Under what circumstances would a woman wait until her 5th month to get an abortion?

Maybe she found out the kid was going to have horrible health issues?
^^ That is just a guess ^^
Maybe she couldn’t afford it till then?
^^ just another guess ^^
Maybe she broke up with the father and it was her way of really hurting him?
^^ again just a guess ^^
If she didn’t make it public knowledge who really knows why she waited so long.

Not every woman knows right away.
Certainly a change in circumstance.
Possibly the child or mother having health issues.

I always thought there was a cut off point where a Doctor won’t do an abortion,unless the kid or the mothers health is in serious peril if carrying it to term.

I just can’t even imagine carrying a baby for that amount of time and then having an abortion, unless it was for some serious medical issue. Man, it would be moving around and kicking by 5 months. Before that you can subconsciously pretend it’s nothing.

@SQUEEKY2 Different states have different laws. In Arizona, I think, there is no cut off point, even in the 3rd trimester.

The mother may be in a location where it is difficult to get to a provider. A woman in rural Kansas or Texas would have to drive a long way to get to a provider.

If she is poor, even more difficult to get to a clinic.

20 weeks is measured from the last menstrual period, so conception would usually happen a couple weeks after that. An abortion at 4 weeks would be before you’d miss a period with the way they’re counting. (not questioning you, just clarifying the terms)

People with inadequate healthcare (so young, poor, or not trying to conceive) don’t usually know they’re pregnant right away and might not know until they start showing.

Surveys have been done to determine why mothers choose to have later abortions, here’s one

71% of women were unaware they were pregnant or misjudged gestation
48% of women found it hard to make arrangements for abortion
33% of women were afraid to tell their partner or parents
24% of women took longer to decide whether to have an abortion
8% of women had an abortion after a change in their relationship status
8% of women were initially pressured not to have abortion
6% of women chose to have an abortion because of a change in circumstances after becoming pregnant
6% of women were not properly educated on how timing affects abortion
5% of women were unaware that abortion was available to them
2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy
11% Other

——

Honestly, there are very very few late-term abortions.

In 2003, from data collected in those areas that sufficiently reported gestational age, it was found that 6.2% of abortions were conducted between 13 and 15 weeks, 4.2% between 16 and 20 weeks, and 1.4% at or after 21 weeks.

Abortions are usually available until the baby is viable on it’s own. 24 weeks is seen as a minimum for viability.

In 1997, the Guttmacher Institute estimated the number of abortions in the U.S. past 24 weeks to be 0.08%, or approximately 1,032 per year.

I’d guess those are health choices, either regarding the baby or mother, but couldn’t find anything definitive there. I’m not sure it matters and definitely wouldn’t want to be asked if I had to make those choices.

I was a couple of days late, but didn’t think much about it. Until the morning, when I was in the bathroom getting ready for class and I threw up the toast I’d had for breakfast. I started feeling nauseous and it hit me instantly. I thought, “God, I better not throw up!” and I did. And I knew in that instant I was pregnant. I immediately went to the campus nurse. She drew blood, came back with the results, beaming and said “You’re not pregnant!”
I said, “Yes, I am.”
She said, “The test says you’re not!”
I said, “The test is wrong,” and sadly walked out.
Went back a week later and the test was then positive.

When I was in my 30’s I was doing something in the house, then suddenly paused, examining my body mentally. I said, “If I didn’t know better I’d say I was pregnant!” But I’d had my period just the week before so I didn’t think I could be.
It ended up to be an ectopic pregnancy which almost killed me. I still had my period through it.

They are very rare – only 1.3% of abortions are performed after 21 weeks.

A study on the reasons for late-term abortions says this:

“Later abortion recipients experienced logistical delays (e.g., difficulty finding a provider and raising funds for the procedure and travel costs), which compounded other delays in receiving care. Most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.”

I was young and nulliparous, whatever that is. I’ll read it as “dumbass.”

@Dutchess_III Just analyzing the word – never heard it before – it means having no children.

Well, that too! And I was a dumbass.

I can give you\some examples off the top of my head.

1. Young and scared. Sometimes it is hard to tell parents/boyfriends, whatever until it is undenyable.

2. Access is limited. The State and the Holier than thou have made difficult by closing down services in not only the immediate area but surrounding counties (and sometimes States) and you have to work to come up with the money to get to wherever these services are still available.

