[70Chip]

Assuming that the women has an authentic medical condition that would mean that having an abortion may save her life, the moral dilemma is still vexatious. The reason that there are only a few doctors who perform late term abortions is that apparently you actually have to be an excellent surgeon to do them. Early abortions are quite simple and many states do not even require practitioners to be licensed physicians. Late term procedures are dangerous to the women because a sloppy procedure can leave bone fragments that can damage the uterus (and other parts I guess) and the head of the fetus is usually too large to be removed through the birth canal intact. You have to know what you are doing. This is not the simple extraction of a doughy lump of cells. This is something else and this is why its troublesome. While a doctor performing one of these procedures may be able to say that he has saved the mother's life, he (or she) must also wrestle with the the fact that in order to effectively do so, he has to quite skillfully destroy another.

Furthermore, these procedures are quite expensive. I would worry that the lucrative nature of a practice like George Tiller's would cause an unscrupulous practitioner to treat perfectly healthy women. We all remember the cases of these girls who drop a baby in the bathroom at the prom. In other words, there are mothers who are the picture of health who hit month 6 and suddenly decide "Oh. I need to do something about this". Such a situation may be painful for the women and perhaps the child is doomed to an unhappy life (or maybe not), but one has to weigh that fact against those bone shards and the crushed skull I mentioned above. It seems like we are relying on the people making the money to decide if these women are really in danger and that worrys me.