Reps Torr and Welch have introduced HB 1020 which grants a family a $2,500 tax credit for a stillborn birth. A stillbirth is defined elsewhere as gestation of 20 weeks or more that does not result in a live birth.
Taken on its own merits, I don’t really have a problem with this bill. Certainly 20 weeks of pregnancy involves significant costs and the stillbirth itself has to be very traumatic. I am concerned that this is less motivated by an interest in helping families with those costs and more motivated as part of an overall effort to add legislative support to the idea that embryos, fetuses, blastocysts, and zygotes are morally equivalent to a fully developed human being. Former Representative John Hostettler introduced a similar bill on the federal level a while back.
[tags]HB1020-2007, abortion[/tags]
Oh, the horror! It certianly easier to kill when we de-humanize something. “embryos, fetuses, blastocysts, and zygotes” are easy to kill. Unborn humans, pre-mature infants, and undeloped babies are a little harder to kill…
Doug,
I think it’s more likely a crass attempt to bribe pregnant women into continuing pregnancies that threaten the life of the embryo/fetus, or the woman’s own life.
Why don’t we offer a tax credit to people who deliberately do other things hazardous to their health, like eating every meal at McDonald’s every day for 30 days straight (Ã la Morgan Spurlock in Fast Food Nation)?
Why should a woman receive a pecuniary incentive for carrying a dead fetus until she delivers it? What happened to the Party of Personal Responsibility? Oh, right, I forgot — that got traded in for the party of No-Bid Contracts and the Big Pharma Subsidy bill of 2003.
Jason,
I’m with ya, brother. We need to give all those unborn babies the full package of civil rights, including the vote, gun ownership, and freedom of contract. We must also let them serve in the armed forces — we surely need a few good young men and women for the Big Surge that will turn the tide and bring Iraq back from
the brink ofcivil war. The dead-enders will be no match for our battalions of not-yet-borners!We furthermore need to lower the age of consent to negative 9 months to honor the full moral equivalence between fertilized eggs and the 35 year old citizens eligible to become President. It will sure save a lot of taxpayer money not having to screw with prosecuting all those child molesters and policing their compliance with the sex offender registry.
Branden, I really don’t think you’re that dense. Your post would be a little more accurate if you said that we should lower the age of consent, armed forces, vote and others to 17 years, 3 months. I’d get the humor in that.
However, somehow you tie abortion to the Iraq war, child molesters and gun ownership. You really seem to box people into “with me, against me”. If I’m against abortion, I must be for all the things you are against.
As to the reason for this, I assume there is some tax credit when a spouse or fully developed child dies. If so, then personal responsibility can be shown by being consistant:
If you are pro-choice and your blastocyst does not fully develop, I assume you would NOT file this in your taxes. After all, no one has died in your view. You do not need assistance. If you are pro-life, then you would (correctly, IMHO) feel like your child has died, and deserve the same assistance others receive when they lose a family member.
However, if no such tax credit exists for the born, then I don’t see the reason in passing this law.
Jason,
For the moment, I’ll just observe that you’re making a pretty reckless assumption about my views on private gun ownership, and note the possibility that this “with me, against me” boxing-in you describe is more projection than anything else.
Branden,
Please make your points then. I add comments here so people can hear another view, and I want to learn other views. I can’t really do anything but make reckless assumptions when I don’t understand your post. Were you really saying you personally think those things should be moved to -9 months, or were you trying to make a dramatic point? I don’t understand why those other subjects were brought up, and I don’t understand your point.
Again, I’m just trying to understand what you are saying. I’m also pointing out that if you are also trying to share your views with others, your post #3 above was not helpful, at least not to me. If that is not your intent, then please excuse me. Just trying to help.
Jason,
I think your post was unfair to Doug’s post in that it was snarky and distorted his message, so I responded in kind.
If you want an elevated discussion, start there.
If you want to play the invective game, don’t expect to play alone.
Why should someone who has a miscarriage get a tax benefit? Because pregnancies have expenses associated with them? Because miscarriages are traumatic? I don’t get why that should lower your taxes? If you don’t want expenses, by all means DON’T GET PREGNANT! In the meantime, if you are using the same roads, national defense, etc., as me, I don’t expect your contribution to those efforts to decrease relative to mine simply because you got pregnant.