3. Sperm Donor (I hesitate to use the term father) decides at 4.75 months that he is out of there and leaves you to fend the best you can.

4. Lack of funds for pre-natal care leads to either problems with the health of the fetus or the finding out late in the pregnancy that there are problems that have existed from conception.

I can’t answer for anyone else, but my mom couldn’t have had me and raised me without the support of her family, my wonderful grandparents.

Yes, she could have, but it’s wonderful that she had that kind of back up. I was in Kansas and my mom was in Washington state. I would have had to have moved. It would probably have been a better decision…but I didn’t want to move. This is where I grew up. I just didn’t tell them about it.

Takes a month to determine she is pregnant, plus four months to manage to successfully get away from her controlling anti-abortion parents and get to someone willing to perform the abortion?

(i.e. It seems to me that the more difficult people try to make it to get an abortion, the worse the circumstances tend to be for people trying to do it anyway (particularly when it’s illegal).)

I read somewhere that making abortion illegal will not stop abortion. It will just mean more women will be dying from back ally abortions.

@Dutchess_III This probably isn’t the best site to discuss my feelings about this particular issue. Peace.

Maybe it took too long to reserve an appointment with the doctor?

I asked this because there are posts flying around on Facebook about “dismembering” a “baby” during an abortion. But the vast majority of elective abortions are performed before there is anything to dismember. I don’t think any woman would wait 5 months, when there would be dismemberment involved, to have an abortion.

“I just can’t even imagine carrying a baby for that amount of time and then having an abortion, unless it was for some serious medical issue. Man, it would be moving around and kicking by 5 months. Before that you can subconsciously pretend it’s nothing.”

You just touched the pulse of what the majority of anti-abortion proponents are against. The fact that late-term is exceedingly rare is beside the point. At some stage during the pregnancy you have a life that should be granted rights. I have found it hard to stomach that the left who rightfully want to progress “intersectionality” don’t accept the fact that fetuses are humans. The religious right will claim “at conception” but most practical anti-abortion proponents don’t have much of a problem with abortions when there is more zygote and not so much fetus.

There is a TV series, called I didn’t know I was pregnant.” Or something like that. I watched 1 part, of 1 episode. A woman gave birth in her toilet, and didn’t even realize it. Then, she went back to bed. Later, she was awoken by the baby crying, in the toilet. She was crying, as she recanted the tale. I tried to feel sympathetic, but I just thought she was a complete idiot. How the hell do you carry a animal inside yiu, for that long, and have a person fall out of you, without knowing? I’m not a female, but that is just hard to believe…. I’m sure that if she voted, she voted Trump. I don’t KNOW, I just know….

@ARE_you_kidding_me :: How do you feel about welfare, WIC, and foodstamps?

On the whole I generally don’t have problems with any of it.

@ARE_you_kidding_me I am fairly certain that late term abortions are not done by women who suddenly decided they didn’t want to be pregnant any more. They’re done for serious medical reasons.

That’s generally the case but not always. Remember exceedingly rare and you also have to qualify what “late-term” is… I mean at three months I would consider that “late-term”

@ARE_you_kidding_me – there’s no need to use numbers from 1997. Same report from 2014

What are you basing your opinions on? What’s special about 3 months? Most people don’t have an ultrasound until 9–12 weeks and a full anatomy scan isn’t usually done until around 20 weeks.

What would you tell someone who has to make a decision regarding their family, life, and health based on that information? Why is that a political consideration?

Surely it is something for a woman, her doctor and potentially her partner to decide and not anyone else.

I would say late term was 19 years but that does not stop government from sending your and my child into combat overseas to increase some fuckers bottom line in what is basically a state-sponsored retroactive abortion.

@funkdaddy at what point do you grant a human the status of “life”

@ARE_you_kidding_me – when they can live outside of another human.

That is of course a matter of opinion that I don’t happen to agree with. At all. Even infants are incapable of surviving outside the care of other humans on their own for quite some time. Are they not human either? Is a baby somehow not human seconds before birth? A day, a week, a month??? Where is the line to be drawn? It’s not an easy question to answer if you’re being honest. I see the “outside of the mother” opinion as sort of a cop out.

To be fair, saying “life begins at conception” is a cop out too. May as well say “life begins at intercourse that results in pregnancy” or when the sperm and egg are formed… sounds crazy because it is. Just as crazy as saying there is some magical barrier that is crossed in the birth canal.

