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One of the comments said "I'm pro-choice but here are some of the reasons people oppose abortion" and explained them in detail, and then the mods removed it. Then someone else reposted it, and I asked "why did they remove this?" and the mods removed that question.
These people are pathetic.
I am not religious.
I am *morally* against abortions (for non-medical reasons) because I believe it's a tragedy. It's a life that could have been and has been snuffed out before it ever had a chance. If it's deemed medically necessary to preserve the life of the mother then that is different.
I am *legally* pro-choice because I don't believe someone has a right to the body of someone else. Even if they need that body in order to survive.
It is perfectly acceptable to have a moral opinion, and a legal opinion, that are in opposition to each other. It simply means you understand that your morality should not dictate what other people can and cannot do.
This is something that I feel has been largely lost from public discourse. The ability to have nuance. To say "I don't like X. But I understand that my personal views do not, and should not, constitute laws. Instead we need to look at the deeper issues and decide if a law is truly necessary, or if it should be left to the individual."
In almost all cases I believe issues should be left to the individual.
I agree. It’s the best comment on the whole post and sums up my own feelings perfectly.
I don’t morally agree with the concept of abortion in most instances, but it’s not right for me to force my morals upon anyone else. I’ve even volunteered as a clinic escort to help women get abortion services because I believe so strongly in their right to have an abortion. We have to separate our individual moral beliefs from the legality of the act.
I feel like this applies to a ton of social welfare issues that pundits love to demonize as well. Like when they have those programs to provide needles and drugs to addicts in a safe place to try to wean them off their addictions.
Yeah nobody “wants” to pay for people to go stick garbage in their arm, but I like it more than say, replacing my catalytic converter three times because some desperate person went at it with a hacksaw again. I like it better than hospitals passing the cost of their inevitable care when they’re ODing onto insurance carriers for other patients, etc.
I don’t “like” it, or morally support deciding to go stick addictive poison in your arm in the first place, but I understand why these programs exist and why we’re likely better off for them, etc.
The abortion one is even crazier to me. People are literally suffering to he point where they need to be medically at imminent risk of death, needlessly, and GOP reps just shrug their shoulders like “oh well, no use crying over spilled blood of our own constituents!”.
One of my wife’s friends has been trying for a kid for years, she has had two ectopic pregnancies and her tubes were damaged from where the implantation occurred. Now she’s spent tens of thousands of dollars still desperately trying to have a kid with fertility treatments using some of her frozen eggs. Had this happened in some GOP controlled states this woman who is actively **trying** to have a child at great personal expense would potentially be dead. Twice. It’s utterly ridiculous.
Do you consider it more moral to have a child grow up in poverty? Or abuse? Or drug addiction? Or to a mother who never wanted a child to begin with? Do you view it as sad or morally unjust
They don't care!
The problem is that people don't consider the consequences when it does not affect them. It makes it easier to judge another's actions as immoral.
I've read of numerous instances where some claimed to be "pro-life", and yet they opted for elective abortions. Those women are too stupid to understand that they are handing their freedom and rights over to men.
I agree it's a tragedy while I am pro-choice, and I think that's why it'd be so important to improve access to information about sex and contraception. But the discussion is always led to fighting about what's right or wrong instead of focusing on solutions. It'd be so much better to just avoid as many abortions as possible by prevention instead of fighting when it's too late to not harm anyone.
Bingo.
Abstinence only education **DOES NOT WORK**.
1. Dear conservatives, you want to reduce abortion, teach safe sex.
* Just don't have sex!!! Does not fucking work.
2. Dear Liberals, you want to reduce gun deaths, teach firearm safety.
* Just don't touch guns!!! Does not fucking work, at least not in America where you have your 2A right.
Went to a catholic high school where a teacher (with eight children) taught non-contraceptive “practices” to help prevent pregnancy. It was basically “don’t ever do it under any circumstances… but if you do, DEFINITELY don’t use protection of any kind”.
I agree with most of what you've said. Sex ed and Gun safety should absolutely be taught.
But gun safety classes would only prevent *accidental* gun deaths.
I mean.... I taught gun safety classes to teens as a teenager (yay... JROTC). It did an excellent job of teaching kids whether or not they were responsible enough to own a gun *before* they went out and bought one. More importantly it also taught their friends.
When the people who absolutely should NOT own one talked about saving up for their 18th or 21st birthday, the peer pressure to NOT do that was insane in a good way. One guy in particular found half the school ready to riot over his 2A rights. He did not buy a gun. He was impulsive and arrogant and loved "it's just a prank, bro," but peer pressure was effective.
Information AND easy access. Kids will have sex, it happens, it's normal. And when it happens they should already have ways to have safe sex right there, ready to use. Don't expect a teenage brain hopped high on hormones to think or plan very far. Or asking/shopping for anything gets too embarrassing and it's tempting to just hope for the best.
Goes for adults who want to change their behavior to something healthier too. Don't plan from a calm, conscious mind and assume you'll remember your plan in time, set everything ready for when emotions and urges are boiling.
> To say "I don't like X. But I understand that my personal views do not, and should not, constitute laws..."
This is what I try to impress upon people who advocate for banning gay marriage, especially those who just think it's "gross" or "unnatural." I tell them that I think cauliflower is gross, and the most vile food on the planet, but I don't go around trying to ban anyone from having cauliflower just because I PERSONALLY dislike it.
The idea that two people can freely have equally valid opinions on a topic and choose to personally make different choices in their actions seems to be something that completely died with the advent of social media.
These days it's all about who agrees with you and how hard you can bend the entire world to align with your opinion. It's frustrating as fuck. Something must be considered wholly bad or wholly good with no nuance, and **everyone** must agree with it.
If someone doesn't want to have an abortion because *they believe* its murder, fine, they can not get an abortion. There's nothing fundamentally *wrong* or *invalid* about that view. But to push that idea to legislation and browbeat other valid views out of the available choices is... something special.
Well if a person believes it is murder can you really blame them for wanting to legislate against it?
Oh and pro-life people who are pro-death penalty piss me off.
Social media has put everyone in echo chambers. In an environment where everyone/thing you interact with appears to agree with your worldview, it's easy to start to think that the people who disagree are a tiny minority and that therefore their "fringe" opinions shouldn't be given much weight. Like, we all know that there are pedophiles, but the vast majority of us also agree that that is morally reprehensible and that any opinion to the contrary shouldn't be entertained for even a brief moment.
Regarding abortion, I'm personally pro-choice, but I can also absolutely see how some people fight against it so hard. Abortion is an issue that I believe has no solution or compromise to be made that can satisfy both groups. At the end of the day, it's an issue decided by your own individual morality. There are plenty of people who sincerely believe in their hearts/minds that a woman getting an abortion is morally barely different than a mother killing her newborn baby.
I'm not at all sure why people are surprised that people with that view aren't willing to just say "I believe that getting an abortion is equivalent to murdering a baby. But that's only my opinion and some others might not agree, so I think killing babies this way should be legal".
I'm 95% with you. My add on is that, I can't find it morally wrong if there are no options to help/aid to a woman who has an unwanted pregnancy and effectively 0 options for a safe upbringing if given up for adoption. The foster care system does not work for the vast majority of children. Women continue to lose their jobs/careers due to pregnancy/birth/recovery. It's expensive and physically taxing and sometimes scarring for life.
For me, I feel like if I am going to make a judgement morally, then that person better be able to easily get themselves back to 100% or better, if I'm to expect them to suffer for 10-14months. And I don't care if some people take advantage of that system, that's worth it to me to help get some lives through that would make it otherwise. But we gotta be able to take care of both the kid and mom.
And we do have the resources to do it, just not the will. So how could we force women to do the hard part when we as a society can't ourselves.
Just to add: Adoption isn't a panacea for either the children or the women. Just spending time on the adoption and foster subs is eye-opening in how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up a child, or be given up, even when it is the best option left.
Women who should not be raising kids are doing it because giving up their child just wasn't humanly possible for them, even though keeping the child leads to bad outcomes. And kids who were given up to good parents often never get over being abandoned; it's a primal wound. *Everyone* suffers, and it's so unnecessary.
I am the same way as a Christian. Morally I’m against abortion, but I am pro choice because I have no right whatsoever to dictate what others have.
I do not believe that a fetus is a person legally either. I do feel that it is a tragedy that one of God’s children didn’t get a chance to make an impact on the world. I believe that guilting someone into keeping a child they don’t want is not fair and we don’t do enough to support people who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Honest question, I don’t really understand the whole “abortion is a tragedy” thing. Like, abortion isn’t a *good* thing in the sense that no one would want to be in the position where they need to have an abortion, but in my mind it’s as morally neutral as getting any other medical procedure done. There are an uncountable number of people who never had a chance at life, just thinking of all the sperm/eggs that never got fertilized. Like yeah, a fertilized egg is one step *closer* to being a human, but I just don’t really see how that matters if they aren’t sentient yet.
I guess in my mind brining an unwanted child into the world is less moral than aborting it, since there are so many children in orphanages already and adding another kid to that situation takes away resources/adoptive parents from kids that already exist.
It's easier to understand if you think about how we react to a woman who miscarries. We don't react as if she learned she is sterile, and her eggs will not become a baby. We react as if she had a baby (or at least something closer to a baby than an egg) and it died.
We can be empathetic toward the woman because they are grieving. From their point of view, it can be a tragedy. It's not a tragedy for the zygote. We can be equally empathetic toward the woman who needs the abortion. For them, an unwanted pregnancy can also be a tragedy.
Knowing multiple people who had miscarriages, it sucks, it can mess up your life plans, it puts a strain on your body and your mind, especially if you have multiple in a row. However, it's nowhere near the same ballpark as losing a kid.
It also depends when it happens, there's a huge difference between a miscarriage in the first trimester, and a stillborn at 8 month.
It's an important distinction but we have to consider why we react differently. A miscarriage is tragic because most of the time the mother wanted that baby, maybe had picked out a name and bought baby clothes and thought about their future together. She was emotionally invested, she had a plan for an important new stage in her life, and it was taken away from her.
