that the pulse only caused the baby to be born, rather than the cause of death, there may be a murder trial.

Decriminalisation sends a message to desperate women that DIY late term abortions are legal, despite then being dangerous for the woman and still likely to trigger the investigation decriminalisation was intended to avoid.

But then you have women who are over six months pregnant using these pills, either because they didn’t know or because they are lying.

Neither situation is good.

Besides, decriminalizing means that someone like Carla Foster could not be prosecuted, when she absolutely is a monster and should have been punished for what she did. Space needs to be open for these rare cases.

Perhaps there should be more guardrails around investigations, but you can understand why investigations had to happen in those two situations mentioned in the piece, no? There was a point of failure where women too far along were using these drugs—one of whose baby actually survived, we don’t know if it suffered any disabilities due to that

For every woman who obtains the pills fraudulently, there'll be others who get them legitimately and decide to continue the pregnancy before changing her mind later on. After all, they are stashed at the back of her cupboard at home already...

Using the pills later on means a baby may well be born alive. Depending on gestation, the mum then has a choice between trying to save the baby's life by rushing them to hospital, to watch the baby suffocate to death, or to 'finish the job'. Even by the most ardent pro choice arguments, that baby is a full blown human being at that point with full human rights, and may be left to suffocate to death or murdered at birth.

It's absolutely essential IMO that the pills are more tightly controlled so this cannot happen.

I disagree that Carla Foster should have been prosecuted, and in the second case a young woman who didn't know she was pregnant was put through hell. Decriminalisation gives women the safety to tell the truth when things go wrong.

The number of investigations has ramped up massively in the past few years. So have the efforts of anti abortion activists. That in itself is enough for me to support decriminalisation, because it takes a weapon away from these people.

We should adopt the New Zealand model.

I apologize for posting the below, but it’s from one of the linked articles, and it really highlights why this medication needs to be strictly controlled. Packer apparently did not know what gestation she was—or maybe she did, who can say—but the end result is horrifying, which I’ve pasted but crossed out so people don’t accidentally read it.

WARNING GRAPHIC

It is hard to imagine how traumatically awful it must have been for Ms Packer thinking that she would only see blood clots to look into the toilet bowl and see a small but fully formed baby,” she told the jury. “Four and a half years later you can see how she is still utterly traumatised by that

The risk with these prosecutions is that women suffering unexpected late miscarriages, with or without the use of abortion medication, may not feel able to seek medical help for fear of prosecution.

I don't think that the midwife who reported that case to police was acting in good faith.

I have one question: how would jailing someone like that benefit society or the person themselves? It won't stop desperate women from seeking to abort, because we know banning abortion doesn't stop abortion from happening. So what's the point, other than revenge?

This is my concern as well. It is already happening elsewhere. We need to bolster the protections for women, because in too many places their rights are being eroded. This change in the law is a much needed addition to the barricade.

I do wonder if we should be normalising the use of frequent pregnancy self testing for women on progesterone based methods. A lot of women don't have regular periods on these, I do a monthly test as the idea of being pregnant for months without realising freaks me out.

Super late on this but just to say I was raised in a religious Jewish household and in Judaism, life begins at the first breath. So it follows that a fetus isn't alive until it's out and breathing. So this view isn't that unique in my experience and there could be a historical context for her belief. I'm no longer religious but it is something I find myself remembering when this comes up.

On a personal level, I am fiercely, intensely pro-choice but also grieved the losses when I miscarried twice so I can both think that they weren't technically alive and also it was really sad when those potential humans ceased to be a possibility.

The Guardian article doesn’t mention it, but did Packer know that she was further along and lied?

Let’s assume she did NOT know, then lax rules around the abortion pills has unnecessarily traumatized her, and there should be an investigation as to how this could have happened. Of course it wouldn’t lead to any jail time on her part, but one would hope ‘lessons would be learned’ among the NHS.

But for someone who knew they were further along, lied to their doctor and terminated a fetus past 24 weeks? Yeah, I do think prison time is appropriate in some cases NOT ALL CASES but some cases, yes.

I think it’s like requesting euthanasia for a terminally ill relative—you should be prosecuted if you smother or overdose your elderly parent due to caregiver burnout, but something like Canadian MAID should become available with appropriate safeguards.