A cop out? I guess let me start by reassuring you that I’ve put a lot of thought into this. That’s my opinion because it’s the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. If it’s a cop out, I came to it the hard way.

Speaking only personally, I shared your opinion until it was challenged and it seems to be the default. I wouldn’t call it a cop out, I understand the perspective, but I would say it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny from either logic or experience.

If I changed my mind a said a fetus is a “life” or a human before it can live outside its mother, what else is a “life”? What differentiates a fetus from an organ or tumor? We wouldn’t call those humans even though they grew from us and develop into complex, purposeful portions of a living whole.

The difference we see is that a fetus has the potential to be more. It can grow into a life that exists independently. It could smile and love and change the world someday. The potential is what makes it special and makes so many people center their world around the tiny humans that are the result. I’m one of those people, I love the little kiddos and their potential keeps me moving.

The thing is, once a fetus is viable, absolutely anyone can raise it. It will grow and flourish with appropriate care from any source. It is a “life” when it can sustain life. That’s the definition of life. It is human in the sense we’re talking about at the same time.

While a fetus, there is only one source of life, and that’s the mother. There is no alternate, no one else can raise or care for that fetus in the womb. In your terminology, she is the “life” and the human, and has the autonomy to decide what happens inside of her own body, if no where else.

The alternatives invite odd scenarios where you’re not in charge of your own body due to the potential benefits or discomfort of others. The potential for good in letting an individual be damaged or suffer is not an acceptable ethical tradeoff in any other medical discussion.

I’d be open to listening to where you think any of this isn’t true or reasonable. As I said, I once held essentially your view, and the questions I’m asking you are the questions that forced me to examine that more thoroughly.

The view you have is biased because if the entanglement that the mother has with the child and the social implications of it. This is beside the point when defining when “life begins.” The answer to that is grey and you just simply cannot create an arbitrary line such as immediately after birth and say “here it is.” I don’t think anyone deeply believes that. They state that to avoid the uncomfortable and in some ways unfortunate reality that it is somewhere in the hard to define span between conception and birth.

@ARE_you_kidding_me -

This is beside the point when defining when “life begins.” The answer to that is grey and you just simply cannot create an arbitrary line such as immediately after birth and say “here it is.”

to clarify, I’m not saying life begins at birth…

I’m saying life begins when it has the capacity to sustain itself. In this discussion, medically speaking, that’s about 22 to 24 weeks, or about 500 grams in most cases. There’s a bit of a range, but it’s fairly definite that you need certain parts to work in certain ways in order to live.

I’m pretty sure that infants will die rather quickly if left alone so are they “self sustaining” These are very hard things to nail down, everyone will have a differing opinion.

I think you can disappear up your own (or our collective) asses arguing over when life begins but the bottom line is that pregnancy is a unique situation where there are potentially two conflicting sets of needs – the mother’s and the fetus’s. Since the fetus is inside the mother and she will be the sole presumptive caretaker, it is her bodily autonomy that must take precedence. Until the state is prepared to take prenatal care of all mothers and post-natal care of any unwanted children that might be born, it should be up to the woman and her doctor. Nobody is saying that any of these decisions are easily made or that there aren’t conflicting rights, but it is sheer hypocrisy to talk about the sanctity of life while the fetus is in the mother but not care at all about the children being killed daily by gun violence.

Why is a woman’s “entanglement” in the situation beside the point? Isn’t that the crux of the issue?

Edit: @janbb addressed the question before I got it posted.

“Surviving” means they can breath on their own, their heart beats on its own. Their body is fully functioning. They are helpless at birth, because they have to be born so early, so someone has to feed them, so of course, if no one fed them, they would starve to death.

These are very hard things to nail down, everyone will have a differing opinion.

Babies born too early can not survive under any conditions. There is no machine, no medical care, no magic in the world that will keep them alive. This is a medical fact up until about the ages I mentioned above. It’s not an opinion.

Yep.

I would go so far as to argue that it actually doesn’t matter whether you consider the fetus alive at the time of abortion. While the fetus continues to use the woman’s body in order to stay alive (note that this is entirely different than the strawman argument of “but infants will die too if you don’t provide for them” – providing services and providing your body are two entirely different concepts), the woman’s bodily autonomy overrules. In any other medical situation in which somebody needs to use my body to stay alive (e.g. they need a kidney, they need a blood transfusion) no law in the land will mandate that I give use of my body to them. Pregnancy should be no exception.