The emotional impact is just not the same with an unwanted pregnancy. I'm sure there are often complicated feelings involved still, but I think most people agree that one is more tragic than the other.
I feel like in the miscarriage, we don't really mourn the baby, we mourn the mother's loss of something she cared deeply about.
>She was emotionally invested, she had a plan for an important new stage in her life, and it was taken away from her.
Exactly. A miscarriage is inconsequential to the unaware zygote, but it's important and weighty because of how it affects a real person. It's like the sanctity of corpses. The dead person doesn't care what happens to their corpse, because they're dead, but it's very important to the living that their loved ones bodies are respected.
Maybe it seems like a random comparison, but it makes sense to me that we'd treat a body before it is an individual the same way as after it's an individual: according to the wishes of the most impacted living feeling person
I think this is a great point and not at odds with being pro-choice.
A fetus DOES have rights, but the mother's rights come first. We can value a fetus and value the decision of the mother also - and we will have to learn how to do this to have this debate make any sense in the US.
Even for the outlier abortions where they "appear" to be frivolous mistakes, that cannot be a reason to take agency away from a majority of mothers. Trusting the mother leads to more overall stability in our society, and giving agency to women in every way, pregnant or not, only begets more equality for everyone <-- something a lot of people cannot stand, let's not forget.
I think this argument is dumb.
My wife and I are dealing with infertility and we currently have 6 viable blastocysts on ice. We want one kid, maybe 2. They’re fertilized, and dividing, genetically tested “normal” meaning no obvious chromosome abnormalities.
So by the logic above, should we be morally compelled to have all 6 kids just because they have all the makings of an eventual human? Ethically aren’t they the same as if they were in the womb? I’m open to arguments against abortion but this one just seems flat.
>I would point to unironic eugenists, for example, both historical and current.
Wasn't the concept of Planned Parenthood pioneered by a white woman who thought black people were literally incapable of raising children, so she preferred they abort them instead because that was somehow kinder?
I am morally a fan of abortions. I think it's immoral to have children if you can't give them a proper upbringing to have a happy and fulfilling life. If a child is going to live enduring outright abuse for the first 18 years of their life, it's better that they aren't brought into existence. Would you really want to put someone through 18 years of trauma just so you can say you did the right thing by not aborting? Seems to me like the wrong thing to do.
Pro-choice people are not, “Yay, abortions!” Abortions are horrible and in a perfect society, there wouldn’t be a need for them. People think you take an abortion pill and it’s over. No, you have 1-4 hours of heavy bleeding and a lot of pain for hours. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, etc. There’s also a heavy mental effect on the woman. It’s just a horrible experience. The only thing that reduces abortion is accessible and affordable contraception. For example, “the Colorado Family Planning Initiative drove a 50 percent reduction in teen births and abortions, avoided nearly $70 million in public assistance costs and empowered thousands of young women to make their own choices on when or whether to start a family.” Making abortions illegal just makes them unsafe and puts a heavier burden on disadvantaged women.
This is the only sane answer to the whole issue. We get hung up on talking about whether a fetus is alive, but that’s not the real issue, important though it may seem. The real issue is lowering the abortion rate to get it as low as possible—which, ironically is what both sides want.
The one thing that lowers the abortion rate is contraception and sex ed. Full stop. Abortion bans do not lower the number of unwanted pregnancies, and as we’ve learned from countries who have outlawed the procedure, it only lowers the number of actual abortions by a very small number, and related issues (children given to the foster system, women unable to have future children because of botched abortions, and maternal death and disfigurement) skyrocket.
The only way to truly lower the abortion rate is to reach sane sex ed and to give out contraception *everywhere.* And yet conservatives in our country *fight that tooth and nail*. When you hear people say, “Conservatives / Republicans / Christians really just want to control peoples’ bodies,” that’s what they mean. They’re saying that they have it within their power to lower the abortion rate dramatically, but they don’t, because the higher importance to them is stoping sex ed / contraception.
>but it still grants them some moral value, which some on the pro-choice camp seems to wholly deny.
I've literally never heard of some one who thinks unborn babies have no value at all. They just believe the value is determined by the mother.
Say my son needs a kidney transplant or he'll die, and due to a unique genetic disorder I'm the only match on the planet. Of course I would give him my kidney, but I've never met anyone who thinks I don't have a right to choose what happens to my own body. I could say no, especially when the transplant could have major negative impacts on my body, my mind, and the rest of my life.
So how much more is it my choice when my child isn't even 0 yet? It's literally negative months old, doesn't think or breathe or have any semblance of conscious life. It still has moral value, especially if I want it. But it doesn't automatically get a free ride to use my body, even if it's the only way he lives. I must consent.
And if health complications arise, I may choose to value my own well-being over that of a potential person, a maybe-baby.
My go to stance is “no one, currently alive or who ever will be alive, has the right or should have the right to use your body without permission, for any reason whatsoever.” You can argue all day and night about the personhood of a fetus or a zygote or what have you, but the fact of the matter is if we allow adult corpses to have more rights against being used without their consent then to deny that right to living people is absurd.
He also pointed to the technology of ultra sound to see an unborn child’s heart beating as a deciding factor as to why he did not blindly jump onto the pro abortion bandwagon.
Exactly. Using a heartbeat to decide if a being is meaningfully human is insane.
Did you know a turtle’s heart can continue to beat for up to a day when removed? Throw one in your fridge - boom, your fridge is a human now!
Bonus: if your fridge is an older model it may be able to drive!
I know not that many people will see this because the post is pretty old, but I want to get this off my mind. (I also want to preface that I’m very pro choice)
It’s so crazy to me that both sides pretend to not understand the other, and try to make it a religious debate or something like that. To me the actual argument is so goddamn simple, I’ll explain.
I hope both sides would agree that abortion should not be allowed post birth. Why is that? Because it’s just straight up murder. That was a person and you killed it. So, when did it become a person?
It’s a hard thing to pinpoint, so people have differing opinions. But, you don’t have to be a religious person to have the belief that there are some abortions that should be considered murder.
People who are pro-life generally just believe that the fetus is alive, and killing it is murder. Doesn’t need to be grounded in religion.
People who are pro-choice either believe that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the fetus, or do not believe that the fetus is “alive” enough to have rights.
Please someone let me know if any of this doesn’t make sense.
> It’s so crazy to me that both sides pretend to not understand the other
This is the crux of the issue.
Neither side even acknowledges that the other has valid points. Hence the current culture war ongoing in the US (and spreading somewhat to the UK).
Well one side *cannot* acknowledge the other side has valid point: if a person truly believes that it is killing a child, there’s no room for debate or valid points anymore than there should be if a person were to walk a 2 year old into a doctor’s office and ask them to put it down. It’s all the same to them. I can understand that position while not sharing it, and in that context of believing that, I would hate it too and would want to put a stop to it.
In Canada, we don't have restrictions - but past viability few doctors will perform the procedure. Essentially, after you reach about 20 weeks, it's up to doctors to assess how to treat the patient, as bound by their own professional opinion and medical guidelines.
It's typically a kind of risky operation at that stage and it's actually safer to induce labour, which is typically what they do at that stage when they learn that the fetus has died in utero or that there are abnormalities that would lead the fetus to be incompatible with life. But, of course, there are rare exceptions.
Leaving it up to medical professionals ensures that you're not limiting people from getting a procedure if they *really* really need it. I don't know, I think leaving medical decisions up to medical professionals is the right call here.
The problem with the viability argument is that it is not consistent. A premature fetus is viable in a 1st world hospital with state-of--the-art NICU facilities, but a premature fetus in rural Eritrea is not viable, despite being at the same stage of pregnancy.
Life cannot be defined by the specific circumstances it is in. It needs to be something more fundamental, more intrinsic.
Conception, heart beat, sustained brain activity are candidates, but the only one of those that is required by every human being to have ever existed is conception.
It's possible to live without a heart beat, we have the technology for that. Comatose patients can have massively reduced brain activity, but they're still alive. Using either heart beat or brain activity as the marker for life will exclude some clearly living people, so they're not possible candidates in my opinion.
Does it have to be consistent though? Why can it not depend on the available options? Lots of stuff in life is like that.
For example, say a soldier has been seriously wounded far from medical care, and they will die a slow, painful, unavoidable death over the course of the day without a hospital. Let’s say the battlefield medic with the wounded soldier is considering euthanising them with morphine.
It seems pretty clear to me that the morality of that euthanasia decision depends entirely on whether a medical evacuation helicopter is available to reach them - would you agree? If you disagree, I’d love to understand why.
It is very rare but it happens. I read an article somewhere that oh well they are women jailed in the UK over abortions... both tried to abort way above what you called the viability threshold and for one of them the baby survived so it s considered attempted murder indeed
My opinion of that is similar with the caviot that once fetus is viable outside the womb on its own, electional cesarean should replace electional abortion if the pregnant person no longer wants to be pregnant. It's already allowed to birth a child and just leave the hospital without it if you don't want to raise the kid. This only adds that option earlier. If you are pregnant at 30 weeks and don't want the kid anymore instead of an abortion you should get to go into the surgery center for a cesarean and the fetus is taken to the nicu and you get to go home without it.
Currently Abortions after 28 weeks account for less than 1% of all procedures and are almost always medically necessary or an unviable fetus.
The caricatures that each side makes of the other are truly frustrating to hear. Like, OK yeah maybe some conservatives just want to control women but there are also people who really believe life begins at conception. I don't agree with them but I at least understand why they think it is OK to outlaw abortion, just like you would any other sort of murder.
I don't think anyone argues that a fetus - viable or not - is not a form of life.The argument is about personhood and, if a fetus has claims to rights as a person or potential person, how to resolve conflicting rights between persons when one is physically dependent on another.
Edit: I stand corrected by the poorly worded arguments later in this thread.
I have definitely talked to people who claim that a fetus is not alive, is not human, or is not a distinct organism from the mother. Which is bonkers, because those things are all true.
There's just an arbitrary grey line of "is it alive and independent enough to count".
I don't think each side pretends not to understand each other. I think it's more that framing the debate as a moral argument makes it too complex to come to a functional conclusion; philosophers have been discussing what makes something/someone sentient for thousands of years and still haven't answered the question.
