[JSDude1]

The poll finds that 53 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal if the baby has a fatal birth defect,

BABY: this is a baby; a human being!: Have we gone INSANE: Just becuase one has a “birth-defect”, they not don’t deserve life (and humans can now judge to allow that to happen!??). This is sickening. How can someone rationally say that this should be LEGAL?

Because the “Adults” are thinking of themselves; selfishness?

[JSDude1]

I’ll go one step further and say that ALL abortion is SELFISHNESS.

[WFTR]

I think the big point in this question is the "fatal" qualifier. We don't know how much pain the child feels at each stage of development. The doctors may believe that the child will suffer less if aborted early, and the choice may seem to be between the child being aborted in the first few months of pregnancy or dying a painful death in the first few weeks out of the womb.

Again, the issue is not whether you would make one decision or the other. The issue is whether you would send someone to jail for refusing to make the decision that you recommend. I would lean towards letting the child have a chance to live, but I wouldn't want the criminal justice system to prosecute someone for making the other decision. Each of these circumstances will be different and may depend on subtle medical issues. I don't some power-hungry district attorney who never even took college biology trying to make these kinds of difficult distinctions.

To further complicate matters, many of these situations may be ones where the pregnancy is a real, medical danger to the mother. I have a friend who's wife had a problem with her pregnancy. The baby wasn't completely dead yet, but the baby was dying and was certain to die. If his wife had continued carrying the baby, the miscarriage might have come at a dangerous time and might have impacted her too quickly for doctors to save her. In that situation, they aborted the baby to ensure her health. That's a tough decision, and I wouldn't want some district attorney trying to prosecute them because he promised his pro-life constituents that he'd punish someone for a "mother's health" abortion.

Bill