Why would you give an abortion to a baby?
Upvoted for OP’s name
Is there a way to make that statement in a neutral way? It seems to me that either you mention the baby and show a clear position against abortion, or you don’t and clearly position yourself in favor of it.
Maybe replacing “abortion” -> “getting aborted” so as to clarify that the point of view is the one mother whether explicitly axknowledging whether or not there is a point of view of the baby.
How does the mother get aborted though?
It’s not wrong. Abortion is very not safe for the baby.
It’s a medically inaccurate statement. The editor is referring to a fetus (or other terms earlier in pregnancy), not a baby/infant. “Baby” is used for emotional manipulation.
This is true too, but wouldn’t the edited sentence
When properly done, abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine (for the mother, not the foetus)
be as charged against abortion in that it assumes that there is also the foetus’s point of view to be considered?
I suppose so, in that that passage is clearly talking about maternal health. There has been a lot of disinformation and pseudoscience spread about abortion being risky, so that is an important passage to include in a neutral way. The inserted language only serves to advance an agenda, not inform.
I suppose so, in that that passage is clearly talking about maternal health.
I agree, but (that half of) my original point is that referring to maternal safety is not neutral either, as it implies that there is no foetus’ safety. Si it can appear as a shock for people who conseir it a murder to simply read that it is a safe operation.
The inserted language only serves to advance an agenda, not inform.
Yes but so does the original paragraph, as the information is anyway contained in the dedicated “Safety” section. Even more so when considering that this comes right after the definition.
I am definitely not against the pro-choice agenda, but one should be aware that it is indeed generally pushed by the article.
The reason it is pushing an agenda is because it doesn’t add new information to the article. Yes, the abortion isn’t going to go well for the fetus. That is by definition and doesn’t need to be spelled out. That fragment was added purely to push the “killing babies” viewpoint.
I agree the emphasis given there on the baby is ridiculous, especially given that the modification included a wide repetition of this parenthesis later on.
But you seem to imply that this is an unjutified politization of a otherwise neutral article. My point is that this is actually an overcompensation for an article that was originally (and is as of now) charged in the opposite direction.
The very fact that it is obvious to us that safety of the abortion refers to the one of the mother shows that we consider the abortion as a chirurgical operation on a single person, the mother. People who consider the foetus as a valuable human being rather consider it as an operation on two people, that results in killing one of them. So for them abortion makes at least 50% of casualities, which they do not consider as qualifying as “one of the safest procedures”.
Although I agree with the view that abortion is on operation on the mother, I recognize that this hypothesis is charged by the idea the foetus’s life does not matter as much as the mother’s (especially at the stages where abortion is allowed in the west), and I understand that some people don’t share that view.
The reason it is pushing an agenda is because it doesn’t add new information to the article.
Aside from my previous reply about why I don’t agree that this is a neutral statement, this was not even what I had in mind in the comment your were replying to.
My point there was that I agree with what you just said, but it is also the case of the sentence before that addition. That sentence does not contain information that is not formulated elsewhere in the article. It is not required to understand anything that comes inbetween. The only reason this information is repeated, and that it is placed so early in the paper, is to push a pro-choice agenda. The goal is that the pregnant woman who reads that thinking about abortion integrates as soon as possible the idea that it is a safe thing.
One may wonder whether an encyclopaedia article should be more neutral about. And my original question was whether it is actually possible to phrase that in a neutral way (this last comment now refers more to the content of the parallel comment rather than the layout of the article).
Sorry I am aware there is some repetition between those two comments, I felt like it was important to come back on this complementary aspect
It is safe for the baby, in the sense that the outcome is predictable for him.