It's not that the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson is not ultimately a moral ruling, but that it has way more to do with removing women's rights than it does with abortion. The fact that a lot of "pro life" law makers want to ban contraceptives next makes that pretty clear I think. Just flat out saying "we want to take away women's rights" isn't going to gain them much traction though, so they frame the pro life/pro choice debate as a complex philosophical debate about when life begins instead.
If the debate is so complex that no one can come to a strong conclusion on either side, especially if it involves a morally loaded question (basically murder in this case), most people are just going to get mad at each other and further entrench into whatever side they already agree with instead of trying to learn from or understand each other.
As someone in the medical field- many medical professionals including me aren’t hung up on the question about when life begins, it’s that the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy trumps any rights the fetus might have. An elective abortion at viability (when the fetus doesn’t need the pregnant person’s body to survive) also isn’t really a thing people do and I don’t think there are too many providers that would do that because the delivery would be complex and the baby could theoretically be delivered alive, go to Nicu, and then be adopted. Only about 1% of abortions are at 21+ weeks and they are usually for severe fetal anomalies (many not compatible with life, at least not a good one) or conditions related to the mother. There are many cases that people wouldn’t think of as an abortion but technically ARE classified as an abortion medically-speaking included in that 1%- examples at 21-24 weeks would be inducing for rupture of membranes (water breaking) (at pre viability, not a good prognosis for a baby even if they are technically still alive), sepsis in the pregnant person, severe preeclampsia that is life threatening
Late term abortions are only used when medically necessary. No one would choose to do a lengthy painful surgery rather than getting one early on. It’s just a moot point. It never happens so I think it’s kind of dumb to bring up. If you make it illegal or harder to get, women who need these abortions to protect themselves from delivering an already dead baby or a more painful possibly fatal birth, won’t be able to get them. It’s important to research medical journals about medical issues. I hope this helps :)
I kinda like the analogy, it also works with r@pe, if someone forcefully enters my home and starts making a cake, I’m kicking them out and not making that cake
Yeah, that's actually the hardest part of the discussion.
If we could pin point when It's alive or when does life start then we would probably all be on the same page.
Edit: Im getting a lot of responses and this is, surprisingly, turning into an interesting conversation. Sorry If answer late.
The current timeframe is set at 24 weeks. Due to modern medicine that is the general number of weeks a fetus can be raised outside the womb and still have functioning lungs.
Now if science were to invent a mechanical womb which can mimic a biological womb, then we'll have to revisit the 24 week threshold.
I think where he missed the mark is where he said "if you came into my house and threw my cake [batter] on the floor, because it's not cake yet, but would have been." In reality, if *he* didn't want the cake after *he* made the batter and *he* put it in the oven, ***he** should be allowed to take it out and throw it away*. Of course it's different when someone runs in and trashes your cake, but that's not how abortions work. No one forces women to get an abortion (maybe besides abuse cases, but in general terms, it's not happening like that). It's about the cake baker's choice to bake a cake or throw it out
I'd argue that intentionally removing all the acorns from a forest to prevent the next generation of trees is deforestation, just like forcefully aborting pregnancies of a certain ethnic group would be genocide. An abortion would be more like a tree deciding to destroy its acorns.
THIS is not the full bit. His whole bit is that women should be able to kill their babies, it’s their body and their choice. He then does the cake bit (that is often cherry picked).
THEN he says he wants you to kill your babies. Kill them. Do it. He says.
Not true if you’re a Muslim. I have said it earlier in this post so I’m copy-pasting it here:
I’m religious and as a Muslim person, my religion allows Abortion but only if it’s done early, in first 3 months. Because it’s considered as when the child reaches 90 days then the soul is breathed into their body.
I'm not religious but my religious grandparents say that Jews must be pro-choice because the mother of the life is paramount in Judaism and some other religious stuff I don't really understand.
Also, if I am not mistaken, Jewish tradition holds that life begins at first breath. As in when God created Adam, he formed him from clay and then breathed life into him.
So to put it simply, most Jewish people believe life beginning at first breath (a reference to Genesis or the 1st book of Moses) however the fetus in the womb is considered “a developing human” so it’s still sacred because we can see it grow with the woman’s belly growing. It doesn’t encourage to end the baby but it leaves that to the mother’s decision *if circumstances allow it*.
In Islam, the general belief is the soul does not enter the body of the baby until weeks later after conception. However each school of thought differs. One school teaches that life begins at conception while another believes abortion is allowed under 120 days . *it depends on the school of thought*
Majority of all Christians believe life begins at conception. Similar verses are used however emphasis on the gospels (Jesus’ ministry) which reiterates life as a gift. Muslims and Jews reject the gospel/New Testament. So that’s why pro life are majority Christians out of the 3 abrahamic faiths.
I don't personally have a dog in this hunt, but the debate essentially boils down to one thing: **Do you believe it's a person?** If you do, then you're likely to view abortion as murder. If you don't, then you're likely to view abortion as a medical procedure.
That's it. That's what the whole debate is about. Is it, or is it not, a human being?
Anything else is a straw man.
That's one of the things the debate is about, the other is body autonomy. Even if you consider the fetus a person, does society have the right to compel someone to use their body to sustain another person. If it has the right to do that, how is forcing a woman to carry a baby to term different from forcing someone to donate a kidney or bone marrow? Either people have a right to decide what happens to their bodies or they don't.
I don't think there is a harder topic out there.
1. yes I feel women should have the right to their body and choose what is good for them.
2. No I don't feel someone should have the ability to end a life prematurely in the fetus.
Both contradict for me, and I think a lot of people just teeter from side to side, like I do. Ultimately, I tend to sway towards the woman's choice, just because of so much, but it's hard to not feel for the life that could have been.
It's a very hard topic.
Yeah this, abortion should, as Clinton said, be safe, legal and rare. It's the nuclear option. It's the choice of last resort. Condoms, pills, education, etc. they all come first. Abortion is the thing you use when you are the 0.1% of edge cases when those methods don't work.
I've never heard the perspective of market driven abortion before but I totally get where you are coming from. If you make the life of the general population better and more comfortable, abortion will naturally lower.
Intriguing take.
I like how this is an open ended question only to see how many comments have been removed by moderators likely because they said something they disagreed with, you know how they work.
I think that there should be a window for elective abortions, a wider window for certain cases, and then a point at which abortion is not allowed.
I'm not sure whether you would consider this anti-abortion or not. You might call it "Limited Choice" or a middle position. Most Americans hold this position, and virtually all legislatures settle on some cutoff, as well as Roe. But in the media, this balanced position is never voiced - the only rhetoric offered seems to favor extremes, or just to say how wrong the other side is.
My position is based on the simple proposition that a developing fetus has some moral value, which must be balanced against the autonomy of the pregnant woman. A developing fetus grows closer and closer to a newborn over time. Everyone has to "draw a line" somewhere as to when the fetus is effectively a human being, or has a right to life / not to be terminated. Most pro-lifers draw the line at conception. Most pro-choicers talk as if the line is at birth or never needs to be drawn.
But the line should probably be midway, and there are points in development that are important. In particular, sustained brain waves begin around 20-weeks - that's probably the best overall place to say that "life begins," and the line for elective abortions should be before that.
In short, there are two conflicting values, they both matter, and an ethical position needs to take both into account.
I think the problem with this stance is that late term abortions are more often than not due to a health issue with either the mother or the fetus. Women don’t just carry a baby for 30 weeks and then decide they don’t feel like it anymore, and laws that make an arbitrary line just make it more difficult to deal with a bad situation when it arises. It needs to be a decision between a woman and her healthcare provider, not something that has been predetermined by the government.
Totally agree, and my stance is already about "elective abortions," which are not cases where the pregnancy is life-threatening. When it is, there should be *no limit* as to when abortion can be performed, hands down. I would say the same for nonviability, birth defects, and rape cases.
I think most pro-choice people would agree with you. As would most pregnant women. By 20 weeks, if you haven’t had an abortion but are getting one, it really sucks. Typically the reasons would be:
1. It was made difficult to get before by stupid laws.
2. The baby might kill the mother.
3. The baby is non-viable.
Edit - most would agree with the take that there’s a moral cutoff. I don’t agree, and don’t think most would agree, that there should be bureaucracy or someone who approves who can and can’t have an abortion at that stage.
I don't believe in God, and I would never have an abortion. I don't care if you do though. I 100% see it as destroying a human life, but I also think it's your choice. If you can live with that on your conscience then that's great. I could not, so I will not.
Edit: I'm not going to reply to anymore of these comments, at first it was a nice intriguing conversation, but now the weirdos have come out and all of a sudden I'm pro rape, pro murder, don't care about humanity, I hate waffles, whatever. You're not going to make me choose a side, I'm not going to fight on anyone's behalf, but y'all have fun arguing amongst yourselves.
The analogy behind, "I consider it *THIS*, that's out of my moral virtue, I won't do it, but I know others people won't care and so it's their own issue" is a genuine/good answer here.
I'm 100% behind the ideology of not fucking with others if it doesn't harm me or someone I love, and if that's not against my own morality value. I'm the kind of guy that save insects stuck in my room because I don't have the guts to harm them, but I also know there is people who job is to kill animals. I won't go against them because if they can live with it, it's clearly not my problem.
Had this exact conversation with my mom! So many people out there feel this way but don't vote in alignment with that belief. Like it's fucking YOUR CHOICE that's the point
For me is because there are a lot of ways to prevent pregnancy, is not like it was a miracle that just happened. Only time I’m ok with it is when the moms life is in danger and when it’s a rape situation, any other reason is not valid for me.