And of course this is only to define personhood down to the moment of conception.
I assume you are talking about the “Oh, the horror!” comment. Doug, Branden, sorry for that. It was ment sarcasticly, but not hateful. I was trying to say that murder should be more of a concern than the label an unborn child has, and I didn’t get my point across well.
The rest of that post was not sarcasm. I really think the conern many people have about calling an unborn child a zygote has to do with de-humanizing the person. It may look like a person, think like a person, have a heartbeat, brainwaves, hiccups, response to pain, dreams. However, as long as it is covered by a few millimeters of flesh, then we can call it anything but a person.
We all know that once someone is an unperson, it becomes VERY easy to do terriable things to them. History has shown that before one group of people slaughters another, they give the group a label that strips away their humanity.
I agree with you if there is no tax benefit when a family member dies currently. If there is a tax benefit when a child dies now, then there should be one that covers all children.
Is there a lawyer in the house that can answer the question of existing tax benefits when a child dies?
Jason– other than the “looks like a person, thinks like a person” part of your criteria, your list of person-defining traits is shared by all five of my dogs. And a human zygote looks more like a dog zygote than it does a person. Defining personhood based on a set of behaviors that born people have would risk making a chimpanzee more of a “person” than an unborn child–and we do medical experiments on chimps… The “thinks like a person” thing is pretty speculative. A notocord is not a brain. In the end, we have a group of people wanting to define “person” as any product of conception made by human beings, from the single cell onward. If you are fully formed, functional, bipedal, use tools, etc., and your genetic code is 96% identical to ours (chimps), you’re not a person, and in fact are suitable for experimentation, eating, etc. But if you are a ball of cells the size of the head of a pin, made from a human sperm and egg, you are a person. And a potential tax deduction.
I come from Tom’s side of the fence on this one. What is it about humanness that entitles humans to greater moral rights than other creatures? Is it the mere biological fact of humanness? If you have the correct number of chromosomes, does that do the trick?
I think there is a biographical component that has to be involved along with the biological one. Self-awareness has to play into what’s special about humans. Probably other factors as well. I just can’t by into the idea that a clump of cells is “human” in the sense that entitles humans to greater rights.
From USCCB.org
If I kill your dog, I can be sent to jail. If I kill my own dog in a brutal way, I can be sent to jail. If I take a sea turtle egg that is already dead, I can be sent to jail. If I tear apart an unborn child using a vacum hose that pulls the little feet, arms and torso off before crushing the head, then I am protected?
Does everyone that is pro-choice really think this is OK? If I pulled my dog’s legs off as it flopped around yelping, then gutted it and took a hammer to his head last, I would certianly be sent up. WHY ON EARTH is the same protection not there for undeveloped humans? I really do NOT understand, and I keep trying too. I don’t want to think that the world is really this mad!
I must just assume that there is some way that you that support abortion change that unborn child to a plant. I really do not think that you would condone this behavior to a living animal.
The more medical science advances, the more we will learn about what the human child goes through while in the womb. I think that there will be a day when all people look back on what we have been doing and are shocked that we ever allowed such things to be done to our own children.
As to the “biographical component”, Doug: It is known that newborn babies can detect their mother and father’s voice from remembering it in the womb.
If an unborn child is able to remember that voice, isn’t that their “biographical component”? Some fully born humans have less sensory input than what a unborn child can feel and hear. We also know that unborn children DREAM. You dream about your experances, the sensory input you get. Is that enough for life? What must that child do to earn the right to live?
You’re comparing treatment of born, grown, and self-maintaining dogs to unborn clumps of human cells–comparing apples to oranges. If you pulled your dog apart in utero, it would be the equivalent of what we are talking about. If you gave a dog an abortofacient while the “unborn dog” was an embryo or fetus, that would be the equivalent of what we are talking about. If you gave your little Boston Terrier pup a hysterectomy because she was pregnant after getting with the Great Dane down the road (as my parents did for our dog years ago), that would be equivalent to abortion. For me, tearing apart a grown dog would be worse than aborting a 12 week human fetus.
