Their willingness to see the analogy as apt is immaterial. Their “testimony” and anti-choice advocacy is 100% appeal to emotion, typically built on top of some ugly ableism, particularly in the case of Jessen and Rodriguez who capitalize a lot on “look at my disability, it’s terrible that I have to live this way” as a poison cherry on the top of their otherwise typical antichoice talking points.
The only response to them is the same response to women who now regret having terminated a pregnancy (usually shortly after they’ve joined a religion that tells them they’ve committed a grievous sin) and advocate that the choice be taken away from others. “Your poor experience, or your negative response to your experience is your own, but it isn’t a rational or logical basis for public policy eliminating abortion access for other people whose experience and circumstances are not yours.”
Why? They were intended not to have been born, but were born anyway.
What if someone were to learn that they were born because a condom broke, or a birth control pill failed to prevent conception and implantation (as sometimes happens.) Should that person now be against all contraception, just because they were intended never to have been conceived in the first place?
You can’t generalize these things. It’s silly and pointless.
“How would you feel if you had been aborted?” I’d feel nothing.
The only thing to take away from this is to make the procedure as safe and effective as possible, so that tragedies of this kind happen very rarely.
I’m going out on a limb here, because of my own mixed feelings about the subject, but here goes:
“most have gone well” = The fetus was killed, no messy situation as with a PERSON who survived.
“some have gone bad” = The killing of the fetus was botched, and she/he lived, DAMMIT!
Now, people here may well wonder where I stand on abortion and abortion-and-the-law.
I think it would be great if a global consciousness turned more toward regarding the fetus as a developing person, especially at 20 +x weeks of development. Brainwaves and the capacity to feel pain should be factors in the distinction.
All the same, the nature of the situation makes any abortion an extremely difficult matter for legislative “remedy”. If not virtually impossible. And historically not every sin has been approached legally, at least not in every era. (Specifically, cocaine use was legal for a long time even though the smart money said that you would be likely wrecking your own life and dragging your family, and society, down.)
I certainly don’t want to see a return to the coat-hanger milieu.
My emphasis added to quote.
Oh, and I didn’t mean to be crude when I used the cliche involving the word “limb”.
I don’t think it is immaterial, since the OP specifically asks for a response to abortion survivors. So the audience to whom your remarks are addressed is a pretty central concern. If they think what you’re saying is a steaming pile of horse manure, is there really much point in your saying it to them?
Plenty of pro-choice advocacy is an appeal to emotion too, though, isn’t it? We are invited to empathize with the position of a woman who finds herself pregnant when she doesn’t want to be, and who fears that her life will be permanently altered, in ways that she doesn’t want, if she has no option to but to see through the pregnancy.
There’s nothing wrong with this. An appeal to emotion is not inherently invalid. If you’re making a moral case - and “right to choose” is as much a moral case as “right to life” - appeals to emotion are going to be pretty much at the centre of your advocacy.
That’s not the “only response”, though, is it? My post was an answer to a completely different response offered by Trinopus in post #9, drawing an analogy between motoring and abortion.
Your response, I agree, is a better one. I think it’s still not a completely satisfactory one from the point of view of the abortion survivor, who can reasonably rejoin with “if affording people access to abortion can have such profoundly adverse consequences for someone like me, who never chose an abortion, then we can’t present freedom to choose as an absolute right which must be untrammelled because nobody else can ever be affected by it by the exercise of the choice”.
That’s not a clincher of a pro-life argument. What it does, I think, is to move the discussion from absolutist pro-life versus absolutist pro-choice positions (a pretty sterile discussion, IMO) to a consideration of what limitations or restrictions on access to abortion are appropriate to prevent adverse outcomes, including this one.
But they’re going to anyway, unless the response to them is agreement. They’re zealots. They’re not interested in a dialogue.
Not meaningful advocacy. There’s a lot of time, too much time, playing countpoint games to appeals to emotion from antichoicers but that’s less advocacy and more argument, and argument isn’t particularly useful regarding this issue, frankly.