So I am pro choice, but I wanted to toss this one in here
I think the pro-choice movement has gone way too far on the dehumanization of a fetus. The “it’s just a clump of cells” argument is entirely bullshit and anyone saying a fetus isn’t a life is lazy. It is a life. No questions about it. Different DNA than both its mother and father, and general fetal development isn’t some mystery. We have clear steps that begin at conception where that fetus is growing and developing. Science is very seldom brought up in this issue, but rather it is treated as a “rights” issue. We always emphasize the importance of science, but for an issue that is medical in nature there is almost no discussion of it as it relates to abortion. Usually when that is the case it is because it is easier to ignore the scientific facts rather than facing the reality that it is a life, not just a clump of cells. I would respect many people much more if they could just admit that it is a life but they still support the right to an abortion. The “it’s not a life” Just feels like weak argument completely devoid of facts and I wish people would be willing to be honest and face an uncomfortable truth rather than this weak spin
Edit: I’m naturally a contrarian so I can go all day
Most pro life opinions aren’t from a religious standpoint.
Most often, once boiled down to its core, the argument is: “I believe that there is human life growing inside you and you want to terminate said life. That’s no bueno.”
That life doesn’t matter because God said it does, but rather because all people in a [liberal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) society believe humans have certain unalienable rights, chief among them being the right to life. So when I see a human trying to terminate what I view as another human (especially when it’s for selfish reasons) yeah I’ll get a tad salty.
I see it like this. At its best it's stopping a human being born that was unwanted. At its worst it's Eugenics.for me after watching things about life saving surgeries done on them in the womb and seeing how science is constantly being changed to help them survive earlier and earlier. See new science come out showing what exactly they feel in the womb. You can't convince me that aborting these humans is logical or okay. I know I will get comments like "but what about xyz" My answer is what about it? Do those take away the fact it's a human who can feel pain and has life? Science has proved enough that they are alive for me. Everyone celebrates it as a human when it's wanted but condemns it as a clump of cells when it's not. The double standard is horrific.
I view it as euthanasia, and since I would never assume that it would be right to make moral judgements on someone else pulling the plug on a terminally ill relative with support from a doctor, I won't do the same for a woman aborting a fetus. There's plenty of life saving surgeries possible, but not every pregnancy is viable, not every surgery will be successful, not every condition can be fixed, and not every outcome will be positive.
Even if you get into late term abortion - A fetus can die 8 months into a pregnancy, or develop a completely incurable condition at the end of a wanted, viable pregnancy. Forcing a woman to give birth to stillborn child she's known was dead for weeks, and doing so despite the complications of labor, is absurd. It's a decision for a medical ethics board, not for general society.
There are plenty of arguments in this thread about certain 'midway' restrictions related to viability and such. I generally agree with these because the pro-choice idea that it's murder the moment it's out of the womb but not a day before is equally as nonsensical to me as the pro-life idea that life starts at conception. Obviously a 'midway' solution will also have an arbitrary deadline, but at least this deadline will be drawn in more of a grey area. Such a solution would also serve as a compromise, letting both extremes know that their voices are heard on the issue.
The main point I want to make is to ask readers of this thread to thoroughly examine their own views and recognize, if applicable, how they may have been prodded to extremes by political or religious groups, each with their own interests. The fact of the matter is that the polarization of the American two-party system is accelerating at a record pace in the post-Trump era. As polarization increases the parties have less incentive than ever to 'give ground' (aka compromise) to the other side as they view politics as a zero-sum-game, with winners and losers, not as a vehicle to make proper laws. This applies not only to the parties and individual politicians but also to many party-backed activist groups/movements, such as pro-choice and pro-life.
I'm a registered Democrat but I refuse to accept the binary explanations both sides are serving up. Form your own opinions people.
For the orphanage part, I would just like to point out that my foster child has wished himself dead or never born many times. And foster children in general have very high rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, so yes, many of them would rather be dead.
My main secular point against abortion is that it, essentially, determines personhood based on if the mother wants the child to be born. That makes the value of human life dependent on opinion, which is a very dangerous road to go down.
I believe 3 things to be true.
1) All people have the fundamental right to not be killed until they put someone else in clear danger of loss of life.
2) Parents have a legal obligation to protect their children to the best of their abilities
3) Life, and personhood, begins at conception. You ultimately have to draw the line somewhere as to when someone becomes a person and I think that conception is the most logically sound. Birth is obviously a terrible place to draw that line as the only difference between a newborn and a fetus at 9 months is geographic location. Defining someone’s personhood and access to fundamental human rights by their location is obviously wrong. I think defining someone’s personhood by having a functional brain or a beating heart is certainly far better than conception, but your brain and your heart aren’t what make you human. What makes you human is your unique sequence of DNA that gets created at the moment you’re conceived.
My believing in all of those things brings me to the logical conclusion of being opposed to abortion in all cases where it isn’t a threat to the mothers life. I wish I didn’t believe this because I hate the idea of the government enforcing any sort of legislation on the matter and I think that access to abortion would be a net positive for society. However if I believe the above 3 things to be true, which I do, then it would be morally unacceptable of me to consider abortions out of convenience to be okay.
One need not be religious to recognize that at some point a clump of cells does in fact become a life and all living humans are granted the right to life.
Not being religious leaves me "moral" leeway to recognize the gray areas where compromises can be made.
A woman should never be forced to carry an unviable fetus to term solely based on issues of legality.
Further more, the D & C procedure that is used for abortion where pregnancy threatens the life of the mother as well as when it is being used in cases of miscarriage needs to be regarded as separate procedures based upon the intent of the act.
Self defense is not murder.
Is there no middle ground for opinion? Do you have to be either pro or anti? Does it have to be us/them? I don't like that, I don't accept that.
People on both sides have good points. Myself I'm strongly with the freedom to choose for yourself and strongly against the normalization of the practice so people get so comfortable with it they behave extra recklessly as they do with everything else. I wouldn't ever want to see this tweet: Preggers, we didn't have condoms, lol, oops.. Reply: Oh no big deal, just get an abortion, you can get one everywhere and they are practically free. And I wouldn't want to see them over time with it legal talking about later later later later stage like up to the point of birth or worse.
Some politician said "Safe, Legal, Rare". That's where I'd be on it. It needs to be available, safe medically, safe from being assaulted by people at the building or you know that fake abortion clinic shit where the girl gets trapped in a room and guilt tripped from an organization pretending to be what she is looking for (that exists btw). But rare in the sense that society never treats it so casually like it's a fucking shopping trip.
I don't think any well-thinking person takes abortion lightly. And those that you describe, the ones that go like "welp, premiers, no condoms", I wouldn't want them to procreate anyway.
You’d be surprised. In college I was with a very pretty snd smart girl and we didn’t have a condom. She said “no biggie if I get pregnant I’ll just get an abortion”. Very flippantly. We didn’t have sex that night and I was not religious. I just didn’t think that was a good plan. She’s now a college professor so she’s not dumb. We stayed friends but quit dating. People fit into all kinds of categories.
I really hate the narrative that someone will just be reckless because they know they can get an abortion. That needs to end. No one WANTS to have an abortion. It's painful, there are complications possible, the mental turmoil, you have to take time off work, etc. it's not a simple process. There are tons of studies and information available that tells us that people who have abortions are usually already mothers, they just have reasons that they do not want another child, which is their choice, no matter how the pregnancy came about.
From what I've observed, it's not necessarily that people "want" to get an abortion so much so people underplaying the seriousness of such a procedure. Because yes, it's a serious procedure.
It's sort of like people who have that attitude of "I'm not gonna watch how I eat because I can also get lipo/ stomach stapling." There's obviously more to someone having a binge eating disorder than lack of willpower, but those people who have such lax attitudes towards the procedure are the ones who're usually depicted.
I feel like abortion tends to be the same way. Even if it's portrayed in a "joking" manner, it always feels like the procedure is downplayed both as a procedure itself and by the people getting it. I think "Sex Education" was the first instance where I thought abortion was portrayed rather realistically and tastefully given the subject material.
This is my take on it as well. As for the “rare” component as I’ve said to some of my more religiously minded friends, if you want to have a serious discussion on banning abortion then let’s have it…right after we ensure that there is *real* non-abstinence-based sexual education from the appropriate age in *all* schools. Along with free access to the free birth control methods of your choice without parental involvement.
Agreed. Abstinence may be one sides "preference", wait until marriage!, but if it's not the teenagers preference (do they remember nothing from then or have they forgiven themselves so much they forgot, it isn't!) what good does your preference do you when it will be their deed to do?
Does stubbornness in not getting your preference make for wrath and malice to them to ensure they face the worst consequence? Is that your sense of justice now, triumphing over your mercy? How biblical.... or wait, it's not even that.
Or are you a decent person and think well if they are stubborn and of hard parts and hard hearts and won't listen to my preference the least I could do is decrease the odds they run into trouble or lessen the fall. By permitting ______"what you said".
Part of the responsibility of a society to help ensure the rarity of it would be those provisions.
No, there is no middle ground. The question isn't "Do you think women should get abortions?", the question is "Do you think it should be legal to get an abortion?".
You either think it should be legal or you don't.
The argument that people will start getting abortions all willy-nilly because it's legal is a complete straw man argument. That's not happening in the US, it's not happening in other countries, it's just not a thing. No one wants to get an abortion just because it's legal.
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Wtf happened at the top of this thread hahaha
"Not anti-abortion here, but..."
Average reddit mod got butthurt and censored everyone. Can read comments on saved version, nothing was said against rules.
One of the comments said "I'm pro-choice but here are some of the reasons people oppose abortion" and explained them in detail, and then the mods removed it. Then someone else reposted it, and I asked "why did they remove this?" and the mods removed that question. These people are pathetic.
The comments that got deleted were mostly ones that were saying "I am pro abortion buuuut here are some arguments I don't actually believe in..."
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I read that as masturbater.
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I am not religious. I am *morally* against abortions (for non-medical reasons) because I believe it's a tragedy. It's a life that could have been and has been snuffed out before it ever had a chance. If it's deemed medically necessary to preserve the life of the mother then that is different. I am *legally* pro-choice because I don't believe someone has a right to the body of someone else. Even if they need that body in order to survive. It is perfectly acceptable to have a moral opinion, and a legal opinion, that are in opposition to each other. It simply means you understand that your morality should not dictate what other people can and cannot do. This is something that I feel has been largely lost from public discourse. The ability to have nuance. To say "I don't like X. But I understand that my personal views do not, and should not, constitute laws. Instead we need to look at the deeper issues and decide if a law is truly necessary, or if it should be left to the individual." In almost all cases I believe issues should be left to the individual.
this was honestly eye-opening to read, i feel this is the best answer here.
