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Testimony by one of the bill\u2019s sponsors was circulating around YouTube yesterday; as Fox News reports<\/a>,\u00a0Virginia Democratic Del. Kathy Tran, in response to questions, acknowledged that her bill would permit abortion for \u201cmental health\u201d reasons with no time limit whatsoever, even to the point at which a mother is giving birth.\u00a0 Today,\u00a0Virginia governor Ralph Northam in an interview said that<\/a>, in the case of a live birth (presumably an unintended live birth when an abortion was underway), the baby \u201cwould be resuscitated if that\u2019s what the mother and the family desired\u201d \u2014 in other words, the decision to provide medical care would not be based on the child\u2019s ability to survive but on the parents\u2019 say-so.\u00a0 In Rhode Island, state legislators are holding hearings<\/a> on bills which purport to \u201ccodify Roe v. Wade\u201d but in fact strip away virtually any restriction, with one bill<\/a> removing the willful killing of an unborn child from the state\u2019s criminal code, as well as making a blanket statement that abortion is permitted for any reason up to viability and to preserve \u201chealth\u201d at any time afterwards (note that with no definition of \u201chealth\u201d nor a process for verifying that an abortion is health-related, this is effectively no restriction at all, as the Supreme Court has defined \u201chealth\u201d to include even family size as it may affect a woman\u2019s sense of well-being to have more children than desired); and the second of which<\/a> is virtually identical but retains the willful killing provision in the case of a direct injury to the mother (but not for cases of administering an abortion-inducing drug without her knowledge).<\/p>\n Folks, I know that the usual rhetoric in support of late-term abortion, or, more specifically, in support of refusing to criminalize late-term abortion tends to fall along these lines:<\/p>\n \u201cNo woman would get a late-term abortion unless she had a really good reason, so we don\u2019t need to criminalize late-term abortion just to cover something that really doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWomen that need late-term abortions are undergoing such trauma that it would traumatize them further to require some sort of proof that what they\u2019re doing is necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLate term abortions hardly ever happen, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n As it happens, a couple years ago I did some digging into this<\/a> and found that Guttmacher, a pro-abortion research group, found that 1.2% of abortions are after 20 weeks, and that these late abortions are generally for the same reasons as earlier abortions, except that these are cases where women didn\u2019t realize they were pregnant earlier (e.g., erratic cycles, or using some contraception which eliminates a monthly menstrual or pseudo-menstrual cycle).\u00a0 Yes, the latest abortions are generally for some sort of fetal disability, and to the best of my knowledge there is no data on numbers here, both in terms of raw counts and the extent to which these are extreme medical conditions vs. cases in which a child would have a more run-of-the-mill disability.<\/p>\n But stop and think about this:\u00a0 According to Statistica<\/a>,\u00a0 \u201cthere were a total of 17,284 reported murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in the U.S.<\/a> in 2017.\u201d\u00a0 Expressed as a percent of the U.S. population of about 323 million, 0.005% of the population was killed that year.\u00a0 But it would be preposterous to say, \u201chardly anyone is ever killed, so we don\u2019t need laws criminalizing murder,\u201d let alone, \u201cto criminalize murder is an insult to adults who we should trust to make the right decision for themselves.\u201d\u00a0 (Yes, fine, it\u2019s not apples to apples, but I am assuming that there are not large number of people who would suddenly start killing their friends and family if murder were decriminalized.)<\/p>\n To shrug off late-term abortions because \u201csurely anyone who gets one had a good reason\u201d is really not something that makes a heck of a lot of sense \u2013 unless you reject the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the deliberate killing of a human being<\/em>.\u00a0 If you believe that it\u2019s all shades of grey, then, sure, I get it.\u00a0 If you look back to the ancient Greeks\u2019 custom of exposing a child upon the say-so of the father, and say, \u201ceh, different cultures have different norms,\u201d or if you simply view morality as a set of behaviors and beliefs that is directed at ensuring that a society is well-functioning, and that a society in which infants could be euthanized, a la Peter Singer<\/a>, could be equally well-functioning, just differently, then sure, it makes complete sense.\u00a0 And if you think of small humans as not really human but beings of some other category, then, sure, you can say that abortion is undesirable but nothing we should criminalize in the same way as one might argue that euthanizing abandoned pets is undesirable but unavoidable<\/a>.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s it for today.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meanwhile, while we\u2019ve been arguing about whether or not the Covington kids were innocent, or guilty, or guilty of being white males and that\u2019s enough for a conviction, Democrats in New York wasted no time to pass legislation removing any and all restrictions on abortion, celebrating the event with a pink-lit World Trade Center (which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[198,319],"class_list":["post-12565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortion","tag-late-term-abortion"],"yoast_head":"\n