are any of you honest enough to simply answer the question asked?

[downbeatplumb]

Medicine is guided by extremely strict ethical practices. If a late term abortion is performed it would be due to extremely good and ethical reasons.

To pretend otherwise is to misrepresent the entire medical profession.

Are you sure? Doctors are human beings, and human beings sometimes place their ideology, politics, and beliefs ahead of ethics. Doctors are as guilty as anyone of rationalizing atrocities. You have heard of Dr. Mengele, right? And last month an American doctor was busted for saying that she would give Jews the wrong medication. Those are extreme examples. But trusting doctors to self regulate is a bit naive. Self regulation gets weird. Self regulation inherently becomes a bit arrogant, and the self regulated always become convinced that what is best for them is best for everyone.

I am not against abortion. But the law says that a doctor has the right to perform the procedure if they determine that it is in the best medical interest of their patient. I want their decision to perform the procedure to be based on their medical assessment, and not on their politics or ideological garbage. Bodily autonomy is rationalized ideological garbage. And before anyone goes there, I think that it is in the patient's best medical interest if the doctor is concerned that a woman will seek the services of an unqualified provider if the doctor refuses to perform the procedure.

I am aware that feminists don't like the legal reasoning behind legalized abortions. They want the reasoning to revolve around 'bodily autonomy'. But bodily autonomy is more of a self flattering rhetorical concept than a legal one. The legal justification for abortions is less than flattering, because one of the most common justifications is that we do it to protect women from themselves-- if the doctor doesn't do it, she might find an unqualified practitioner.

I agree that is not a very flattering medical justification for performing the procedure. But purpose of the law is not to flatter people. Women who want the law to say that bodily autonomy gives them the right to abortions simply want the law to be flattering and empowering, rather than simply protecting them from themselves. But the law is there to protect you and not to stroke the ego.

Am I sure? yes I am I used to work at a hospital and have an understanding of how medical ethical decisions are made.

Also the abortions being suggested would only happen in extreme situations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opini...cX6B081S9Y

French appears to be worried that women will seek, and doctors will perform, late-term abortions for trivial reasons. But there’s contempt for women embedded in the idea that, absent legal prohibition, someone on the verge of giving birth might instead terminate her pregnancy to avoid the brutalities of labor.
“No matter what the law were, in real life, these things don’t happen,” said Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy and the former head of Catholics for a Free Choice. “I am not saying that there would not be one woman out of 20 million who decided at the 33rd week of pregnancy that she needed an abortion, and I would suggest that she probably does have mental health problems. However, this woman is not going to find anyone who will do this.”
Kissling is well known in the pro-choice movement for thinking deeply about the ethical gray areas surrounding abortion. As she points out, there are only about a dozen doctors in the country who perform third-trimester abortions at all, and she’s spoken to several of them, asking specific questions about patients they’ve turned down. “What I have learned is that all of them have limits and have declined to do abortions in certain circumstances for certain reasons,” she said. (The murderous abortionist , serving a life sentence in prison, is an exception, but he was operating outside the law.)
A person who is ambivalent about abortion might wonder why, if the situations put forward by Gilbert and French are so unthinkable, pro-choice people would object to laws making them illegal. But the law is a blunt instrument for making judgments about extreme and unusual contingencies.