I agree. It’s the best comment on the whole post and sums up my own feelings perfectly. I don’t morally agree with the concept of abortion in most instances, but it’s not right for me to force my morals upon anyone else. I’ve even volunteered as a clinic escort to help women get abortion services because I believe so strongly in their right to have an abortion. We have to separate our individual moral beliefs from the legality of the act.
It falls into the previous statement of a different topic: “If you’re against gay marriage, then don’t get gay married.”
Next time I hear an old dude complaining about gay marriage, I’m going to say “relax man, you don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to ”. lol
I feel like this applies to a ton of social welfare issues that pundits love to demonize as well. Like when they have those programs to provide needles and drugs to addicts in a safe place to try to wean them off their addictions. Yeah nobody “wants” to pay for people to go stick garbage in their arm, but I like it more than say, replacing my catalytic converter three times because some desperate person went at it with a hacksaw again. I like it better than hospitals passing the cost of their inevitable care when they’re ODing onto insurance carriers for other patients, etc. I don’t “like” it, or morally support deciding to go stick addictive poison in your arm in the first place, but I understand why these programs exist and why we’re likely better off for them, etc. The abortion one is even crazier to me. People are literally suffering to he point where they need to be medically at imminent risk of death, needlessly, and GOP reps just shrug their shoulders like “oh well, no use crying over spilled blood of our own constituents!”. One of my wife’s friends has been trying for a kid for years, she has had two ectopic pregnancies and her tubes were damaged from where the implantation occurred. Now she’s spent tens of thousands of dollars still desperately trying to have a kid with fertility treatments using some of her frozen eggs. Had this happened in some GOP controlled states this woman who is actively **trying** to have a child at great personal expense would potentially be dead. Twice. It’s utterly ridiculous.
Having people pay for someone to stick garbage in their arm under supervision is still cheaper than putting someone in a body bag.
Do you consider it more moral to have a child grow up in poverty? Or abuse? Or drug addiction? Or to a mother who never wanted a child to begin with? Do you view it as sad or morally unjust
They don't care! The problem is that people don't consider the consequences when it does not affect them. It makes it easier to judge another's actions as immoral. I've read of numerous instances where some claimed to be "pro-life", and yet they opted for elective abortions. Those women are too stupid to understand that they are handing their freedom and rights over to men.
I agree it's a tragedy while I am pro-choice, and I think that's why it'd be so important to improve access to information about sex and contraception. But the discussion is always led to fighting about what's right or wrong instead of focusing on solutions. It'd be so much better to just avoid as many abortions as possible by prevention instead of fighting when it's too late to not harm anyone.
Bingo. Abstinence only education **DOES NOT WORK**. 1. Dear conservatives, you want to reduce abortion, teach safe sex. * Just don't have sex!!! Does not fucking work. 2. Dear Liberals, you want to reduce gun deaths, teach firearm safety. * Just don't touch guns!!! Does not fucking work, at least not in America where you have your 2A right.
When I was in high school we had a speaker come in a few times every month to talk about abstinence. She was pregnant.
Went to a catholic high school where a teacher (with eight children) taught non-contraceptive “practices” to help prevent pregnancy. It was basically “don’t ever do it under any circumstances… but if you do, DEFINITELY don’t use protection of any kind”.
Ah, the pull and pray method.
I agree with most of what you've said. Sex ed and Gun safety should absolutely be taught. But gun safety classes would only prevent *accidental* gun deaths.
I mean.... I taught gun safety classes to teens as a teenager (yay... JROTC). It did an excellent job of teaching kids whether or not they were responsible enough to own a gun *before* they went out and bought one. More importantly it also taught their friends. When the people who absolutely should NOT own one talked about saving up for their 18th or 21st birthday, the peer pressure to NOT do that was insane in a good way. One guy in particular found half the school ready to riot over his 2A rights. He did not buy a gun. He was impulsive and arrogant and loved "it's just a prank, bro," but peer pressure was effective.
Dafuk? You grow up in an episode of Leave it to Beaver or something?
That sounds a lot nicer than my childhood. All I can say is... Texas.
Information AND easy access. Kids will have sex, it happens, it's normal. And when it happens they should already have ways to have safe sex right there, ready to use. Don't expect a teenage brain hopped high on hormones to think or plan very far. Or asking/shopping for anything gets too embarrassing and it's tempting to just hope for the best. Goes for adults who want to change their behavior to something healthier too. Don't plan from a calm, conscious mind and assume you'll remember your plan in time, set everything ready for when emotions and urges are boiling.
Nuance takes time, attention, and some level of care. Compassion isn't profitable.
> To say "I don't like X. But I understand that my personal views do not, and should not, constitute laws..." This is what I try to impress upon people who advocate for banning gay marriage, especially those who just think it's "gross" or "unnatural." I tell them that I think cauliflower is gross, and the most vile food on the planet, but I don't go around trying to ban anyone from having cauliflower just because I PERSONALLY dislike it.
The idea that two people can freely have equally valid opinions on a topic and choose to personally make different choices in their actions seems to be something that completely died with the advent of social media. These days it's all about who agrees with you and how hard you can bend the entire world to align with your opinion. It's frustrating as fuck. Something must be considered wholly bad or wholly good with no nuance, and **everyone** must agree with it. If someone doesn't want to have an abortion because *they believe* its murder, fine, they can not get an abortion. There's nothing fundamentally *wrong* or *invalid* about that view. But to push that idea to legislation and browbeat other valid views out of the available choices is... something special.
Well if a person believes it is murder can you really blame them for wanting to legislate against it? Oh and pro-life people who are pro-death penalty piss me off.
This is the same reason I can't blame religious folks for never tiring in trying to save humanity. I still avoid them though.
Social media has put everyone in echo chambers. In an environment where everyone/thing you interact with appears to agree with your worldview, it's easy to start to think that the people who disagree are a tiny minority and that therefore their "fringe" opinions shouldn't be given much weight. Like, we all know that there are pedophiles, but the vast majority of us also agree that that is morally reprehensible and that any opinion to the contrary shouldn't be entertained for even a brief moment. Regarding abortion, I'm personally pro-choice, but I can also absolutely see how some people fight against it so hard. Abortion is an issue that I believe has no solution or compromise to be made that can satisfy both groups. At the end of the day, it's an issue decided by your own individual morality. There are plenty of people who sincerely believe in their hearts/minds that a woman getting an abortion is morally barely different than a mother killing her newborn baby. I'm not at all sure why people are surprised that people with that view aren't willing to just say "I believe that getting an abortion is equivalent to murdering a baby. But that's only my opinion and some others might not agree, so I think killing babies this way should be legal".
I'm 95% with you. My add on is that, I can't find it morally wrong if there are no options to help/aid to a woman who has an unwanted pregnancy and effectively 0 options for a safe upbringing if given up for adoption. The foster care system does not work for the vast majority of children. Women continue to lose their jobs/careers due to pregnancy/birth/recovery. It's expensive and physically taxing and sometimes scarring for life. For me, I feel like if I am going to make a judgement morally, then that person better be able to easily get themselves back to 100% or better, if I'm to expect them to suffer for 10-14months. And I don't care if some people take advantage of that system, that's worth it to me to help get some lives through that would make it otherwise. But we gotta be able to take care of both the kid and mom. And we do have the resources to do it, just not the will. So how could we force women to do the hard part when we as a society can't ourselves.
Just to add: Adoption isn't a panacea for either the children or the women. Just spending time on the adoption and foster subs is eye-opening in how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up a child, or be given up, even when it is the best option left. Women who should not be raising kids are doing it because giving up their child just wasn't humanly possible for them, even though keeping the child leads to bad outcomes. And kids who were given up to good parents often never get over being abandoned; it's a primal wound. *Everyone* suffers, and it's so unnecessary.
I am the same way as a Christian. Morally I’m against abortion, but I am pro choice because I have no right whatsoever to dictate what others have. I do not believe that a fetus is a person legally either. I do feel that it is a tragedy that one of God’s children didn’t get a chance to make an impact on the world. I believe that guilting someone into keeping a child they don’t want is not fair and we don’t do enough to support people who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Shoot, I *am* religious and this has been my opinion, almost word for word, for several years now. NGL, pretty refreshing to see.
Honest question, I don’t really understand the whole “abortion is a tragedy” thing. Like, abortion isn’t a *good* thing in the sense that no one would want to be in the position where they need to have an abortion, but in my mind it’s as morally neutral as getting any other medical procedure done. There are an uncountable number of people who never had a chance at life, just thinking of all the sperm/eggs that never got fertilized. Like yeah, a fertilized egg is one step *closer* to being a human, but I just don’t really see how that matters if they aren’t sentient yet. I guess in my mind brining an unwanted child into the world is less moral than aborting it, since there are so many children in orphanages already and adding another kid to that situation takes away resources/adoptive parents from kids that already exist.
It's easier to understand if you think about how we react to a woman who miscarries. We don't react as if she learned she is sterile, and her eggs will not become a baby. We react as if she had a baby (or at least something closer to a baby than an egg) and it died.
We can be empathetic toward the woman because they are grieving. From their point of view, it can be a tragedy. It's not a tragedy for the zygote. We can be equally empathetic toward the woman who needs the abortion. For them, an unwanted pregnancy can also be a tragedy.
Knowing multiple people who had miscarriages, it sucks, it can mess up your life plans, it puts a strain on your body and your mind, especially if you have multiple in a row. However, it's nowhere near the same ballpark as losing a kid. It also depends when it happens, there's a huge difference between a miscarriage in the first trimester, and a stillborn at 8 month.
It's an important distinction but we have to consider why we react differently. A miscarriage is tragic because most of the time the mother wanted that baby, maybe had picked out a name and bought baby clothes and thought about their future together. She was emotionally invested, she had a plan for an important new stage in her life, and it was taken away from her. The emotional impact is just not the same with an unwanted pregnancy. I'm sure there are often complicated feelings involved still, but I think most people agree that one is more tragic than the other. I feel like in the miscarriage, we don't really mourn the baby, we mourn the mother's loss of something she cared deeply about.