Yes, there are dog cruelty laws. But unlike laws protecting humans, dog cruelty laws are rarely applied to the fullest extent allowable. It’s usually, “Hey, Jimmy’s a good kid. He’s never set any dogs on fire before. The law says up to x years in jail, but probably a few months of house arrest and probation is more appropriate.”
Punishment for harming endangered turtles is conferred due to their endangered status. Turtles that aren’t endangered may be captured and eaten. Can you say the same thing about humans, which are not endangered? So there’s really no equivalence there.
People DO condone this type of treatment for animals. Google animal testing for pharmaceuticals, etc, especially beagles. Short synopsis: beagles burned extensively with blowtorches without anesthetic prior to testing burn remedies, inducing cancer or heart failure in beagles, fracturing their bones, etc. Plus a lifetime of being deprived social interaction with humans or other dogs. I’d say a lifetime of torture of a sentient non-human is much further up the evil scale than a human abortion, especially an early one.
Why? I really don’t understand what changes in the minutes between being covered by a womb and being a newborn puppy. Is it just that we can’t see it?
Also, most dogs are no more self-maintaining than a unborn child. The unborn child gets food from its mother, and the dog gets food from his master. If I keep the dog in a cage and don’t feed it, it dies just as the infant does.
So self-maintaining is not really a factor, since newborns are just as dependant on their parents as the unborn. Grown is not a factor, since all children that have been born still grow and develop. The reproductive system takes years after birth to completely develop!
Can a group of cells change THAT much by being removed from a thin bag of skin? What is so magical about that process that it suddenly changes a bag of cells to a REAL human? It can’t be the umbilical cord, becuase that would make late-term abortion much easier. Today, we have to make sure the baby’s head does not leave the mother’s body before we cut its neck. If it was just the umbilical cord that kept the “clump o’ cells” label, then we could remove the baby and kill it much easier while the cord was still attached.
Is that what you think? That a baby that has arms and legs kicking in the open air, but their head is still inside their mother is a “clump of cells” that can be terminated? However, if that head moves a few INCHES to get outside the mother, then it is an American that would be murdered if the doctor cut its neck?
I just can NOT understand this! I am really trying to!
Um………………….
No.
Abortion foes have this fetish about late-term abortion and seem to think that most abortions happen minutes before an otherwise natural birth. When we describe “clumps of cells”, or at least when I do, we’re talking about prior to eight weeks gestation. There are no arms waving in the air. It’s a little creature that looks like a shrimp without the tail. There are no higher thought processes at that point, no frontal cortex, no dreams, etc. It’s a clump, with all the potential in the world. But still a clump, and sometimes an unwanted clump easily aborted. That is the point at which “pro-choice” advocates would prefer abortions to occur.
Those who advocate legalized abortion tend to want it to occur as early as possible. Pregnancy can be recognized as soon as a period is missed. Abortion at that time is safe, effective, and humane. The “baby” at that point is a hollow ball of cells devoid of any recognizable traits, minus a central nervous system, etc. Abortion opponents insist on calling that a “baby”. Pure silliness. Like calling an acorn an oak tree.
I tend to lean toward “viability” as a guideline for when abortion should be allowed or not. If it could live outside the mother, it shouldn’t be aborted. Should’ve thought out your options sooner, mom-to-be. But aborting little inchlong squiggles of flesh with gills and arm buds just doesn’t meet the definition of “murder” in my mind.
Dogs will find their own food. Not sure what a cage has to do with it. No caged creature of any kind including humans would be able to survive without food.
To take the extremes of the argument, you think that sucking out a ball of cells long before viability is equivalent to drawing and quartering the family dog. I don’t.
A group of cells doesn’t change due to leaving the womb. But a single cell (and fertilization) changes a whole hell of a lot to become millions and millions of cells, while still in the womb. I propose that prior to all those changes taking place, sucking the ball out isn’t the evil you state it is.