That’s a strawman argument, though, because I can’t think of anyone who says that abortion access must remain as unfettered as possible because “nobody else can ever be affected by it.” Obviously there can be an impact on other people, including a fetus that survives unintentionally. It would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
And that discussion is about 2 seconds long, because there is nothing, no policy, no training, no restriction, no externality of any kind that can prevent occasional unintentional outcomes following a procedure that is performed by human beings on human beings. Even where procedures are performed correctly, anomalies of anatomy, metabolism and other variances within a patient can change the outcome beyond a doctor’s control.
And please keep in mind that the minuscule number of “failed abortion” cases that are documented were all a result of someone operating outside the framework of existing law and medical practice guidelines to begin with. So any discussion about changing policy would be like making driver’s licenses harder to get because unlicensed drivers have caused a few accidents.
“As I support a woman’s right to a safe abortion in the first two trimesters, and only in extraordinary life-threatening circumstances afterward, your testimony has nothing at all to do with my pro-abortion stance.”
Neither do people who are born due to failed abortions, as far as I can tell. I think it’s fair to say that the people being trotted out by pro-life groups are not going to be representative of the majority (assuming these people exist in any significant numbers).
ETA: Cerebral palsy can be caused by asphyxiation or head trauma, but it can also result from a number of other things clearly unrelated to abortions such as infection.
My response: abortions occur whether they are legal or not; legal abortions are much more likely to be safe for the mother and less likely to result in a damaged but still viable fetus than black market abortions; and ultimately a woman must have the right to control her own body, including the right to expel anyone and anything inside it.
Planned Parenthood’s main purpose is providing contraception. Along with health education & medical care for women–& some men. Those who want to close Planned Parenthood because it does terminate pregnancies also want to end all the other services offered.
With education & contraception, far fewer women will need to consider abortion.
If a woman needs to terminate a pregnancy, she should do it early in the pregnancy–before viability. With fewer facilities in a big state like Texas, this can be difficult.
Without PP, fear & ignorance will cause desperate women to try to end pregnancies in less than optimum situations.
I’ll also add that the right to end one’s pregnancy, in my view, does not always and necessarily mean the right to destroy the fetus – in my view, when a fetus is viable, a woman still has the right to expel it and end her pregnancy, but not necessarily the right to kill it. “Abortion” means ending a pregnancy. Before viability, most or all abortions will result in the death of the fetus; after viability, in my view, unless the medical need precludes live delivery (e.g. if attempting a live delivery/caesarian vice a ‘traditional’ destroyed-fetus abortion will increase the risk of death to the mother), abortion should just end with a no-longer-pregnant woman and a live (and possibly premature) baby.
So I would include all that in my response to the OP’s question.
Yes, ironically closing PP will result in MORE unwanted pregnancies which will result in MORE abortions, more of which will be done unsafely due to the lack of access to safe facilities and more of which will end badly for the woman.
But hey! They should have kept their legs shut, right? Not OUR fault that we closed the only place offering affordable contraception and women’s health services.
Attempts were not made to “silence any speech.” As you tell it, the senator attempted to hijack and disrupt an event, played a gotcha on a room of his colleagues based on an insulting and fallacious assumption about their beliefs, and was rightfully told (metaphorically) to shove it.
From the article you linked:
They were not silenced, they were prevented from ruining a scheduled event. When you crash someone else’s party with intent to disrupt it, you don’t get to pretend that the response to your bad behavior is somehow proof that your voice is being silenced, or that you have some compelling point that people just can’t stand to hear.
It’s like raaaain, on your wedding day! Why is it ironic? It’s not like Alice Madden wanted Gianna dead. “Surprise, the baby Moses is back to bring down your empire!” “It was told that one day I would enjoy the singing of a child, so I ordered all children aborted. One got away on a bed of reeds, and not the prophecy has come true! Nooooo!” I mean, is this really what the rhetoric is? Planned Parenthood wants people dead? Batshit crazy. Totally batshit crazy.
“Wreaked only harm”? This is a disgusting, obvious lie, and any cite that claims this ought to be summarily ignored. Regardless on one’s stance on abortion, talk to one person who has gotten birth control or family planning/counseling through PP (or had sex with someone who has), and this statement is as stupid as it is wrong.
I’ve heard some abortion survivors stories. Not in so much as your POV tried to kill me, but God is the final say of who lives and dies, and God can and does override the wishes of the woman, and the ability and actions of the doctors as He sees fit. As such the argument of pro this or that doesn’t really apply, God is in control and does what He wants.