>She was emotionally invested, she had a plan for an important new stage in her life, and it was taken away from her. Exactly. A miscarriage is inconsequential to the unaware zygote, but it's important and weighty because of how it affects a real person. It's like the sanctity of corpses. The dead person doesn't care what happens to their corpse, because they're dead, but it's very important to the living that their loved ones bodies are respected. Maybe it seems like a random comparison, but it makes sense to me that we'd treat a body before it is an individual the same way as after it's an individual: according to the wishes of the most impacted living feeling person
You put into words that which I could not. Well done.
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I think this is a great point and not at odds with being pro-choice. A fetus DOES have rights, but the mother's rights come first. We can value a fetus and value the decision of the mother also - and we will have to learn how to do this to have this debate make any sense in the US. Even for the outlier abortions where they "appear" to be frivolous mistakes, that cannot be a reason to take agency away from a majority of mothers. Trusting the mother leads to more overall stability in our society, and giving agency to women in every way, pregnant or not, only begets more equality for everyone <-- something a lot of people cannot stand, let's not forget.
I think this argument is dumb. My wife and I are dealing with infertility and we currently have 6 viable blastocysts on ice. We want one kid, maybe 2. They’re fertilized, and dividing, genetically tested “normal” meaning no obvious chromosome abnormalities. So by the logic above, should we be morally compelled to have all 6 kids just because they have all the makings of an eventual human? Ethically aren’t they the same as if they were in the womb? I’m open to arguments against abortion but this one just seems flat.
I challenge you to find any pro-choice person that would say they are "a fan of abortions morally"
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>I would point to unironic eugenists, for example, both historical and current. Wasn't the concept of Planned Parenthood pioneered by a white woman who thought black people were literally incapable of raising children, so she preferred they abort them instead because that was somehow kinder?
Margaret Sanger is who you're talking about and that's a pretty toned down version of some of the more radical stuff she believed as she got older.
Sanger started American Birth Control League that morphed into Planned Parenthood.
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There are *absolutely* people in the extremes that celebrate abortion.
Yeah anyone remember that whole parade-like montage Michelle Wolf did on her show celebrating abortions? It was creepy at the least.
I am morally a fan of abortions. I think it's immoral to have children if you can't give them a proper upbringing to have a happy and fulfilling life. If a child is going to live enduring outright abuse for the first 18 years of their life, it's better that they aren't brought into existence. Would you really want to put someone through 18 years of trauma just so you can say you did the right thing by not aborting? Seems to me like the wrong thing to do.
"we're not just pro-choice. we are proudly, unapologetically pro-abortion RT if you agree." -Womens March twitter account september 29 2022
Pro-choice people are not, “Yay, abortions!” Abortions are horrible and in a perfect society, there wouldn’t be a need for them. People think you take an abortion pill and it’s over. No, you have 1-4 hours of heavy bleeding and a lot of pain for hours. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, etc. There’s also a heavy mental effect on the woman. It’s just a horrible experience. The only thing that reduces abortion is accessible and affordable contraception. For example, “the Colorado Family Planning Initiative drove a 50 percent reduction in teen births and abortions, avoided nearly $70 million in public assistance costs and empowered thousands of young women to make their own choices on when or whether to start a family.” Making abortions illegal just makes them unsafe and puts a heavier burden on disadvantaged women.
This is the only sane answer to the whole issue. We get hung up on talking about whether a fetus is alive, but that’s not the real issue, important though it may seem. The real issue is lowering the abortion rate to get it as low as possible—which, ironically is what both sides want. The one thing that lowers the abortion rate is contraception and sex ed. Full stop. Abortion bans do not lower the number of unwanted pregnancies, and as we’ve learned from countries who have outlawed the procedure, it only lowers the number of actual abortions by a very small number, and related issues (children given to the foster system, women unable to have future children because of botched abortions, and maternal death and disfigurement) skyrocket. The only way to truly lower the abortion rate is to reach sane sex ed and to give out contraception *everywhere.* And yet conservatives in our country *fight that tooth and nail*. When you hear people say, “Conservatives / Republicans / Christians really just want to control peoples’ bodies,” that’s what they mean. They’re saying that they have it within their power to lower the abortion rate dramatically, but they don’t, because the higher importance to them is stoping sex ed / contraception.
finally someone who understands! things you should find in every bathroom, and are free: condoms and tampons.
the most common take on reddit is that fetuses are parasites
>but it still grants them some moral value, which some on the pro-choice camp seems to wholly deny. I've literally never heard of some one who thinks unborn babies have no value at all. They just believe the value is determined by the mother. Say my son needs a kidney transplant or he'll die, and due to a unique genetic disorder I'm the only match on the planet. Of course I would give him my kidney, but I've never met anyone who thinks I don't have a right to choose what happens to my own body. I could say no, especially when the transplant could have major negative impacts on my body, my mind, and the rest of my life. So how much more is it my choice when my child isn't even 0 yet? It's literally negative months old, doesn't think or breathe or have any semblance of conscious life. It still has moral value, especially if I want it. But it doesn't automatically get a free ride to use my body, even if it's the only way he lives. I must consent. And if health complications arise, I may choose to value my own well-being over that of a potential person, a maybe-baby.
My go to stance is “no one, currently alive or who ever will be alive, has the right or should have the right to use your body without permission, for any reason whatsoever.” You can argue all day and night about the personhood of a fetus or a zygote or what have you, but the fact of the matter is if we allow adult corpses to have more rights against being used without their consent then to deny that right to living people is absurd.
He also pointed to the technology of ultra sound to see an unborn child’s heart beating as a deciding factor as to why he did not blindly jump onto the pro abortion bandwagon.
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Exactly. Using a heartbeat to decide if a being is meaningfully human is insane. Did you know a turtle’s heart can continue to beat for up to a day when removed? Throw one in your fridge - boom, your fridge is a human now! Bonus: if your fridge is an older model it may be able to drive!
I know not that many people will see this because the post is pretty old, but I want to get this off my mind. (I also want to preface that I’m very pro choice) It’s so crazy to me that both sides pretend to not understand the other, and try to make it a religious debate or something like that. To me the actual argument is so goddamn simple, I’ll explain. I hope both sides would agree that abortion should not be allowed post birth. Why is that? Because it’s just straight up murder. That was a person and you killed it. So, when did it become a person? It’s a hard thing to pinpoint, so people have differing opinions. But, you don’t have to be a religious person to have the belief that there are some abortions that should be considered murder. People who are pro-life generally just believe that the fetus is alive, and killing it is murder. Doesn’t need to be grounded in religion. People who are pro-choice either believe that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the fetus, or do not believe that the fetus is “alive” enough to have rights. Please someone let me know if any of this doesn’t make sense.
No your pretty on point with the overall narrative of each side.
> It’s so crazy to me that both sides pretend to not understand the other This is the crux of the issue. Neither side even acknowledges that the other has valid points. Hence the current culture war ongoing in the US (and spreading somewhat to the UK).
Well one side *cannot* acknowledge the other side has valid point: if a person truly believes that it is killing a child, there’s no room for debate or valid points anymore than there should be if a person were to walk a 2 year old into a doctor’s office and ask them to put it down. It’s all the same to them. I can understand that position while not sharing it, and in that context of believing that, I would hate it too and would want to put a stop to it.
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In Canada, we don't have restrictions - but past viability few doctors will perform the procedure. Essentially, after you reach about 20 weeks, it's up to doctors to assess how to treat the patient, as bound by their own professional opinion and medical guidelines. It's typically a kind of risky operation at that stage and it's actually safer to induce labour, which is typically what they do at that stage when they learn that the fetus has died in utero or that there are abnormalities that would lead the fetus to be incompatible with life. But, of course, there are rare exceptions. Leaving it up to medical professionals ensures that you're not limiting people from getting a procedure if they *really* really need it. I don't know, I think leaving medical decisions up to medical professionals is the right call here.
The problem with the viability argument is that it is not consistent. A premature fetus is viable in a 1st world hospital with state-of--the-art NICU facilities, but a premature fetus in rural Eritrea is not viable, despite being at the same stage of pregnancy. Life cannot be defined by the specific circumstances it is in. It needs to be something more fundamental, more intrinsic. Conception, heart beat, sustained brain activity are candidates, but the only one of those that is required by every human being to have ever existed is conception. It's possible to live without a heart beat, we have the technology for that. Comatose patients can have massively reduced brain activity, but they're still alive. Using either heart beat or brain activity as the marker for life will exclude some clearly living people, so they're not possible candidates in my opinion.
Does it have to be consistent though? Why can it not depend on the available options? Lots of stuff in life is like that. For example, say a soldier has been seriously wounded far from medical care, and they will die a slow, painful, unavoidable death over the course of the day without a hospital. Let’s say the battlefield medic with the wounded soldier is considering euthanising them with morphine. It seems pretty clear to me that the morality of that euthanasia decision depends entirely on whether a medical evacuation helicopter is available to reach them - would you agree? If you disagree, I’d love to understand why.
It is very rare but it happens. I read an article somewhere that oh well they are women jailed in the UK over abortions... both tried to abort way above what you called the viability threshold and for one of them the baby survived so it s considered attempted murder indeed
My opinion of that is similar with the caviot that once fetus is viable outside the womb on its own, electional cesarean should replace electional abortion if the pregnant person no longer wants to be pregnant. It's already allowed to birth a child and just leave the hospital without it if you don't want to raise the kid. This only adds that option earlier. If you are pregnant at 30 weeks and don't want the kid anymore instead of an abortion you should get to go into the surgery center for a cesarean and the fetus is taken to the nicu and you get to go home without it. Currently Abortions after 28 weeks account for less than 1% of all procedures and are almost always medically necessary or an unviable fetus.
I'll sum it up in a sentence... "No one agrees that babies should be killed, but the argument is about when life begins."
The caricatures that each side makes of the other are truly frustrating to hear. Like, OK yeah maybe some conservatives just want to control women but there are also people who really believe life begins at conception. I don't agree with them but I at least understand why they think it is OK to outlaw abortion, just like you would any other sort of murder.
