…Really ugly. Zealots on the pro-choice side are the masters of spin. Fetus, products of conception, “a woman’s right to choose”…to choose what exactly? They’ll never outright say.
Now they are spinning one woman’s loss of her baby as an abortion, simply because she’s a politician’s wife and they want to claim her husband is a hypocrite.
Some blogger is asserting that when Karen Santorum, wife of candidate for the Republican nomination to run for President Rick Santorum, lost her baby because she was about to lose her own life in a difficult pregnancy, that it was a second trimester abortion.
They’re trying to make it very “confusing.” It’s a technicality or semantics–no difference between what happened to her and abortion.
Intentionality matters. It matters in areas unrelated to abortion. If you are driving down the street and hit someone entirely by accident, you’ll be treated differently than if you geared up, aimed, and deliberately ran someone over.
When a baby dies while attempting to save the mother’s life, that’s not abortion.
I must say, bloggers like that make it no surprise that fewer and fewer decent people enter into politics.
Watch, however, as the blogger attempts to show she has compassion:
It is revolting that Rick and Karen Santorum choose to stigmatize and harass those of us who, as they did, grieve over the loss of a possible child in the second trimester.
The spin never ends. Ugly, just ugly.
by 
When a baby dies while attempting to save the mother’s life, that’s not abortion.
Kind of all depends on how you define abortion, doesn’t it?
It’s a particular pet peeve of mine, the way pro-lifers jerry-rig the definition of abortion to exclude situations such as this, when a pregnancy is (unintentionally) aborted while a doctor fights to keep the mother healthy and alive. (For the record, i think pro-choicers are guilty of far more spin, expecially when they try to define such terms as person, or human.)
Fact is, abortion is a term that is far too loaded. We pro-lifers have kind of made the term abortion synonymous with “killing your baby”. And lots of times, that is what abortion is. However, you won’t find too many vets that will say that an animal miscarried. Animals don’t miscarry. They abort. The technical term for a miscarriage is a spontaneous abortion. Abortion simply means stopping a pregnancy.
Mrs. Santorum got sick while pregnant. The doctor gave her some drugs to treat her illness. The drugs caused her to deliver her baby early. That, my friends, whether we like it or not, is an abortion. As much as we would like the world to be black and white, it isn’t. Not all abortions are morally wrong.
But let’s translate that final quote, shall we?
It is revolting that Rick and Karen Santorum choose to stigmatize and harass those of us who, as they did, grieve over the loss of a possible child in the second trimester.
Because losing a baby because the mother was so sick that she could not sustain the pregnancy any longer is exactly the same as losing a baby by injecting that baby with poison and then pulling it out of its mother’s womb in pieces, isn’t it?
I’m not exactly sure if you can write legislation that would distinguish between the two types of situations. I’m quite sure that the political will to try isn’t there right now, anyway. But the two scenarios are different as night and day, and you’d have to be an imbecile not to understand the distinction.
I understand you are using medical terminology, but clearly the article was not accusing the Santorums of having a spontaneous abortion aka miscarriage or premature birth. For better or worse, the common usage of the term ‘abortion’ when used of humans means to deliberately terminate a pregnancy by killing the embryo or fetus. It isn’t, nor ever was, illegal to spontaneously abort or miscarry.
It doesn’t seem to me to be that hard to distinguish between the two scenarios.
In the abortion scenario, your goal is the death of the child. If you want an abortion and the abortionist induces premature labor and the baby is born alive, you have a failed abortion (in the common usage of the term). That’s why we have things like partial birth abortion – because it’s too likely that merely inducing premature labor in the third trimester and sometimes even in the late second trimester, won’t actually kill the baby, so the abortionist has to be sure it is dead before it is born.
In the second scenario, the treatment of the mother may cause her go into premature labor which will almost certainly lead to the death of the child; but the death of the child is a side effect of a treatment to keep the mother alive. The medical personnel are not directly attacking the child and in fact, will do whatever they can to keep the child alive during and after birth.
Mary,
I would argue with you that, in a typical abortion scenario, the goal is not necessarily the death of the child. I think that, when a woman is pregnant and does not wish to be, the goal of abortion is to not be pregnant. The child, if it is thought about at all, is merely seen as collateral damage.
And in Mrs. Santorum’s case, the child was collateral damage of the medical treatment that saved her life. Which, on the face of it, is not that different from your typical abortion. And yet…Intentions make all the difference.
