re: #828 Salamantis

That’s a hard one. There are undeniably cases where women have seriously threatened to commit suicide if they are not allowed to abort healthy post-viability fetuses, fully intending to go through with it. I do not think that there are very many of them, because women who are that dead set against carrying pregnancies to term almost always avail themselves of abortion sooner. There is also the problem, however, of women who would not attempt suicide rather than carry an unwanted post-viability pregnancy to term, but who would say that they would so that they could obtain the procedure when they otherwise could not. Which were which would have to be determined, in my opinion, on a case by case basis, by qualified, certified psychiatric professionals.

The mental health justification should exist in such extreme circumstances, but it should not, in my opinion, be a late term abortion loophole wide enough to drive a truck through.

Okay, try this one. Your fetus has a lethal gene (like anencephaly) which will result in a live birth, but a death within 4 days.

Should you acquiesce to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and bear that corpse to term?