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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33916 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I agree that you can’t tell “heartbeat stopped two seconds out of the womb” from “heartbeat stopped in the trash can” based on this report. I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter. The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

It might be possible to track down birth and death certificates for these individuals. I’m sure they exist, but I have no idea if we have access to a vital records database.

Let me first state a few things I think we agree upon:

  1. It is quite difficult for abortion clinics to attempt to save the lives of infants who are born alive. NICU babies require quite a lot of care and these babies probably require as much or more, plus they're outside of a hospital where that care could be provided.
  2. Abortion clinics are probably already accustomed to hiding, at least to some extent, this specific situation--born-alive infants. The mothers are going to be traumatized if they hear the infant survived. Likely they already have procedures in place to spirit the infant away, living or dead, in order to protect the mother from this knowledge.
  3. Abortionists strongly support the right to kill healthy infants who were intended to be aborted. The "why" does not matter. Maybe they think infants have moral worth but that born-alive infants are rare enough to not be worth jeopardizing women's rights to bodily autonomy. Maybe they think infants don't have moral worth. But they certainly want to be allowed to kill healthy born-alive babies. We know this because they have enough pull to legalize doing this in at least one state. If the common people support legalizing this, the ones actually performing the abortions will doubtless be far more extreme.
  4. The existence of born-alive infants is politically inconvenient. You're acknowledging not only that some of these abortions are performed on viable babies, but also that the abortion procedure itself can potentially result in a living baby. Meaning, abortionists admit that the safest abortion in some cases is essentially just delivery of a viable child, except they kill the child first. At that point, why not just deliver the baby?

Keeping all of this in mind, I find it highly unlikely that abortion clinicians don't fudge the numbers.

You'll note that a few of the babies in the documents listed did not have any pre-existing conditions listed and also were not provided any care at all. These are living, breathing babies, capable of experiencing pain, who were left to die without so much as painkillers to ease their passing. I wouldn't trust someone capable of doing that to report something extremely inconvenient and damaging to the movement that owns their soul.

Putting all of that aside though...

The legal requirement for “reasonable” medical care is just as strong as the one for reporting mitigating factors.

Okay, and some of the infants were reported as having no mitigating factors and receiving no medical care at all. Lacking more information, I think we can assume that the legally mandated report is accurate, and that abortion clinicians would report factors favorable to their decision not to help the child if such factors existed.

I don’t believe that justifies assuming the latter.

Lacking more information I think we can assume that the information provided by abortion clinicians paints them in a maximally favorable light.

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