^^ Which is similar to what I said.

The mother is beside the point. When is a life a life? 10 weeks? 20? When the heart starts beating? I’m not on board with this whole donating a kidney or blood analogy. It’s not the same as being physically entangled with another person. Can a conjoined twin decide not to let the other use their shared organs? I get the worry about the health of the mother. It’s of course in the sphere of exceptions we must make. But fuck can’t we stop regurgitating the same talking points about “the sanctity if life” or “my body my choice”

@ARE_you_kidding_me There was a Supreme Court consensus that viability is after the second trimester. That is probably a best possible conclusion to the question of “when does life begin.”

But nobody seems to be okay with that.

Nobody knows, scientifically, when life starts, @ARE_you_kidding_me, so we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

My opinion is that nobody should be forced by the state to put their health at risk in order to save another. The ambiguity of when life starts is irrelevant to my opinion, because my statement applies equally regardless of whether the fetus is alive or not.

If all you’re hearing from our posts is “my body my choice” then you’re not really listening.

“There was a Supreme Court consensus that viability is after the second trimester. That is probably a best possible conclusion to the question of “when does life begin.”

But nobody seems to be okay with that”

“My opinion is that nobody should be forced by the state to put their health at risk in order to save another. The ambiguity of when life starts is irrelevant to my opinion, because my statement applies equally regardless of whether the fetus is alive or not.”

Much better answers folks, thank you.

@zenvelo That’s somewhere in the range of my thinking

@Mariah I get what you’re saying but I don’t completely agree that a woman’s bodily autonomy overrules. If someone needs a kidney you are not the only person who can lend this sort of aid. I don’t like it at all and honestly it’s something I struggle with but if a “host” is not in immediate danger then the fetus that is a human after a certain period should be given rights like everyone else. If a known pregnancy progresses past a certain point without objection and without complication bodily autonomy rights have effectively been waived. There should probably be a legal precedent for this sort of thing where a choice must be made one way or another. Thankfully this is like I have said…exceedingly rare.

IMO everyone needs to really weigh in on this and not let activists lead the charge. There is no good solution and there never will be but I kind of feel that forcing an arbitrary line in a habitually grey area may be necessary.

What do you consider to be “immediate” danger? Pregnancy has permanent effects on a woman’s body. Even in a completely ordinary pregnancy it is not uncommon for the woman to have problems with incontinence, muscle damage, vaginal tearing, prolapses, deformation, etc. afterwards. And don’t get me started on C-section, which is a major abdominal surgery, with all the infection risks associated with that, that can leave you with problems similar to the ones I have with scar tissue in the abdominal cavity. I can tell you first-hand that is no walk in the park. This is ignoring all the less common stuff that can happen that is even more devastating. Why should anyone be allowed to tell a woman that she has to be willing to take those risks with her health? This is such a personal decision, I can’t believe anybody wants the state involved.

I just don’t think anyone should be punished for being protective of their own health. If a guy falls in on the tracks while I’m waiting for the subway I shouldn’t be punished if I don’t jump in there to save him, even if I’m the only one around, and even if it’s not obvious whether or not a train is approaching. I should be under no obligation to take on a risk to save someone else.

Maybe you have to be someone who has experienced a loss of health to understand how I feel about this, I don’t know.

This is why I think that there needs to be a sort of hard deadline where a choice must be made one way or another where typical pregnancy issues are accepted if pregnancy is allowed to come to term. Immediate danger would be like…death, serious complications where these legalities are waived. It’s still a choice but one with a deadline.

If you don’t help someone who has fallen on tracks it’s not always your problem unless you are the only other person there. In those cases honestly I feel like yeah, you should have some legal obligation to try to help. Not a popular opinion and you can call it a grey area but if you refuse to help someone in need and you are able, even if it’s Hitler you’re a shitty human. If you’re going that route why should the state mandate I pay to supplement your fucking health care. I personally don’t have a problem with it even if I need that money to eat.

Well we already established above that studies show the main reason why women have abortions late is because of barriers (“difficulty finding a provider and raising funds for the procedure and travel costs”) not because they just feel like being an asshole, so placing time restrictions is just going to harm innocent women who are trying to do what they must. Pro-life people keep throwing more legal hoops to jump through into the process (mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods, etc), which just results in later and later abortions. If they were reasonable they’d want the process to go as smoothly and quickly as possible.

