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There needs to be a health exception because sometimes a pregnancy will maim a woman, crippling her or permanently disabling her... and it isn't life threatening.

Heart attack, kidney failure, paralysis, blindness, coma, all of these are non-fatal. A woman who would be doomed to one of these states would be denied an abortion because her "life" was not at stake, only her health.

Perhaps what pro-lifers should be working towards is not a D&X abortion ban, but rather a more strict definition of what qualifies as a "health" exception.

If there's any risk of that, I would think that they would find it before the sixth month, or whenever the partial-birth abortions start being used.

I mean, just reading that description, it's a healthy and most likely viable baby that is killed. Why can't they birth it?

We aren't saying that there shouldn't be a health exception for abortion in general, of course there should, although the point at which health is a permitted reason needs to be stated very clearly to prevent abuse. But health is never an issue by the time you reach partial-birth abortion stage.

That's a different case though; If the baby is dead or will be dead then you know that we make exceptions.

This is what I really don't get: If birthing will cause these insane health problems, how does -half birthing,- going so far as to be able to -stab scissors into the child's neck- pose any less of a threat?

Heads are smaller then bodies, when I last checked. And if you are going to go so far as to break the bones of the baby's body, why not break the skull as well?

For that matter, if you are going to go to all this trouble, why not do what people who want the kid do in that situation and have a c-section?

Id be interested to see your sources on this. Especially the numbers saying that often D&X is done on stillbirths.

From what I could find searching my wifes medical journals, I found very little support from the "medically neccesary" viewpoint. Most of the articles mentioned that D&X is neccesary for the mothers mental health, something I believe that we can both agree is something that ought to not really be considered if the fetus has achieved personhood.

In most cases C-section or Symphysiotomy will be succesful enough to save the life of the mother and the life of the baby. The only study I found that pointed to D&X being significantly more succesful at saving the mothers life showed that if the mother had vaginal dlivery she would have a 34% chance of death whereas having an abortion would only be a 1/14 death rate. This only applied to people suffering from a rare disease that has recently been diagnosed called Eisenmenger's syndrome. The study only took into account 44 documented cases, involving 70 pregnancies. It was vague in not saying where these operations were performed and it was vague by not explaining if these "pregnancy interuptions" were strictly D&X or if they were any abortion period. Also, this study didnt take into account the renewed technique of Symphysiotomy. Id love to see a study comparing the mortality and complication rate of Symphysiotomy versus D&X.

What D&X supporters are trying to suggest is that any risk to the mothers life is of much greater concern than the 100% death rate of the baby in D&X. If we take a more dangerous approach to the mother by having a C-section, which at worst given the previous study, is 34%, we can increase the chance of the fetus's viablity. I believe from what I remember the doctors telling me and my wife when our son was to be born at 23 weeks, that it was something like 20-40% survival rate for the baby. It was also a 90% disablity rate ranging from severe brain defects to mild breathing problems such as asthma. Are we trying to strictly increase the mothers chance of surviving in the worst case scenario by roughly 25% by decreasing the fetus' chance of survival to 0?

I saw an interesting medical case on TLC where two girls were joined together in a car crash by a metal pole, which I believe was a street sign. The doctors had to take into consideration how to treat each girl to help them both survive. The main consideration they had was how to seperate them without hurting them in the process. One girl was punctured a little more seriously than the other, yet the doctors didnt just kill the other girl so that it would be easier and safer to rescue the other. They tried to save both girls lives. Fortunately, as it would only be shown on TLC of course, they did indeed succeed in rescuing both girls. However, if both had died, would it have been wrong to try to save both and not just kill one outright and go for the other? In medicine there are many times when you need to make decisions to let someone go when it is obvious they both will certainly die...however when there is a significant chance to save both, why do you resort to the auto death of the less likely to survive?

I find it strange too that the main article we found on Jama about partial birth abortion spent most of its "medical opinion" expressing how women who are young and poor deserve to be rid of having to adopt their child or raise them unwantedly through the use of partial birth abortion. It isnt neccesary everytime it is performed, and I do not believe it is neccesary anytime it is performed. I looked long and hard to find a good article on it through 4 journals and libraries but I couldnt find anything conclusively pointing to the fact that D&X is ever neccesary.