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an Ohio bill [would] ban abortions in cases where a pregnant woman has had a positive test result or prenatal diagnosis indicating Down syndrome. Physicians convicted of performing an abortion under such circumstances could be charged with a fourth-degree felony, stripped of their medical license and held liable for legal damages. The pregnant woman would face no criminal liability.
Several other states have considered similar measures, triggering emotional debate over women's rights, parental love, and the trust between doctor and patient.
The Ohio bill's chief Senate sponsor, Republican Sen. Frank LaRose, said Republican lawmakers accelerated the measure after hearing a mid-August CBS News report on Iceland's high rate of abortions in cases involving Down syndrome. The report asserted Iceland had come close to "eradicating" such births.
[...] Doctors and medical students are fighting the measure.
Parvaneh Nouri, a third-year medical student at Wright State University, told lawmakers it would do little to stop abortions but could stop information-sharing between patients and their doctors.
“It destroys the trust of our patients, for which we have worked tirelessly over generations of physicians to cultivate,” she said.
Indiana's version of the law has been blocked by a federal judge while North Dakota's law has gone unchallenged due to the state's only abortion clinic not performing abortions after 16 weeks. An Oklahoma bill that would prohibit abortions based on any genetic abnormalities did not reach the state Senate.
Previously: Down Syndrome Births Nearly Eliminated in Iceland
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DutchUncle on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:29PM (7 children)
In any other context, this would be prima facie stupid: Test for a problem, and if a problem is found, you are NOT ALLOWED to fix or eliminate the problem. Even in the context of abortion, and the religiously-based effort to prohibit abortion, this seems politically backwards; they might get some fence-sitters if they tried to ban abortion UNLESS a specific problem was found. This way, they're guaranteeing a lifetime handicap, which nobody really wants.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:41PM (2 children)
Would be interesting to see what the abortion laws are in jurisdictions that offer free healthcare. I bet they'd be leaner.
Because in such places, I guarantee you, they'd rather not have to pay to support a child who is unwanted, unlikely to ever lead a normal adult life, or where the birth process would cause more damage to the mother.
I imagine only in places that can profit from you being forced to give birth, and then forced to look after a child with much greater medical and other requirements for their entire lives, and/or forced to be subjected to a harrowing process likely to affect your health, would anyone ever support such a motion.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday September 27 2017, @02:48AM (1 child)
In Canada, there are no abortion laws. After we got a Charter of Rights, the Supreme Court threw out the old laws and no government has dared to introduce new ones. Simply, a fetus is not a person in law.
Understand that before the the Charter (1982), there was one famous abortionist (Henry Morgantelor sp?) who got off through jury nullification, twice IIRC, the citizenry made such a huge outcry about the double jeopardy that was used to jail him that the government illegalized double jeopardy and eventually enshrined it in the Constitution. Generally Canadians are in favour of legal abortions.
We also have fairly comprehensive sex education and availability to birth control, because face it, almost no one actually likes abortions and prevention is the best way to avoid them.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:16AM
Pretty much the same in the UK - so long as it's before a certain way into the pregnancy (by which point you generally know you're pregnant), which I don't think is a bad thing.
Ireland, however, is an entirely different matter. In fact, the mothers often ship themselves over to the UK just to do it and then return to their home country. There are clinics set up just to allow that.
Nobody wants to abort a baby.
Nobody with a brain wants to bring a baby or mother into life-long suffering, either.
Abortion because of rape? Hell, why are we even discussing it? Of course they should be able to.
Abortion because of medical conditions, danger to the mother? It's pretty simple to understand.
Abortion because otherwise the child is born to a mother who doesn't want it? That's quite literally choosing a life of abuse and neglect for the child, unless you want to make it so that she can give up the baby, discretely, no questions asked, no stigma attached.
But, surely, if the child stood a chance, had a reasonable parent, who could cope with the birth and the giving away, where it was something they could go through and would be willing to give the child to people who could look after it, that's what would happen, whether abortion existed or not.
I never got the philosophical issue at all. Even the term is unnecessarily loaded. Termination. Abortion.
You chose not to continue be pregnant. What a difficult, intellectual, measured, reasoned, sensible decision, if you don't think it's the right thing for you or the child.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Virindi on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:46PM (2 children)
Nope. After you get the test, since there is no penalty for the woman getting the abortion, you can just go to another doctor to get the abortion. If you don't tell them about the test, they cannot be guilty of this crime because they had no idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:58PM
I like the way you think.
Still, this would require withholding from your new doctor all your medical records. Assuming you have health insurance (which under Obamacare we are all supposed to have)... this may not be possible. The push is for electronic records that are sharable.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:29PM
I'm afraid they may have already thought of doctor shopping. All they'd have to say is that doctor shopping is suspicious enough behavior or come up with some other tangential reason to be suspicious, as shown in the text below:
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 26 2017, @04:19PM
That's because you're thinking like a rational person, not a religious nutjob. But rational people are not these legislator's constituency.
A religious nutjob generally thinks that the affliction of Down's Syndrome is the result of God punishing the parent(s) for some sin, particularly having sex outside of wedlock. So they want to make it impossible to use abortion to avoid that punishment. Hence banning abortion in this context is *more* important than banning abortion of healthy babies.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.