Friday 12 February 2010

More Ultrasounds = More Abortions (Revised)

I wonder how SUZY ('I'd have as many ultrasounds as I could') ALLCAPS is going to feel about this.
Since ultrasounds have been offered to every pregnant woman in the Netherlands at 20 weeks, late abortions have doubled.

The Dutch branch of Fetus Fetishists International, predictably, is SHRIEEEEEKING.
The Dutch orthodox Christian party ChristenUnie however, is now saying it wants to postpone the official ultrasound to week 24, the legal limit for abortion in the Netherlands. The government introduced the 20-week ultrasound for all women in 2007. If a major defect is found at that stage, parents have four weeks to decide whether they want their baby to be born.

(snip)

Esmé Wiegman, a member of parliament for the ChristenUnie, said Tuesday: "The life ofa person with disabilities is a valuable life. We should be able to count on a careful approach when the life of an unborn child with a disability is involved." She announced she wants to move the regular echo to week 24, when abortion is illegal, to turn the tide. If that proposal fails to get support, she to cap legal abortion at 18 weeks, before the defects become visible.

The orthodox Christian party has always opposed abortion, claiming only God should decide whether a baby is born or not. When it entered into a coalition with the Christian democrats, CDA, and Labour in 2006 however, it signed a government agreement that said the laws on abortion would not be changed.

But there's some good news too:
Another possible consequence is that doctors reported not a single euthanasia of a newborn in 2008. They are obligated to disclose if babies with a condition deemed "incompatible with life", such as certain very serious cases of spina bifida, are euthanised. Experts say fewer such babies are born now because their condition can be determined at the 20 week ultrasound.

Not a single euthanasia. Well, that's good, isn't it?

We'll give the last word to a sciency-facty type:
Gynaecologist Wildschut finds it odd that politicians act surprised about the higher number of abortions. "The whole idea of the 20 week ultrasound was to detect these defects," he said.


UPDATED: To remove fetal pr0n redirect by SUZY. But that's the intellectually crippled fetus fetishist reaction to sciency facty stuff. RUN!

1 comment:

Bina said...

So much for the notion that ultrasounds make women more sentimental towards the fetus, and thus more likely to continue a pregnancy they might otherwise have terminated. This doesn't surprise me, but I can see how it would throw the feto-fetishists for one helluva loop. Fancy a woman not wanting to burden the healthcare system and her own family with a severely disabled infant! What kind of unnatural...etc.

So much, too, for the people who say "God don't make no junk". Well, sorry, but if you believe God made her pregnant, and she's carrying a severely defective fetus, then God DOES make junk. And I'd be seriously inclined to question the benevolence of a God who'd want to burden anyone that way. Especially when a lot of birth defects are actually the result of pollution, poor nutrition and other factors that we could, as a society, take control of...but owing to strange right-wing notions of "freedom", we don't.

It must be awful to be so schizoid, to believe on the one hand in an all-controlling, all-wise, all-good God, and on the other, in a "freedom" that condemns people to give birth to preventably-deformed infants. Good thing I trashed both those belief systems out of my life long ago.

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