Fetal viability, the point at which a child has a legitimate chance to survive outside the womb is generally placed at 24-28 weeks. Accordingly, this law substantially overlaps with the time period in which even many ardent advocates for the pro-choice position admit there is quite a bit of moral ambiguity. A 20 week fetus is not an amorphous bundle of cells. It’s a very small being, weighing about a pound, that looks like a baby and has developed internal organs, limbs, and the like.
If a pregnancy emerges from the first trimester, the odds are overwhelming that a pregnancy will go to term. Accordingly, people start making plans and expenditures based upon a baby: purchases for the nursery, non-insured shared of prenatal visits, and so forth. If the tax code does not currently allow parents who are in the slim minority who do not deliver a live baby despite reaching the 20 week mark, this is a law that makes sense.
Pro choice advocates risk making themselves look like cranks if they focus more on the motivation of a bill’s sponsors than whether it is a sound piece of public policy. This seems to be a good law, and it’s a law that would be particularly beneficial to the middle and lower classes, i.e., typical Democratic constituencies. Opposition on the basis of some slippery slope fallacy seems like a bad idea.
John M:
You wrote:
I don’t understand the above. If the tax code does not currently allow […] parents…to do what?
Sorry if I was unclear. It looks like I left out part of the sentence. I meant to say that if the tax code currently does not allow parents in such circumstances to take a deduction, the law would seem to be a good one. If a healthy shild is born today, the parents will get a deduction for the 2006 year. I presume, but don’t know, that if a stillbirth occurs today, there will not be such a tax deduction. If my presumption is correct, I think this is a law that makes sense. Parents who suffer late-term miscarriages or stillbirths have incurred much of the expense that justifies the dependent tax deduction.
Our expenditures for our son’s month in the NICU were far in excess of the expense of a miscarriage, and there was no extra tax benefit for that. Regardless, I think we have to ask ourselves a couple of policy questions: One, why tax deductions for children to begin with? I mean, you add one more person reaping the benefits of life in this country (or in this case, the state), so you pay less for its upkeep? Doesn’t really make sense. Now that we’ve moved past the 300 million mark, does the government really need to subsidize procreation? And two, do we really need to use the tax code to put a band-aid on any little boo-boo that life tosses at us? OK, you had a miscarriage. That’s a shame. But up to one third of all pregnancies miscarry. It’s a normal process by which nature terminates malformed fetuses due to genetic defects (copying millions of genes millions of times in gametogenesis does lead to mistakes sometimes). If you aren’t prepared for that uncertainty, pregnancy may not be for you.
T,
Thanks for the explaination. I don’t agree with your view, but I at least understand it.
Just as the violent pro-life people and very NON-compassionate congressmen have made the pro-life movement hard to understand, I think that the pro-choice people that oppose any and every restriction on abortion also do damage to the pro-choice movement.
Like many things, the extreme people drown out the calm middle. Thanks again for your help.
Again, I look to medical science to help here. Artifical wombs would do a great deal for viability. Then unwanted babies could be transfered to parents that DO want them. I know at least two couples that waited over 7 YEARS to adopt. It is a shame that they had to wait so long when so many children are not wanted.
As to your last point, T: That’s what the 20-week thing is for. Once a child’s heartbeat can be heard (usually MUCH less than 20 weeks), the odds go from 33% chance to 95% chance (at least according to our OB/GYN). We wouldn’t be giving a credit to every miscarrage. Very few, in fact.
Sorry if I pulled this coversation a little off-topic, Doug!
We would sometimes hear the heartbeat at 12 weeks in the office, but usually 14 weeks or so.
It’s a shame that not everyone who wants to conceive actually can. One of my nurses has tried for two years, on meds, etc. Meanwhile my son was blessedly conceived by the sperm equivalent of the Warren Commission’s “magic bullet”.
“Pro-choice” people have to be skeptical of any restrictions due to worries about “slippery-slopisms”. Ask the same Republican who doesn’t understand why we can’t restrict some types of abortion whether he would be ok with us restricting certain types of ammo clips and you’ll hear the same logic.
When I think about the “30 million” aborted fetuses, I imagine a megaopolis of tens of millions of people, poorly parented because they weren’t wanted, and maybe reproducing as irresponsibly as their parents did. For those who want to adopt–fantastic. But my ideal would be for people who have a first missed period and don’t want children to just pop a pill and expell the little ball and not burden the earth with another human just for the sake of having another human. I think humanity is taking far more than our fair share. I feel the same way about people in this day and age having six or eight kids.
