It is in California, Colorado, Oregon, Vemont, and Washington, to a greater or lesser extent. They call it physician assisted, but I believe in most or all of those states, it just legalizes a doctor prescribing medication even if he knows it is going to be used in a suicide of a terminally ill person. The sort of stuff Kevorkian did remains illegal.
Yeah, you're right, but
pediatric euthanasia remains illegal in all of those states. I should have been more specific.
Shit, did they share any gross dead fetus pics with the world?
You know, I have a really clear memory of seeing a photo, but I can't find it online and since this happened in 1996, it seems unlikely that any photos that do exist have been widely publicized, so I think I might be conflating memories here. There are photos in this thread of children posing with a dead infant sibling, for example.
While that does sound like a legit horrible situation I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for conservatives who will try to prevent other women accessing abortion or condemning women for it. Hell, wouldn't that kind of thing be technically illegal under the Ohio ban?
I have zero sympathy for Rick and Karen Santorum. They chose to terminate a pregnancy by inducing labor before the possibility of fetal viability. That is indisputable. That they continue to refer to the baby as "stillborn" while shitting on and actively campaigning against the right of a woman to choose
exactly the same thing they did is an egotistical fantasy at best and a conscious deception with the intent of preserving a fanatical agenda at worst. If they were merely a regular couple who just thought that their own abortion was the only moral abortion, I might be willing to entertain the suggestion of the former. However, Rick based his entire career on his rigid anti-abortion stance, with Karen at his side to cry about her abiding love for children and desire to raise Godly arrows for their quiver, all while knowing that they had enjoyed the luxury of choice and were lying about it to keep others from doing the same.
For these two to smugly declare that abortion is always immoral and unjustifiable is the most insidious, venal sort of hypocrisy, and it certainly lays bare their emphasis on dogma over mercy. Super Christlike of them, I'm sure Jesus himself would approve.
Rick and Karen Santorum deserve contempt, not sympathy.
Edited to add that yes, as far as I understand the Ohio abortion bill, an appellate court recently held that the right to abortion pre-viability is not absolute.
Also, some sources say the Santorums terminated at 19 weeks and others say 20. My suspicion is that this is more intentional obfuscation of the facts. Regardless, though, a 20 week fetus was not viable in 1996 and is at the extreme low end of "
periviable" fetal age in 2021, with fewer than 5% of fetuses born before 23 weeks of gestation surviving, and between 98-100% of those survivors having severe to profound disability as a result of their prematurity. Most physicians wouldn't find it unethical to withhold intensive, heroic measures for an infant born at 20 weeks, even today. Even in hospitals with the very best high level NICU care, it is very, very unlikely that a baby born that early would even survive, much less have any quality of life. In 1996, inducing then was definitely a death sentence, and the Santorums would have signed informed consent documentation which made that outcome clear. There's no way they can justifiably call it anything but what it is.
I read a blog a while ago by a mom whose baby was born at 23 weeks 1 day gestational age. When she went into labor, she was given the option of going home to miscarry naturally, but chose to deliver in the hospital on the off chance that her baby, who weighed less than a pound (454 g) at birth, would survive. He did, but spent two
years in the hospital, had almost all of the expected complications of being that premature, and still requires a trach and ventilator to stay alive.