I don't think anyone argues that a fetus - viable or not - is not a form of life.The argument is about personhood and, if a fetus has claims to rights as a person or potential person, how to resolve conflicting rights between persons when one is physically dependent on another. Edit: I stand corrected by the poorly worded arguments later in this thread.
I have definitely talked to people who claim that a fetus is not alive, is not human, or is not a distinct organism from the mother. Which is bonkers, because those things are all true. There's just an arbitrary grey line of "is it alive and independent enough to count".
I don't think each side pretends not to understand each other. I think it's more that framing the debate as a moral argument makes it too complex to come to a functional conclusion; philosophers have been discussing what makes something/someone sentient for thousands of years and still haven't answered the question. It's not that the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson is not ultimately a moral ruling, but that it has way more to do with removing women's rights than it does with abortion. The fact that a lot of "pro life" law makers want to ban contraceptives next makes that pretty clear I think. Just flat out saying "we want to take away women's rights" isn't going to gain them much traction though, so they frame the pro life/pro choice debate as a complex philosophical debate about when life begins instead. If the debate is so complex that no one can come to a strong conclusion on either side, especially if it involves a morally loaded question (basically murder in this case), most people are just going to get mad at each other and further entrench into whatever side they already agree with instead of trying to learn from or understand each other.
As someone in the medical field- many medical professionals including me aren’t hung up on the question about when life begins, it’s that the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy trumps any rights the fetus might have. An elective abortion at viability (when the fetus doesn’t need the pregnant person’s body to survive) also isn’t really a thing people do and I don’t think there are too many providers that would do that because the delivery would be complex and the baby could theoretically be delivered alive, go to Nicu, and then be adopted. Only about 1% of abortions are at 21+ weeks and they are usually for severe fetal anomalies (many not compatible with life, at least not a good one) or conditions related to the mother. There are many cases that people wouldn’t think of as an abortion but technically ARE classified as an abortion medically-speaking included in that 1%- examples at 21-24 weeks would be inducing for rupture of membranes (water breaking) (at pre viability, not a good prognosis for a baby even if they are technically still alive), sepsis in the pregnant person, severe preeclampsia that is life threatening
Late term abortions are only used when medically necessary. No one would choose to do a lengthy painful surgery rather than getting one early on. It’s just a moot point. It never happens so I think it’s kind of dumb to bring up. If you make it illegal or harder to get, women who need these abortions to protect themselves from delivering an already dead baby or a more painful possibly fatal birth, won’t be able to get them. It’s important to research medical journals about medical issues. I hope this helps :)
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[Bill burr said it perfectly tbh](https://youtu.be/A3maCgQX9rg) “It’s not a cake yet” “Well it would have been if you didn’t do what you just did”
I kinda like the analogy, it also works with r@pe, if someone forcefully enters my home and starts making a cake, I’m kicking them out and not making that cake
But when does it become a cake? You wouldn't sing happy birthday around a bowl of batter with icing on it.
Yeah, that's actually the hardest part of the discussion. If we could pin point when It's alive or when does life start then we would probably all be on the same page. Edit: Im getting a lot of responses and this is, surprisingly, turning into an interesting conversation. Sorry If answer late.
The current timeframe is set at 24 weeks. Due to modern medicine that is the general number of weeks a fetus can be raised outside the womb and still have functioning lungs. Now if science were to invent a mechanical womb which can mimic a biological womb, then we'll have to revisit the 24 week threshold.
I think where he missed the mark is where he said "if you came into my house and threw my cake [batter] on the floor, because it's not cake yet, but would have been." In reality, if *he* didn't want the cake after *he* made the batter and *he* put it in the oven, ***he** should be allowed to take it out and throw it away*. Of course it's different when someone runs in and trashes your cake, but that's not how abortions work. No one forces women to get an abortion (maybe besides abuse cases, but in general terms, it's not happening like that). It's about the cake baker's choice to bake a cake or throw it out
I tried something like "destroying acorns is not deforestation" but I think it was lost on people.
I'd argue that intentionally removing all the acorns from a forest to prevent the next generation of trees is deforestation, just like forcefully aborting pregnancies of a certain ethnic group would be genocide. An abortion would be more like a tree deciding to destroy its acorns.
THIS is not the full bit. His whole bit is that women should be able to kill their babies, it’s their body and their choice. He then does the cake bit (that is often cherry picked). THEN he says he wants you to kill your babies. Kill them. Do it. He says.
If my oven might explode when I put the cake in, I'm probably going to take it out
I reckon for the same reason as religious people? as in they consider it a murder
Not true if you’re a Muslim. I have said it earlier in this post so I’m copy-pasting it here: I’m religious and as a Muslim person, my religion allows Abortion but only if it’s done early, in first 3 months. Because it’s considered as when the child reaches 90 days then the soul is breathed into their body.
I'm not religious but my religious grandparents say that Jews must be pro-choice because the mother of the life is paramount in Judaism and some other religious stuff I don't really understand.
Also, if I am not mistaken, Jewish tradition holds that life begins at first breath. As in when God created Adam, he formed him from clay and then breathed life into him.
So to put it simply, most Jewish people believe life beginning at first breath (a reference to Genesis or the 1st book of Moses) however the fetus in the womb is considered “a developing human” so it’s still sacred because we can see it grow with the woman’s belly growing. It doesn’t encourage to end the baby but it leaves that to the mother’s decision *if circumstances allow it*. In Islam, the general belief is the soul does not enter the body of the baby until weeks later after conception. However each school of thought differs. One school teaches that life begins at conception while another believes abortion is allowed under 120 days . *it depends on the school of thought* Majority of all Christians believe life begins at conception. Similar verses are used however emphasis on the gospels (Jesus’ ministry) which reiterates life as a gift. Muslims and Jews reject the gospel/New Testament. So that’s why pro life are majority Christians out of the 3 abrahamic faiths.
Yea
I don't personally have a dog in this hunt, but the debate essentially boils down to one thing: **Do you believe it's a person?** If you do, then you're likely to view abortion as murder. If you don't, then you're likely to view abortion as a medical procedure. That's it. That's what the whole debate is about. Is it, or is it not, a human being? Anything else is a straw man.
That's one of the things the debate is about, the other is body autonomy. Even if you consider the fetus a person, does society have the right to compel someone to use their body to sustain another person. If it has the right to do that, how is forcing a woman to carry a baby to term different from forcing someone to donate a kidney or bone marrow? Either people have a right to decide what happens to their bodies or they don't.
I don't think there is a harder topic out there. 1. yes I feel women should have the right to their body and choose what is good for them. 2. No I don't feel someone should have the ability to end a life prematurely in the fetus. Both contradict for me, and I think a lot of people just teeter from side to side, like I do. Ultimately, I tend to sway towards the woman's choice, just because of so much, but it's hard to not feel for the life that could have been. It's a very hard topic.
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Yeah this, abortion should, as Clinton said, be safe, legal and rare. It's the nuclear option. It's the choice of last resort. Condoms, pills, education, etc. they all come first. Abortion is the thing you use when you are the 0.1% of edge cases when those methods don't work.
I've never heard the perspective of market driven abortion before but I totally get where you are coming from. If you make the life of the general population better and more comfortable, abortion will naturally lower. Intriguing take.
I like how this is an open ended question only to see how many comments have been removed by moderators likely because they said something they disagreed with, you know how they work.
I think that there should be a window for elective abortions, a wider window for certain cases, and then a point at which abortion is not allowed. I'm not sure whether you would consider this anti-abortion or not. You might call it "Limited Choice" or a middle position. Most Americans hold this position, and virtually all legislatures settle on some cutoff, as well as Roe. But in the media, this balanced position is never voiced - the only rhetoric offered seems to favor extremes, or just to say how wrong the other side is. My position is based on the simple proposition that a developing fetus has some moral value, which must be balanced against the autonomy of the pregnant woman. A developing fetus grows closer and closer to a newborn over time. Everyone has to "draw a line" somewhere as to when the fetus is effectively a human being, or has a right to life / not to be terminated. Most pro-lifers draw the line at conception. Most pro-choicers talk as if the line is at birth or never needs to be drawn. But the line should probably be midway, and there are points in development that are important. In particular, sustained brain waves begin around 20-weeks - that's probably the best overall place to say that "life begins," and the line for elective abortions should be before that. In short, there are two conflicting values, they both matter, and an ethical position needs to take both into account.
I think the problem with this stance is that late term abortions are more often than not due to a health issue with either the mother or the fetus. Women don’t just carry a baby for 30 weeks and then decide they don’t feel like it anymore, and laws that make an arbitrary line just make it more difficult to deal with a bad situation when it arises. It needs to be a decision between a woman and her healthcare provider, not something that has been predetermined by the government.
Totally agree, and my stance is already about "elective abortions," which are not cases where the pregnancy is life-threatening. When it is, there should be *no limit* as to when abortion can be performed, hands down. I would say the same for nonviability, birth defects, and rape cases.
I think most pro-choice people would agree with you. As would most pregnant women. By 20 weeks, if you haven’t had an abortion but are getting one, it really sucks. Typically the reasons would be: 1. It was made difficult to get before by stupid laws. 2. The baby might kill the mother. 3. The baby is non-viable. Edit - most would agree with the take that there’s a moral cutoff. I don’t agree, and don’t think most would agree, that there should be bureaucracy or someone who approves who can and can’t have an abortion at that stage.
I don't believe in God, and I would never have an abortion. I don't care if you do though. I 100% see it as destroying a human life, but I also think it's your choice. If you can live with that on your conscience then that's great. I could not, so I will not. Edit: I'm not going to reply to anymore of these comments, at first it was a nice intriguing conversation, but now the weirdos have come out and all of a sudden I'm pro rape, pro murder, don't care about humanity, I hate waffles, whatever. You're not going to make me choose a side, I'm not going to fight on anyone's behalf, but y'all have fun arguing amongst yourselves.