Jason wrote:
I think this is a false equivalence. Even if one is morally opposed to abortion in all cases, the ultimate culpability for the decision lies with the individual woman who chooses to have one, not with the members of Congress who have failed to place sufficient legal impediments in her way.
By contrast, when Congress takes action to restrict access to contraceptives and abortions (and, yes, the ones restricting one are nearly always the ones restricting the other), they are creating a criminal class of people by their actions, and their lack of compasssion, to paraphrase you, is directly manifest as a moral act. It cannot be mistaken for dithering or indecisiveness.
Similarly, and to use an analogy of a severity that is typical of anti-abortion activists, the primary moral responsibility for the slaughter and atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan (and, of late, eastern Chad) lies with the people committing those acts. The failure of the U.S. Congress to do anything to stop the genocide carries moral weight as well, but it makes a mockery of moral reasoning to assert that Congress’s culpability is equivalent to those committing the acts of violence.
This type of false equivalence is all over the abortion debate, and it’s practiced far more often by the abortion prohibitionists than their opponents. It is yet another example of how, as is too often the case, those who most stridently moralize have a shaky grasp of fundamental moral principles.
We both agree this is wrong.
As for the morality or guilt of Congress, I’m not sure where you are getting that from. I was pointing out and agreeing with you about Congressmen that are NOT compassionate, i.e. they don’t help those that need it, such as your point about contraceptives.
I don’t think Congress should be held responsible for the deaths that come from abortion. As you say, they don’t perform the act. I also don’t think of the women that have abortions and the doctors that perform them have a guilty mind (mens rea? IANAL). As T pointed out, to them that is a ball of cells, not a person. They would not be considered murderers. Manslaughter would be the term I would use, as it is the same as a drunk driver who unknowningly kills someone else. I do not hate people that choose to do this, I feel sorry that they don’t understand what they are doing.
However, we are a long way from giving those rights to a child that is 8 weeks developed. I do think there is reason to give those rights to unborn children, though. We should determine a point, such as viability, that gives those legal rights to the child. Law and science can move that age as more evidence is shown one way or the other. That takes religion out of it (conception being the start of life) and looks at it from a secular, moral, viewpoint. What on earth could be wrong with that?
From your POV. I see it the other way.
Jason,
You wrote:
That’s well and good, but unpersuasive. In making my argument that you were establishing a false equivalence, I quoted your assertion and analyzed it. That you feel “the other side does it, too” adds little information of worth to the discussion.
As the mother of a stillborn, I would love to see this go into effect. This has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. From a financial standpoint, the costs are great when it comes to stillbirth. There’s more than just the cost of a pregnancy. Afterwards, there are all sorts of testing done (autopsy, pathology on the placenta, chromosomal testing, bloodwork, etc.) Then, there’s the cost of the funeral, casket, burial plot, they even charge for digging the grave. A marker alone can put you back well over $1000 for a basic stone.
There is also a lot of emotional trauma that comes with losing a child. There will probably be a lot of missed work and some even seek out a counselor or therapist to speak with. There is no amount of money that will make it better, but helping to offset the cost takes some stress off an already traumatic situation.
I think that what a lot of people aren’t realizing, is that with a stillbirth you are actually going through the birth process. At the end of labor comes a real baby. The only difference is that the baby is that he is lifeless. New parents of a living child get a credit, but new parents of a stillborn don’t. That’s what this is supposed to do, and I hope it passes.
Like I said, I don’t have any real problems with the bill itself; mostly for the reasons you cite. Losing a pregnancy, particularly in the advanced stages, is expensive and traumatic.
Where this bill becomes a problem is in the context of the concerted effort to give more and more rights to fetuses prior to birth; which, in turn, is an effort to erode the right of privacy the Supreme Court determined was protected under the Constitution. (The folks making this effort don’t like Roe v. Wade, obviously, but they also don’t like Connecticut v. Griswold, which forms the foundation for Roe. In Griswold, Justice Douglas wrote that the right to privacy was found in the “penumbras” of the Constitution, and since there was a right to privacy, Connecticut couldn’t prohibit married couples from using contraception. The whole idea of penumbras to Constitutional rights is anathema to some folks, the 9th Amendment notwithstanding.)
