I am pro-choice and I don’t support the hypothetical, because women choosing to die in childbirth, or to give birth to babies so severely deformed that they live short, meaningless, painful lives before dying as infants are bad choices. They should have that choice, of course, but that doesn’t mean one has to say it’s a good choice.
Abortions aren’t had simply because the mother doesn’t want to carry the child. Often it’s because the fetus is horribly sick, or the mom is. Who will care for those children, who will watch them die hours after birth due to defects, who will ensure the health and safety of all the mothers?
Your hypothetical seems to be buying into the argument that abortion exists to satisfy the mothers convenience rather than as a medical necessity.
And there are other reasons women want abortions rather than just the fact that the baby is sick or deformed or whatever. “I don’t want to have a child” is more than ample reason.
But, in a world where contraception is 100% available and used when needed, and everyone is educated, sure, it’s fine that no one goes to the abortion clinics. It’s not like I want women to undergo this procedure. I just want it to be there for when we need it.
Pro life here. It’s a better equilibrium than today’s, but no, I wouldn’t support it.
Me too. But in a situation where even if you do everything right and the fetus still has a medical condition, in many cases, it seems inhumane to bring it to term–if it’s going to die soon after or endure agonizing pain. I guess a choice is a choice, though.
Not all women possess the emotional and/or mental fortitude to surrender a child to adoption. It is incredibly naive to believe otherwise. Many women will never recover from such an experience. Some will crash their lives, become addicts, develop mental illness, etc.
I posit that many more, will, against their own better judgement, keep their child. A child that could grow up, unwanted, resented, in abject poverty, wild dysfunction, ill treated or even abused. The cost to society would be extremely high, in my opinion.
Straight up really, really, bad idea, for everybody involved, in my opinion. Reflects only concern for an ideology, with none for the women or babies involved.
I would like it if abortion were safe, legal, accessible, and rare. A world with the hypothetical, where women who become pregnant and are safe (physically, emotionally, financially) in that pregnancy and don’t receive any discrimination during or after the pregnancy, or for giving up their child, would be nice. But I also can’t fill in enough holes in this hypothetical to make it easy to choose.
I’m a cynic. 
Ditto. I know many women who were healthy when they became pregnant and ended up on strict bed rest and in a high-risk situation. (I couldn’t talk to my best friend the last week she was pregnant other than a quick “hello” because she was hospitalized with major high blood pressure and we *always *end up giggling madly when we talk. It was terrifying, doubly so for her parents, and awful for her father, who’s a doctor and couldn’t do anything to help his own kid.)
tl; dr – friends who were perfectly healthy have wound up with gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and cardiac problems. And that’s among an educated, affluent, social-drinking, non-smoking, non-drug-using population with excellent healthcare before pregnancy and prenatally.
I’ve opted to not have children in part because my asthma was largely uncontrolled during my peak reproductive years, and my doctors really didn’t like the related risks to my health. Then when chronic migraine came along at the end of my reproductive years…yeah. I was afraid I’d give birth to a giant monstrous radish or something.
ETA: I’m glad to see that other people feel the same way I do. I always worry that I’m in some weird minority on this issue.
Why not?
Pro-choice, and it’s unacceptable because the author has constructed a fairy tale without getting me a magical pony that poops money.
If I have to fit into one box, I’m pro-choice, and they should be as safe and as rare as reasonably possible. I’d like to see them rare because we, as a society, take steps to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and when they do happen, that they’re handled as soon in the pregnancy as reasonably possible.
That said, the reason it should be legal is because it’s about choice. People need options to make the most moral decisions, and as much as I do value life and would, in most situations, discourage someone I personally knew who was considering abortion, I also realize that it’s impossible to completely cover all situations, especially since the legislating something with so much specific knowledge and so many possibilities as medicine is just ridiculous.
But this situation is ideal, because if we’re postulating that all women have the option of abortion, but are choosing through their own freewill to not have one, then we get the best of both worlds. This means that we have flawless birth control, no rape or at least not without birth control, sufficient advances in medicine to ensure that abortions are never medically necessary, and we have any other reasons a woman might otherwise choose to abort covered. So, really, unless there’s some other kind of unspoken thing going on, like brainwashing or whatever, I think it’s simple. I could still see some pro-life people perhaps still wanting to ban it though if, even though no one was choosing it, they still thought the idea of the possibility was too wrong.
I am always so taken aback whenever I hear these types of sentiments expressed. How can people saying such words NOT hear how arrogant and disrespectful this attitude is?
(Not this poster specifically, I know it’s a widely held view, and have often heard it expressed!)
That post made me wonder what primary reasons women give for choosing to abort. I searched until I found what I believe to be neutral sources (though most sites appear to use the same study data).
According to available statistics, the primary reasons women gave for choosing to abort were, according to the National Institute for Health:
Health of the mother and/or fetus come in near the bottom:
In taking the role of messenger, I am fully prepared to be shot…
I guess the scenario would be “good,” though I don’t think it would be better than if abortions were easily accessible and some people had them. Maybe I’m taking a bold stance here, but I think that having an abortion in and of itself is a morally neutral decision.
Vehemently oppose. One of the reasons I am pro-choice is I am against adoption. Also, I believe sometimes giving birth is an option to be discouraged. We have enough people in the world. We don’t need to encourage the production of children that are born unwanted burdens.
People believing they have the right to abortion is still an evil thing, even if they don’t make use of the ‘right’.
So by total coincidence, a million women a year all make the same choice.
How, by mass hypnosis? Sorry, gotta fight the hypothetical on this one. You don’t get everyone making the same choice.
And even when the fetus inside them is dead, they still make this choice? They carry it inside them until their body finally pushes it out on its own, and then give the dead fetus up for adoption? Man, that’s just sick. Pathological. But you’re saying that all women in this situation make this choice.
But let me stop fighting the hypothetical for a moment. Going with the hypothetical, you’ve got a million babies up for adoption this year. And next year. And the year after. And so forth. Is there any evidence that adoptive parents could be found for all those babies? I don’t think so. Guess we bring back orphanages? You tell me, OP.
Do some pro-choicers argue that “abortion reduces overpopulation” - therefore that if all women choose adoption rather than abortion, it still increases population?
I laughed.
I’m pro choice and i voted “good” with strong reservations, mainly that the hypothetical makes very little logical sense.
As long as the option is there, I don’t care how few people choose it. I think sometimes abortion is the smarter decision, but I only get to decide when it’s my body.