“Immediate danger would be like…death, serious complications”
Spoken like somebody who has never experienced disability. Someday you will understand why I’m not willing to risk further damage to my body. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

“If you’re going that route why should the state mandate I pay to supplement your fucking health care.”
Because money != bodily sacrifice, seriously? I support a graduated tax structure to pay for healthcare so if somebody is so poor that paying a tax is going to put them in physical danger they shouldn’t have to pay.

How much are we actually disagreeing? It seems like this argument comes down to the idea that a woman might decide to abort for careless, frivolous reasons a child they had otherwise decided to carry full-term—and therefore there ought to be legislation in place to prevent that. But if we actually do surveys and see what reasons women have for making the decision to abort, especially late-term, that’s not what’s actually happening. They’re making those decisions for real, serious, often tragic reasons.(And/or, as has been mentioned, there were barriers put in place that prevented them from seeking an earlier abortion). Why involve law to address a concept that doesn’t match reality, especially when that law’s probably going to affect women that don’t match the conceptual concern? Unless I’m missing something.

I do disagree on the train track scenario. There are too many variables for someone to have a legal obligation to jump down. Just for example, what if that person has a physical impediment—not one that would make the jump-and-rescue impossible, but would make it significantly less likely for them to be successful than for most others. Do they have a legal obligation to make the jump even if it’s more risky for them? Or say that person has a child, or an otherwise dependent relative—is it really a legal obligation of theirs to risk not only their life, but the wellbeing of the person who depends on them? And how do we measure what “enough time” would be for a given person to react with a reasonable expectation of their success? Or is chance of success not a factor at all, and they’ll be legally on the hook if they weren’t willing to die? It’s certainly wonderful for a person to jump down—and in fact, in one of the situations, the man who jumped down had a family who was with him in the station, watching him, freaking out because they were sure they had just watched him die… Certainly wonderful, altruistic behavior; that man was a hero; but it doesn’t seem like something that can be legally required.

Plus, it seems difficult to say that, in the case where there’s only one other person, that person’s legally obligated to act—but if there’s more than one, then the responsibility is dispersed and no one’s legally responsible? But what if there were two people still standing on the platform, and it was a situation where they could have worked together to lift the fallen person up—would it then be a legal obligation again?

Of course, I hope we live in a society where, culturally, more often than not, someone—or, rather, many people—will try to help. But that’s different from legal obligation to do so.

(Also, to go back to an earlier point, I’m still not convinced the conjoined twins scenario is an analogous situation, regardless of how we answer the question about the surgery… But if we’re going to be trying to find the limit of bodily autonomy: in cases of conjoined twins who share a vital organ, we have two people who developed from the same embryo and didn’t fully separate. The shared organ is literally a shared organ. Neither can clearly claim it as part of their own body, because it’s the part of their body that literally isn’t theirs alone.)

“Spoken like somebody who has never experienced disability. Someday you will understand why I’m not willing to risk further damage to my body. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person”

You have no idea about that when it comes to me. I have indeed experienced this. Without going into details I have at least in several points of my life been in so much pain that I have wished for death. If you’re not willing to risk further damage then simply abort at first opportunity. I have zero problems with that. Hell, that’s responsible and prudent.

I will do that if I ever have to; I’m lucky enough to not have financial barriers nor live in a state that’s attacking Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. God help the women who aren’t so lucky, I guess.

@Soubresaut I can see not jumping down into a recessed subway track but not leaving an incapacitated person laying across tracks on level ground. I do agree though it’s hard to write laws that basically say “don’t be a psychopath”

Tiller was from Wichita. It’s pretty bad here.

Note that the train tracks example was supposed to illustrate saving another at significant risk of injury to yourself. If you’re saying that the person should have to help only if it’s safe to help, then we aren’t disagreeing.

@Mariah The train track analogy is a bit flawed anyway. It would be more relevant if it meant that after saving that person’s life, you had to feed, house and school them for the rest of their lives as well. Pregnancy is not just a one-off event, it is having a child that needs to be considered too. (And I know you know this, just pointing out that it is part of the discussion that hasn’t been focused on much yet.)

This is true, but my major objection to limiting abortion is about bodily autonomy, which stops being relevant after birth. Of course there are other legitimate reasons why women seek abortions too though.