I don’t think morality enters into the situation until the child is living (not can live, is living)independently of the mother. Mother-fetus is more comparable to a parasitic relationship until that point.
I’m pro-choice and I haven’t gotten/wouldn’t get an abortion myself. But my personal choice is based on preference, not morality.
The morality of any given abortion is tied up with the thousand and one reasons why that person has made that choice. I personally think some abortions are morally wrong, some are perfectly justified and some fall into areas I don’t know anything about and so can’t judge. Maybe I should just butt out and let the pregnant person, the person with all the information and who has to deal with any consequences, wrestle with those questions herself. Unless she asks my opinion.
I’m viscerally, emotionally uncomfortable with abortion. If a woman were pregnant with my child, I would beg her not to have one, even to the extent that I would promise her, in legally binding writing, that it would be none of her responsibility after birth if she so chose.
But even in the case of such a woman, pregnant with my child, the final decision would lie with her. How much more so, then, in the case of all the pregnancies out there in which I have not even a 50% stake?
Up till the delivery? I don’t think a fertilized egg is a person, but somewhere in between fertilized egg and birth it becomes a human being and I’m uncomfortable putting that line at the point where the baby is crowning!
I don’t think that all abortions are wrong and I don’t feel that life begins at conception.
If faced with the problem, I would have an abortion myself.
That being said I am insane about birth control and pregnancy prevention. So if I got pregnant it would be a complete mistake and something that I did my absolute very best to avoid. Being pregnant is not something I would ever want to experience so adoption is right out. It’d be my only choice, and I want to have it as a safe and legal choice.
As other posters said, I wish abortion were rare and not due to carelessness (or rape). And that unplanned pregnancies were due to unforseeable circumstances against the odds, because everyone involved took precaution.
I don’t think I’d really hold it against anyone that I knew if I found out they had an abortion. It wouldn’t change my view of their morality. You know they feel bad about it - and even if they don’t, it’s not my place to judge.
Unless it’s like the soldier in DrCube’s post or someone that has had abortion(s) due to their own carelessness. Then I’d raise my eyebrows.
I wonder if there are any people on the board who are the exact opposite: they think abortion is fine but want the government to ban it anyways
I think you and I are having a fundamental point of disagreement. I do not view laws as “moral choices by the government”. I view criminal penalties enforced by governmental entities not as moral judgments, but rather as “Rules For Living In Society”. As it happens, my moral sensibilities do not necessarily line up precisely with the criminal code. I sincerely doubt there are very many people whose moral sensibilities line up precisely with the criminal code. There are any number of behaviors I consider to be immoral that are perfectly legal, and also behaviors that I consider perfectly fine from a moral standpoint that are illegal. I think you’ll find this to be the case for many people. However, I am entirely happy to acknowledge that if I want to live in the society governed by that particular set of rules, it behooves me to comply with them or GTFO. Whether or not I am complying with the Rules For Living In Society, my personal moral sensibilities are an entirely separate and distinct matter.
However, a government is certainly entitled to enforce their set of Rules For Living In Society - in fact, that is basically the entire point of government. In fact, the government of the United States has a long-standing and pretty deeply vested tradition of at least making an attempt (or giving lip service to making an attempt) to limit the extent to which the set of rules is actually a moral judgment.
To use your rather invidious example, in the United States, having sex with children is a violation of our set of Rules For Living In Society. Our society has collectively decided we’d rather people living with us refrained from that behavior. Whether or not it is a morally acceptable behavior is an entirely different discussion - and not the overwhelming slam dunk your example was clearly intended to be. For example, ask 100 people whether it’s acceptable for an 18 year old to have a sexual relationship with a 16 year old (or whether it’s acceptable for two 15 year olds to have sex with each other) and see how many different answers you get, if you’re really curious.
In this case, the OP inquired whether there are people who are pro-choice (that is, against having a Rule For Living Together that prohibits abortions in all circumstances) but find the act of having an abortion to be morally wrong in at least some circumstances. The answer (based on the responses in the thread) is clearly “yes”. Since one of the yes-votes was mine, and I judged the OP to be curious as to why that might be, I elected to provide a very, very brief synopsis of my thinking on the matter.
Such people exist in nontrivial quantities but I don’t know if we have any on our board who would openly identify as such.
One form of the phenomenon you describe: people who want abortion to be illegal because they want SEX to be something considerably less accessible via making it more fraught with consequences to the woman; but who have no interest or concern for embryonic life otherwise.
Frankly, for years I thought all RTL folks were full of shit, and that their only concern was for imposing moral sanctions for sexual behavior, and that none of them gave a tinker’s damn about any fetus. I’ve learned otherwise on this very board. Be that as it may, the disingenuous ones most certainly exist and occasionally make statements that reveal this to be so.
Morally wrong? Sure, sometimes. OTOH, I hate the idea that a woman who is unprepared to be a mother should go through pregnancy and be able to hand the baby over to strangers like a bag of dirty laundry. Anti-abortion people present adoption as a magical la-la land where nobody suffers. That is a totally immoral picture.
I have no particular moral qualms about abortion. Whether someone has one once or multiple times.
Now, I might think that a person who had a significant number of abortions could probably do better when using contraception - depending on their circumstances of course. But I wouldn’t consider it in any way a moral concern, just a practical one and a health one.
I can’t think of any situation where abortion would be morally wrong in my eyes. I’ve been trying to think of something. Even if we come up with some imaginary situation where the mother promises to raise the future child, receives money from the father to that end, and then gets an abortion as they planned all along, it would be the deception that would be morally wrong, not the abortion. Maybe I’m not being imaginative enough.