Colombia legalises abortion up to 24 weeks!

Ya es ley! Ya es ley! Ya es ley! Great to hear the good news from Colombia.

As other users have already pointed out you have moved to be sensationalist, disingenuous, and misleading in your interpretation of what happened in Colombia. Attempting to paint it in the most negative light you can...... while making arguments/appeals to emotion rather than intellectual or rational points.

I suspect myself that such tactics were what lost you the referendum in Ireland so significantly. It seems you have not learned from this failure. You are not alone in this. The Anti Choice people I have experienced in Ireland since have failed to learn from it either or failed to change their tactics.

So let me deal with some of the errors and emotional nonsense you employed here:

"An unborn baby is viable at this stage and can survive in an incubator if born prematurely at this stage."

This should be entirely irrelevant. As medical technology improves I somewhat suspect the age of viability will be more and more a moving target. I see little reason to think we will at some point be unable to bring a baby to term from conception within some kind of artificial womb / technology. But certainly our ability to keep a fetus viable is going to improve.

So debating abortion limits based on medical assisted viability is as impractical as it is already intellectually bankrupt. And your posting a story about a baby that survives despite a remarkably early delivery is not morally or ethically informative. It is just a story of the success of our wonderous and awesome medical abilities and science.

"I voted no for the abolition of the 8th amendment as protection of the unborn is sacrosanct."

Or put another way, you want YOUR opinion to be declared correct by fiat and to be afforded no disagreement or challenge. You need to get hip to the fact that it don't work that way. If you can not intellectually or rationally defend your view points than simply declaring them sacred is not going to get you there either.

"The unborn baby feels everything."

Pete is that you?

Unpack this for us. How do you know this to be true? What do you mean by "feel" exactly? Responses to stimulus, even pain stimulus, are not the same thing as "feeling" pain. A simple single celled amoeba responds to the stimulus of having a needle stuck into it. It will move away from the needle. But we do not think it "feels" anything per se. Autonomic responses are not "feelings".

For the emotive move of trying to convince people an aborted fetus "feels" anything to work.... we need to validate that it "feels" something in terms of actually experiencing that pain on some conscious level. Have you any evidence this is the case?

Even if you do however, so what? If there is good reason to perform an abortion then any experience of pain is, while absolutely tragic and unfortunate, does not negate the reasons for the abortion. At best a claim this fetus "feels" anything compels us to do our best to mediate or prevent that pain while performing the procedure.

"Have a look at the attached picture to see what a baby born at 23 weeks gestation looks like."

This is one of the emotional moves that failed you in the referendum. We used to have a user who has since left the forum who was obsessed with informing everyone that the fetus had a tongue and it moves. Because for some reason this fact was meant to pull our heart strings so much it would over ride our intellect and rationality. He became rather irate and haughty when this failed to work.

What it "looks like" is irrelevant. It's human shaped. So what? So is a corpse and so is a mannequin. We do not, and should not, mediate human rights on what something LOOKS like. For example if you posted a picture of a baby that was horrifically facially deformed and missing limbs, at the same age as the picture you did post, it might look hideous to me but I would afford it the same level of human rights and empathy and ethical concern as I would any other baby in any other picture.

LOOKS are irrelevant. Put them aside and instead consider intellectual and rational arguments about when, how, and why we should afford anything or anyone rights of any kind.

All that said however, if it helps you feel better and at peace, it is worth knowing that the vast majority... the near totality in fact.... of abortions of all types (elective or of necessity) happen in or before week 12. Most of the rest happen in or before week 16. And the majority of women who have those abortions say they wish they had had them earlier. And these statistics holds true regardless of how liberal, restrictive, or even illegal abortion is in a given region.

Which means that regardless of the law, women are having the abortions anyway. So if something like "24 weeks" makes you squeal words like "barbaric" it is worth noting that liberal laws and accessible abortion gives women the chance to have those abortions earlier, safer and in the most humane of fashions. As such it is in fact criminalising or resisting abortion that is actually "barbaric". You might want to work on that.

Where abortions are sought after 16 weeks, and certainly at 24 weeks... I think you would be very hard pushed indeed to find any statistics suggesting that the norm there is other than the abortion was out of some deep medical or other necessity and was not simply some whim of the woman/women involved. In fact I suspect you will find most of those women fully wanted/intended to carry the pregnancy to term. But by all means search for some stats on that if you wish.

What actually happened in Colombia without the OPs negativity, misleading nonsense, emotive rhetoric, and sensationalism?

What happened it seems, on a quick read of it (so apologies if I error or over simplify) is that the constitutional court partially decriminalised abortion procedures. It still requires that Colombia’s Congress come up with clear regulations. This will likely take some time. Especially as congress can come up with regulations that contradict the ruling, which will force the courts to invalidate them and drag things out.

This is the result of decades of work by people wanting to change the law, in a country where one report I read claims 60% of the citizens support decriminalisation of one form or another and 25% want legalisation without limits..... and is a direct result of a court case brought by a group of 100 organisations.... and follows suit with what Argentina and Mexico have also been doing. Hopefully it will also spur Chile on which has made similar noises of late.

It also happens in a region where 760000 women annually are treated for the detrimental after effects of having had clandestine and illegal abortions and cause 10% of maternal deaths. Now that is barbaric. So this great news of change is welcomed in my opinion. An opinion I can defend without pretending my opinions are sacred like the OP does.

The petty response of the losers here is worth laughing at too. Their Ex President for example was quoted as saying that the "Ruling deeply offends the highest group of citizens". The who now? Much like the OP of this thread trying to declare his personal opinion "sacrosanct" here we have the Ex President declaring people sharing his personal opinion to be "highest" among the citizens? Love himself much? Need to get over himself much? Declaring yourself to be better than others.... yeah not a great look the best of times. Least of all in a loser. It reminds me of the image of Conor McGregor lying on the floor cradling his broken leg, shouting after the victor that he was going to get him in the parking lot, and suggesting sexual congress with his wife. Beyond. Pathetic.

If the best you can do in a debate is bolster your opinions by elevating yourself to some kind of higher being or your own personal opinions to some level of being sacred.... you're probably losing the battle more roundly than you think and are actually just desperate.

I mediate all my moral and ethical concerns on the basis of maximising the well being of conscious agents.

So the more reason we have to suspect an entity is a conscious agent, the more inclined towards ethical concern I would be.

There is zero evidence of any kind that I know of to suggest a fetus at 12/16 weeks has developed the faculty of human consciousness. In fact my knowledge of the science there suggest it has not even STARTED to develop such. Let alone actually developed it. An analogy I have made often is that at 12/16 weeks it is like looking for radio waves not only when the broadcasting tower is turned off..... in fact no one has started building the tower yet.

Certainly many of the things related to the faculty of consciousness are in play, or in production, around 24 weeks of human gestation. A random quote I have used often for example is:

K.J.S. Anand, a researcher of newborns, and P.R. Hickey, published in NEJM say "intermittent electroencephalographic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks.

So certainly I start to become uncomfortable around this time! But it is not black and white. For me it is like looking at a rainbow. We know Red. We know Orange. But we can not really identify where red stops being red and starts being orange. So our reason for abortion should certainly scale with our uncertainty as best we can!

But as I said to the OP, the near totality of abortions.... and even more so elective abortions.... happen in or before week 12, let alone week 16.... and I see zero foundation for moral or ethical concern for the fetus at this point. And generally it seems women who have abortion would have liked to have had it earlier too. There are endless reasons why they didn't. But we can hamper some of those reasons such as not putting pointless beauracracy and procedure in their path.