And yes, I agree with you, that it isn’t that hard to distinguish between the two types of scenarios. But try to write a law that would permit the one and prohibit the other, and you’ll find that it really is not all that easy.
An unnecessary abortion is kind of like pornography–terribly difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. And so, if you try to write a law that lets through the medically necessary abortions, the law ends up being something like “abortion is a decision best made between a woman and her doctor”.
Which is terribly, terribly frustrating.
I think the main wish is to “undo” the pregnancy, and elective abortion gives the illusion of doing that. The woman getting an abortion does not just want to not be pregnant – she also does not want there to be a child. Her goal is to not have a child, but since once she is pregnant, the child already exists, the only way to “not have” the child is to kill it.
If the goal were simply to not be pregnant, then late abortions would make no sense. At that point, you’ve already gone through most of the pregnancy anyway, and the baby has to come out one way or another – you don’t even avoid labor, necessarily. The only thing you “gain” from a late abortion is a dead baby. Really, it almost seems to me it would be safer for the woman, at a certain stage in her pregnancy, to have the child and kill it. It’s got to be more dangerous to pull out a child in pieces at that point.
interesting discussion here, thanks, Melissa and Mary.
I looked up several definitions of abortion. One definition of abortion was simply “termination of pregnancy”, according to which even a c-section to deliver a baby at full term would be an abortion. Or even natural childbirth.
According to wikipedia: (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion)
Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo, resulting in or caused by its death. An abortion can occur spontaneously due to complications during pregnancy or can be induced, in humans and other species.
According to that definition, an abortion, spontaneous or induced, hasn’t occurred unless the embryo or fetus dies. According to that definition, if the doctors induced labor (which the article doesn’t claim), the Santorums had a spontaneous abortion, more commonly called a miscarriage or premature birth. If the doctors did induce labor, by this definition they had an induced abortion. However, by that definition, any pregnancy where labor was induced and the baby died would be considered an induced abortion, even if labor were induced in a pregnancy that had gone to term.
According to CancerHelp UK (http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/utilities/glossary/):
Abortion is the medical name for the early end of a pregnancy that is either natural (a miscarriage) or carried out for medical reasons. The word is most commonly used to mean the deliberate ending of a pregnancy.
According to this definition, if the doctors induced labor, the Santorums had an induced abortion and if they didn’t, they had a natural abortion (miscarriage).
I would say that Right to Life groups are against the deliberate killing of the embryo or fetus, whether by inducing labor prematurely or by any other means. By some definitions of abortion, the partial birth abortion of a post term baby would not be an abortion because it was not a “premature” termination of pregnancy.
I would also say that in the common use of the term abortion, what is meant is a termination of pregnancy for the purpose of killing the embryo or fetus. I’m not sure what the legal definition is though.
Mary, are you from Canada?
There is no legal definition of abortion in Canada. There is no law regarding abortion in Canada. In Canada, a human being is not a human being until it has left its mother’s body and the umbilical cord has been severed. Before then it is a non-entity, invisible, it doesn’t exist.
And because the child doesn’t exist in law, many people are seriously offended when you talk about it. And that’s why you get people who say ludicrous things like showing a woman an ultrasound of her fetus before her abortion is harassing her.
You can’t kill someone who doesn’t exist. And there are many, many people out there who really, truly, believe that a child doesn’t exist unless its mother gives it birth.
Nope. I’m from the US. Here’s the US legal definition of abortion: http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/abortion/
“Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by various methods, including medical surgery, before the fetus is able to sustain independent life.”
That’s an interesting definition. If “able to sustain independent life” means able to sustain life without further medical intervention, then any time a doctor induces labor or does a c-section and the infant dies, that would be an abortion, because it clearly couldn’t sustain independent life.
On the other hand, if “able to sustain independent life” means able to sustain life after any necessary medical intervention following birth, then terminating a pregnancy even in the second trimester wouldn’t be an abortion so long as the baby lived.
Neither of those seem to be what the law really means by abortion, so I guess that just shows I’m not a lawyer.
Anyway, in the US: first trimester: legal if done by a licensed physician. Second trimester: legal, but may be regulated to protect the woman’s health. Third trimester: may be regulated to protect the fetus, but not at the expense of the woman’s life or health.
I think that’s why the pro-abortion people don’t like anything that might imply abortion is ever dangerous because that allows states to regulate it more in the second and third trimester. And regulation of something usually (always?) results in less availability or higher cost of that thing.