Originally posted by CardiacCoug
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But sure, line drawing is tough, especially when it's between two strong interests. Yet we do it all the time. Take medical malpractice, for example. We have a strong interest in getting high quality care, but we also know that demanding too much of our doctors raises costs to prohibitively high levels. We try to balance those factors against one another to determine what standard of care we can reasonably expect of medical professionals. It's messy, it's complicated, and it's far from perfect-- I happen to think we are too demanding of doctors at present-- but we certainly don't refuse to hold any bad doctor accountable for malpractice.
As it applies in the abortion context, we are drawing lines whether you are squeamish about it or not, so might as well try to draw them in the right places. My feeling is that we are either weighing the baby's right to life far too lightly or we are weighing it against the wrong interest-- i.e., we should be weighing a baby's right to life against a mother's health, not her right to avoid the consequences of her decisions.
And there are plenty of problems with your "common sense" solution, not the least of which is the fact that you can't tell me when it applies. "Around 24 weeks or so"? That doesn't exactly pin it down-- especially as medicine improvements cut down the number of weeks before viability.
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