I’ve gone through a number of abortion debates over the years, and I find that one consistent argument against it (outside the talking points about when life begins) is that abortion is used as a way of avoiding responsibility.
I must say, that there’s something to the idea that abortion does serve to eliminate a responsibility that the woman would otherwise be forced to deal with, in the form of a child she must support for the next 18 years.
Thus I propose the following third option in the abortion debate. I’ll call it Pro-Punishment.
Anyone is allowed to abort a fetus, as it is an intruder in their bodies.
They are not allowed to end the financial obligation they would have had to the fetus if it had been brought to term. Both parents are required to pay child support for the next 18 years to the government in an ammount equal to what they would be required to pay had the child been born and they were simply a non-custodial parent (who will use the money to provide for orphans, etc).
You can get out of this payment only by adopting one of those orphans, since the one you adopt replaces your financial responsibility to the fetus you aborted. (This provision is up for debate.)
This way, no one can use abortion to weasel out of their responsibilities, and on top of that we get our disaffected orphans provided for.
For those of you who think that the reason people shouldn’t be allowed to abort is because it’s a way of avoiding consequences, are these consequences enough for you? For those of you on the other side who care about the bodily domain rights of the woman, this proposal doesn’t interfear with her control over her body in any way, just her control over her pocketbook, so does that resolve the issue for you in an acceptable way?
Debate:
-The proposal for child-support payments for aborted fetuses
-The legitimacy of the goal of punishing women (and men) for daring to have sex and risk pregnancy
-How much this debate really is about bodily domain rights and how much it really has to do with financial considerations
Good idea. Or we could enjoy our lives and thank whatever cosmic throw of the dice gave us the privilege of being born and living at a time and place where sex can be non-procreative by individual choice, without any sad old bigot’s interference. Tough decision to make.
Is a fetus still an intruder if your deliberate actions are entirely responsible for its presence? Isn’t that like calling your neighbour over and shooting him for trespassing?
There are also people who abort because they don’t have the financial resources to raise a child. What are you going to do with people who claim an inability to pay – slap them in jail?
I would think they’d do what they do now to people who can’t pay a fine: garnish money from a check.
OP: This would only work for people who are also against adoption. The pro-punishment side is all about the woman temporarily losing some rights to her body, not having the right to eject the fetus, because she willingly engaged in an activity that gave that fetus the right to be there.
In other words, raising a child does not equal pregnancy. I think the only acceptable alternative to these people would be to make the woman feel the pain without the baby, or somehow quantify the pain in monetary form.
Oh good Lord, the only real reason to oppose abortion is because it ends a life that has already begun, and that’s why we pro-lifers/anti-choicers/whatever oppose it. If we didn’t believe the embryo was a human life with essential rights, we wouldn’t really care.
I wouldn’t regard it as a third option at all, but just as caving in to the pro-birthers. The point of the anti-abortion movement is to oppress and abuse women, and that’s what this proposal does.
:rolleyes: Soooo. You’re just kidding about the pro-choice movement knowingly serving Satan - you just think they are stupid as well as evil and do so without realizing it. And apparently you think that makes you more respectful of the opposition than I am.
I, at least presume that the pro-birthers have at least some clue as to what they are doing. Which is WHY I accuse them of being anti-woman; because their every action is just that, against women.
The OP is just question-begging: it assumes that it is *wrong *that a person with an unwanted foetus should be able to avoid that responsibility if the choose to.
I disagree. I don’t see anything wrong with avoiding an imposed responibility if it harms no other person. Of course, IMO, the foetus is not a person, so this stance works out.
Dude, I had a fucking tubal ligation and got pregnant, what possible reason could you possibly have to say that having an abortion was my way of birth control? I thought I had it fucking covered. I also had to have it aborted because the reason I had my tubes tied in the first place is a third attempt at pregnancy stood a very good chance of killing me [enough so that I was able to get my tubes tied without any argument in my EARLY 20s … ]
And a hearty FUCK YOU for trying to mandate christian morality in nonchristians? I don’t agree that an abortion should be used as birth control, but when jackasses can refuse to dispense birth control or morning after pills because some imaginary sky dweller claims it is a sin [what is sin, if you dont believe in that woo wooo system anyway?] not to mention little things like rape … or even a failure of birth control?
[I have made no secret out of it, I got pregnant on properly used pill birth control, properly used pill birth control combined with a rubber and a tubal ligation. I just had a hysterectomy so if I get pregnant it will be a miracle…]
Convince me that there’s some higher sense of responsibility being shirked that’s important enough to fine a person thousands of dollars.
In other words, as MrDibble and to an extent FriarTed have said, I think you’re kind of making up a perceived injustice against your (hypothetical?) sense of what a woman ought to be responsible for.
If just paying a lot of money makes the bad go away, why not just charge $200,000 tax for an abortion (or whatever the amount would be)? Then you don’t have to go through the bureaucracy of the courts. And, you show that your idea doesn’t really solve a ‘responsibility’ problem, it just makes abortions something only rich people can afford.