If I was convinced that this bill was unrelated to that effort, I’d be a lot happier about it.
I AM HERE TO CONVINCE YOU THIS BILL IS UNRELATED to the “Effort” you discuss and related to a personal story…..MY HUSBAND AND I AND OUR DAUGHTER KATE ARE THE REASON this bill was drafted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Go to KateCares.org to see our infant stillborn daughter, Kate, and maybe you will change your mind on what a stillborn baby often looks like and understand the pain a family goes through. The only difference between Kate and any other infant born is that she wasn’t breathing when delivered. This website makes my blood boil comparing infants to dogs, thinking it is a right wing conspiracy to give undue rights, etc. We ASKED Gerald Torr to author it as the representative in our area to help out other families that endure this tragedy. As Lisa noted above on Feb. 1st, there are SO MANY costs we incurred with our stillborn daughter…..funeral bills, burial bills, unpaid hospital bills, and not to mention the HORRIBLE pain and grief that goes along with a stillborn. Indiana has decided that an infant after 20 weeks gestation is entitled to a proper burial. We went with this gestational age and asked that help be given to families to offset the many costs families face after a stillbirth as no monetary amount can help with grief. This is the same amount given to a child born to a family who breathes outside the womb for one minute…no more and no less. It is FAIR, CORRECT and the right thing to do and won’t cost much to our society as it only happens in 1 our of 115 live births but it does and continues to happen.
I can’t believe that people would make such awful comments about these precious babies that are wanted desparately by families and tragically lost.
Doug: Your writings on my HB 1020 just came to my attention. First, let me clarify that the intention was for the exemption to be the same $1,500 that would apply to any other child for that tax year – the $2,500 was apparently a drafting error that I did not catch before filing the bill.
Secondly, this bill has absolutely nothing to do with abortion or conferring rights on fetuses. The purpose for clarifying that this applied only to a child for which a Certificate of Stillbirth was issued was to keep the A-word completely out of it.
The genesis of this bill is nothing more than a family who contacted me. Having lost a child just a few weeks before their due date, it was a bit of a slap in the face to them to learn that their child, for that one year, did not qualify for the same tax exemption that other children qualify for. As one of your posters pointed out, parents incur medical and other expenses in these situations, and deserve the same tax treatment as other families.
That’s all this bill is about, and I think one has to look pretty far under a rock to see anything else in this.
Thanks for allowing me to clarify this.
Jerry Torr
Rep. Torr & Michelle – thanks for your comments. Like I’ve said before, on its own merits, I don’t find this bill objectionable.
Efforts by social conservatives to incrementally increase the rights of fetuses have made me a bit skittish. I don’t think I was being overly paranoid connecting the two, but since Rep. Torr has provided his assurance that this bill has nothing to do with the pro-life efforts, that’s good enough for me. My apologies for any distress I may have caused to Michelle. (I’m reasonably certain that Rep. Torr’s skin is thick enough to leave him unfazed by anything I might write.)
Wow. Props to Doug for getting a response from an actual state legislator.
Michelle and Rep. Torr make a good case. I just worry that this bill, if passed, will be taken up as a bludgeon by abortion foes anyway.
Will those seeking to rein in the dialogue in light of fearful speculation by abortion rights advocates be so quick to do so when abortion opponents behave with similar recklessness?
I guess we’ll find out.
Incidentally, I should correct a mistake in a post I made in this thread a couple of months ago. Above, I incorrectly identified Morgan Spurlock as the subject of Fast Food Nation. That was wrong. Spurlock’s documentary film was Super Size Me. Fast Food Nation is a book — also about the fast food industry — by Eric Schlosser.
My husband and I suffered a stillbirth with our second son at 38 weeks gestation. This bill had nothing to do with abortion or fetal rights. It is an attempt to help families that suffer a stillbirth to cover the many costs that you face – funeral, burial, etc. For the living, there is insurance to help cover those costs upon death. For a stillbirth – no such insurance exists.
