27
votes
Norway's government wants to relax restrictions on abortion to make it legal for women to terminate pregnancies up to the eighteenth week of gestation
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- Title
- Norway proposes relaxing its abortion law to allow the procedure until 18th week of pregnancy
- Published
- Aug 23 2024
- Word count
- 347 words
If you're wealthy you can fly to the Netherlands, and basically get an abortion, no questions asked, up to 22 weeks. The round trip Oslo-Amsterdam with Norwegian Air Shuttle is ~€250. But since non-Dutch residents will have to do the procedure privately, I expect the most of the cost to be induced by the medical procedure itself. The first clinic on Google says they have staff speaking English, German, French and Polish.
I know for a fact that this is what many women do, in France, where I live. "I'm past the term for abortion, I'll take a train to Amsterdam, and bypass French law." And the fact that some clinic advertise speaking Polish tells me this is not only a French thing.
In my opinion all EU countries should go to 22 weeks. Right now, it's basically discrimination between poor women with a local abortion limit, and women with a 22 weeks abortion limit because they can go to Amsterdam.
What is the difference in week limits in between countries? 22 weeks feels like a long time but I would never trust my opinion on the matter cause I'm a guy, and not a doctor so I definitely don't think my voice is needed.
Is it like 18 weeks in some areas and 22 in the Netherlands?
22 starts to edge close to the limits of viability. 21 weeks and 1 day is the youngest a newborn has survived and that's just 1 as far as I can tell. 22 weeks is considered the viability line by the WHO. (Noting here that this 22 weeks is 20 weeks of fetal development generally)
Survival rate at 22 weeks has gone up from about 7% to around 33% depending on treatment availability. 2022 report had it at just 10% so the level of NICU care matters a lot. It's hard to get disability rates there, because the survival rates vary so much.
Another week gets you to 60% survival rate, and with over half those infants having a disability, 15% of the 23 week babies will have a severe disability. Assuming admission to a NICU because without it there's just not enough lung and heart development.
18 week old fetuses are pretty developed as far as organs and everything existing but they're lacking 4 weeks of growth which is huge (they're usually like 6.5 inches long)
As for Norway it's "on demand" up to 12 weeks, requires a doctor's special request up til 18 weeks and is only allowable due to "grave risk" til 22 weeks which is the limit for a viable pregnancy. At least per Wikipedia. Not sure how that shakes out in practice.
Netherlands allows up to week 24 electively I believe which is when viability goes up.
Thank you for taking the time to reply! Very interesting info, as someone who doesn't really want kids and thus has never looked into it. Definitely seems like with this data that 22 weeks is kinda as late term of an abortion as is reasonable, and even that may be because the mother is having major health risks. But again, don't have a horse in this race, please don't let me have an opinion on something that should be between a woman and her doctor.
Basically past the point of viability abortion is because the parent's health is at serious risk or the fetus isn't viable. Occasionally the fetus is viable but if born it cannot survive or might survive a very short period of time. Viability has crept earlier but without a NICU 24 weeks is probably the earliest it'd land.
They're incredibly rare honestly and the way to keep them rare is ensuring access to abortion earlier.
Here in Germany iirc it's 12 weeks, and you're required to undergo counseling beforehand. Up until recently it was illegal for medical providers to advertise that they provided abortions as well (which meant that, ironically, the best way to find a list of doctors who provide abortions was to find a conservative Christian website that was trying to "name and shame" them). In Poland abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or incest.
Wikipedia has a good article on the subject with a map. According to which there's apparently a total ban on abortion in Andorra and Lichtenstein (though the size of those countries means border-hopping for abortion is no doubt easier for their residents).
That is kinda weird to ban advertising abortions. I can kinda understand the idea, but doubt anyone was going to build a giant neon sign saying "Abortions here!" even without a law banning it.
The law in question, Section 218 Paragraph 219a, dates back to 1933. So, literally put into place by the Nazis, who punished abortion of healthy German babies very strictly. It's not just advertising abortions in the neon sign sense -- doctors could not mention anywhere that they offered abortions. It was only repealed in 2022 -- and it absolutely was enforced up to then.
This law was amended in 2019, so that doctors could say they offered abortions on their websites but not any more information about abortions (such as which methods they offered, how abortions work, etc.) Doctors were fined thousands of euros under this revised law for including language like "medical abortions without anesthetic."
Holy shit, I didn't know that. I did know about Nazi crackdowns on abortions and other body studies, but that's crazy that it never got repealed.
In Canada, there is no restriction at all on abortion. This is something that's left purely up to the doctors who provide it. And the only problem I hear about regularly up here is about lack of access to care for people who need it. I haven't heard a single news piece about "Mom aborts 26 week old baby, the horror!" This simply does not happen.
I'm upset that we live in a world that distrusts women so thoroughly.