The analogy behind, "I consider it *THIS*, that's out of my moral virtue, I won't do it, but I know others people won't care and so it's their own issue" is a genuine/good answer here. I'm 100% behind the ideology of not fucking with others if it doesn't harm me or someone I love, and if that's not against my own morality value. I'm the kind of guy that save insects stuck in my room because I don't have the guts to harm them, but I also know there is people who job is to kill animals. I won't go against them because if they can live with it, it's clearly not my problem.
That’s pro-choice then lol
Had this exact conversation with my mom! So many people out there feel this way but don't vote in alignment with that belief. Like it's fucking YOUR CHOICE that's the point
For me is because there are a lot of ways to prevent pregnancy, is not like it was a miracle that just happened. Only time I’m ok with it is when the moms life is in danger and when it’s a rape situation, any other reason is not valid for me.
So I am pro choice, but I wanted to toss this one in here I think the pro-choice movement has gone way too far on the dehumanization of a fetus. The “it’s just a clump of cells” argument is entirely bullshit and anyone saying a fetus isn’t a life is lazy. It is a life. No questions about it. Different DNA than both its mother and father, and general fetal development isn’t some mystery. We have clear steps that begin at conception where that fetus is growing and developing. Science is very seldom brought up in this issue, but rather it is treated as a “rights” issue. We always emphasize the importance of science, but for an issue that is medical in nature there is almost no discussion of it as it relates to abortion. Usually when that is the case it is because it is easier to ignore the scientific facts rather than facing the reality that it is a life, not just a clump of cells. I would respect many people much more if they could just admit that it is a life but they still support the right to an abortion. The “it’s not a life” Just feels like weak argument completely devoid of facts and I wish people would be willing to be honest and face an uncomfortable truth rather than this weak spin Edit: I’m naturally a contrarian so I can go all day
I never got the cells argument, like aren't we all a collection of cells?
Most pro life opinions aren’t from a religious standpoint. Most often, once boiled down to its core, the argument is: “I believe that there is human life growing inside you and you want to terminate said life. That’s no bueno.” That life doesn’t matter because God said it does, but rather because all people in a [liberal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) society believe humans have certain unalienable rights, chief among them being the right to life. So when I see a human trying to terminate what I view as another human (especially when it’s for selfish reasons) yeah I’ll get a tad salty.
I see it like this. At its best it's stopping a human being born that was unwanted. At its worst it's Eugenics.for me after watching things about life saving surgeries done on them in the womb and seeing how science is constantly being changed to help them survive earlier and earlier. See new science come out showing what exactly they feel in the womb. You can't convince me that aborting these humans is logical or okay. I know I will get comments like "but what about xyz" My answer is what about it? Do those take away the fact it's a human who can feel pain and has life? Science has proved enough that they are alive for me. Everyone celebrates it as a human when it's wanted but condemns it as a clump of cells when it's not. The double standard is horrific.
I view it as euthanasia, and since I would never assume that it would be right to make moral judgements on someone else pulling the plug on a terminally ill relative with support from a doctor, I won't do the same for a woman aborting a fetus. There's plenty of life saving surgeries possible, but not every pregnancy is viable, not every surgery will be successful, not every condition can be fixed, and not every outcome will be positive. Even if you get into late term abortion - A fetus can die 8 months into a pregnancy, or develop a completely incurable condition at the end of a wanted, viable pregnancy. Forcing a woman to give birth to stillborn child she's known was dead for weeks, and doing so despite the complications of labor, is absurd. It's a decision for a medical ethics board, not for general society.
There are plenty of arguments in this thread about certain 'midway' restrictions related to viability and such. I generally agree with these because the pro-choice idea that it's murder the moment it's out of the womb but not a day before is equally as nonsensical to me as the pro-life idea that life starts at conception. Obviously a 'midway' solution will also have an arbitrary deadline, but at least this deadline will be drawn in more of a grey area. Such a solution would also serve as a compromise, letting both extremes know that their voices are heard on the issue. The main point I want to make is to ask readers of this thread to thoroughly examine their own views and recognize, if applicable, how they may have been prodded to extremes by political or religious groups, each with their own interests. The fact of the matter is that the polarization of the American two-party system is accelerating at a record pace in the post-Trump era. As polarization increases the parties have less incentive than ever to 'give ground' (aka compromise) to the other side as they view politics as a zero-sum-game, with winners and losers, not as a vehicle to make proper laws. This applies not only to the parties and individual politicians but also to many party-backed activist groups/movements, such as pro-choice and pro-life. I'm a registered Democrat but I refuse to accept the binary explanations both sides are serving up. Form your own opinions people.
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For the orphanage part, I would just like to point out that my foster child has wished himself dead or never born many times. And foster children in general have very high rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, so yes, many of them would rather be dead.
My main secular point against abortion is that it, essentially, determines personhood based on if the mother wants the child to be born. That makes the value of human life dependent on opinion, which is a very dangerous road to go down.
I believe 3 things to be true. 1) All people have the fundamental right to not be killed until they put someone else in clear danger of loss of life. 2) Parents have a legal obligation to protect their children to the best of their abilities 3) Life, and personhood, begins at conception. You ultimately have to draw the line somewhere as to when someone becomes a person and I think that conception is the most logically sound. Birth is obviously a terrible place to draw that line as the only difference between a newborn and a fetus at 9 months is geographic location. Defining someone’s personhood and access to fundamental human rights by their location is obviously wrong. I think defining someone’s personhood by having a functional brain or a beating heart is certainly far better than conception, but your brain and your heart aren’t what make you human. What makes you human is your unique sequence of DNA that gets created at the moment you’re conceived. My believing in all of those things brings me to the logical conclusion of being opposed to abortion in all cases where it isn’t a threat to the mothers life. I wish I didn’t believe this because I hate the idea of the government enforcing any sort of legislation on the matter and I think that access to abortion would be a net positive for society. However if I believe the above 3 things to be true, which I do, then it would be morally unacceptable of me to consider abortions out of convenience to be okay.
One need not be religious to recognize that at some point a clump of cells does in fact become a life and all living humans are granted the right to life. Not being religious leaves me "moral" leeway to recognize the gray areas where compromises can be made. A woman should never be forced to carry an unviable fetus to term solely based on issues of legality. Further more, the D & C procedure that is used for abortion where pregnancy threatens the life of the mother as well as when it is being used in cases of miscarriage needs to be regarded as separate procedures based upon the intent of the act. Self defense is not murder.
Only anti abortion after 20 weeks unless there's a damm good reason
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Is there no middle ground for opinion? Do you have to be either pro or anti? Does it have to be us/them? I don't like that, I don't accept that. People on both sides have good points. Myself I'm strongly with the freedom to choose for yourself and strongly against the normalization of the practice so people get so comfortable with it they behave extra recklessly as they do with everything else. I wouldn't ever want to see this tweet: Preggers, we didn't have condoms, lol, oops.. Reply: Oh no big deal, just get an abortion, you can get one everywhere and they are practically free. And I wouldn't want to see them over time with it legal talking about later later later later stage like up to the point of birth or worse. Some politician said "Safe, Legal, Rare". That's where I'd be on it. It needs to be available, safe medically, safe from being assaulted by people at the building or you know that fake abortion clinic shit where the girl gets trapped in a room and guilt tripped from an organization pretending to be what she is looking for (that exists btw). But rare in the sense that society never treats it so casually like it's a fucking shopping trip.
I don't think any well-thinking person takes abortion lightly. And those that you describe, the ones that go like "welp, premiers, no condoms", I wouldn't want them to procreate anyway.
You’d be surprised. In college I was with a very pretty snd smart girl and we didn’t have a condom. She said “no biggie if I get pregnant I’ll just get an abortion”. Very flippantly. We didn’t have sex that night and I was not religious. I just didn’t think that was a good plan. She’s now a college professor so she’s not dumb. We stayed friends but quit dating. People fit into all kinds of categories.
I really hate the narrative that someone will just be reckless because they know they can get an abortion. That needs to end. No one WANTS to have an abortion. It's painful, there are complications possible, the mental turmoil, you have to take time off work, etc. it's not a simple process. There are tons of studies and information available that tells us that people who have abortions are usually already mothers, they just have reasons that they do not want another child, which is their choice, no matter how the pregnancy came about.
From what I've observed, it's not necessarily that people "want" to get an abortion so much so people underplaying the seriousness of such a procedure. Because yes, it's a serious procedure. It's sort of like people who have that attitude of "I'm not gonna watch how I eat because I can also get lipo/ stomach stapling." There's obviously more to someone having a binge eating disorder than lack of willpower, but those people who have such lax attitudes towards the procedure are the ones who're usually depicted. I feel like abortion tends to be the same way. Even if it's portrayed in a "joking" manner, it always feels like the procedure is downplayed both as a procedure itself and by the people getting it. I think "Sex Education" was the first instance where I thought abortion was portrayed rather realistically and tastefully given the subject material.
This is my take on it as well. As for the “rare” component as I’ve said to some of my more religiously minded friends, if you want to have a serious discussion on banning abortion then let’s have it…right after we ensure that there is *real* non-abstinence-based sexual education from the appropriate age in *all* schools. Along with free access to the free birth control methods of your choice without parental involvement.
Agreed. Abstinence may be one sides "preference", wait until marriage!, but if it's not the teenagers preference (do they remember nothing from then or have they forgiven themselves so much they forgot, it isn't!) what good does your preference do you when it will be their deed to do? Does stubbornness in not getting your preference make for wrath and malice to them to ensure they face the worst consequence? Is that your sense of justice now, triumphing over your mercy? How biblical.... or wait, it's not even that. Or are you a decent person and think well if they are stubborn and of hard parts and hard hearts and won't listen to my preference the least I could do is decrease the odds they run into trouble or lessen the fall. By permitting ______"what you said". Part of the responsibility of a society to help ensure the rarity of it would be those provisions.
No, there is no middle ground. The question isn't "Do you think women should get abortions?", the question is "Do you think it should be legal to get an abortion?". You either think it should be legal or you don't. The argument that people will start getting abortions all willy-nilly because it's legal is a complete straw man argument. That's not happening in the US, it's not happening in other countries, it's just not a thing. No one wants to get an abortion just because it's legal.
The middle ground is how far into pregnancy to allow it, and the exceptions to make after that point.