Another thing I wanted to point out was the difference between miscarriage and stillbirth.
Some of the posters above referred to “miscarriages”. Miscarriages are defined as occurring prior to 20 weeks gestation. This bill would cover babies who die after 20 weeks – when the families are responsible for providing their baby with a proper burial.
Amy,
You wrote:
Thanks for providing this information. What puzzles me is why private insurers don’t cover this sort of thing as part of standard life insurance or homeowner’s policies[*].
This sounds like a market failure on the part of the insurance industry. Does anyone have any ideas why this is the case?
[*] I know it sounds kind of strange, but I have learned that homeowner’s insurance covers all kinds of odd scenarios that don’t seem closely related to the fact of owning a house.
For crying out loud, educate yourselves before demonstrating your ignorance.
These are FULL TERM, viable babies who die during or just before birth. Parents have already paid for the cost of birth, preparing nurseries, car seats, etc ad nauseum…now they have to pay thousand for a STATE MANDATED burial or cremation which is MANDATORY for stillbirths in our state. For crying out loud…these are 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 lb babies dying for no reason, not “clumps of cells.”
Stupidity.
From the tone of your post, I suspect this will be a drive-by. Plus the discussion of the clumps of cells was a digression from the original bill — discussing the issue of abortion generally, and opposition to it at any time after conception; so I don’t think you read very closely before you decided to rant a little bit.
Be that as it may, Rep. Torr’s bill allowing a deduction for stillbirths kicks in after 20 weeks of gestation. (I don’t believe Rep. Hostettler’s proposal in the U.S. House had any limitation. I think it applied at any time after conception.). At 20 weeks, the fetus is about 6.5 inches long and weighs approximately 10.5 ounces. Not that this means Rep. Torr’s proposal is bad policy. But, if you’re asserting that this only applies to 6 pound, viable babies who happen to die before birth, that would be inaccurate.
I am a mother of a child who died soon after birth and very well could have been stillborn. I am entitled to claim my child on my taxes and therefore do not understand why a parent of a stillborn child should not be able to do the same. You have to take into consideration that we have the same hospital and doctor bills as parents whos children live. Also, most parents do not know in advance that their child will die. You also have to consider the burial expenses, because whether you realize the child is a person or not he/she is recognized by the state and federal government and must recieve a proper burial. Therefore I find it appaling that you need to debate this as though we should have killed our children before this stage when we thought they would live. I would not wish for anyone to have to bury their child like I did but I do think that maybe if you went through it you would understand the reasoning behind the bill.
With all due respect, what the hell are you talking about? Did you read the post or the comments? Did you happen to see the part where I said, “taken on its own merits, I don’t have a problem with this bill?” Do you acknowledge that pro-life advocates have been attempting to combat Roe v. Wade by incrementally recognizing the rights of the unborn and by incrementally imposing more restrictions on the ability to obtain an abortion?
That’s what most of the discussion has been about. You don’t have to agree that this particular bill is about restricting abortion, or paving the way to such restrictions. In fact, Rep. Torr has said that he had no such thing in mind, and I’m inclined to believe Rep. Torr. (Though Rep. Hostettler is a different matter.) But, if you recognize these aspects of the discussion, I do not see how you can fairly suggest — let alone be appalled — that someone is advocating anyone “should have killed our children before this stage when we thought they would live.”
As the mother of a stillborn child (33 weeks gestation, death due to an umbilical cord accident), I will say that a tax credit is very helpful. I did nothing to cause the death of my child. But I had lots of expenses due to his death. Not only did the medical bills pile up, but there are also burial expenses. If your child is over 20 week gestation, you are legally responsible for the proper burial or cremation of the child. And you must deliver the child, even if it is not alive. So you end up with the same medical costs as a mother of a living child. Not only that, but hospitals generally run lots of blood tests and then there is the autopsy. But we are not allowed to claim the child as a dependant.
Jessica, did this law pass? my mom keeps saying it never passed and i want to know for sure if it did or not because my daughter was also stillborn at 30weeks and it was from unknown reasons since the hospital messed up our genetic tests i had done.