The problem with most polls is that they require a snap judgement from the subject.
People tend to answer poll questions on the basis of their political or religious views. But if they actually were in a crisis situation where they had to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, they may be liable to change their minds. Polls ask questions of people who have never had to thoroughly examine the issues on their own. They are just what they claim to be: an expression of public opinion, even if its largely uninformed.
This notion that poll results are somehow “less meaningful” if the respondents don’t have direct experience with the question, is an interesting notion.
I wonder if Blaron applies the same logic (and has posted a similar response in other threads) to death penalty polls…or polls about drug legalization… or polls about U.S. involvement in Iraq …or other matters of public interest.
I believe that American’s opinions on the abortion issue are complex and often contradictory. However, the implication was made earlier by several posters that attitudes in favor restrictions (or bans) on abortion are misogynistic. At the very least…polls that show that a plurality of American women don’t favor abortions for the most commonly voiced reason, show how silly that notion is.
If instead of getting an abortion, a woman were to have a hysterectomy while pregnant, thus ceasing the donation while not directly killing the fetus, is that acceptable to the anti-abortion folks?
I don’t understand how this is going to avoid revictimizing women who have been raped. Consider:
A woman walks into a clinic and says: “I think I was raped two months ago. My memory is hazy because I was drinking and I may have been drugged. Now I’m 8 weeks pregnant. I didn’t consent to sex (or if I did, I don’t remember it) and I don’t want to bear my rapist’s child, though I have no idea who he is. I don’t ever want to see him again, even to testify against him. My husband has been away for four months on an army tour. I don’t want him to know about this. I just want a D&C and then get on with my life.”
Is she lying? Can you prove it? How many police man-hours do you want to put into investigating this? Is it even possible to investigate a rape under these conditions before the woman enters her second trimester? How much personal information does the woman have to give to police in the course of their investigation? Does she have to inform her husband and possibly destroy her marriage? What makes you think “female police officers” will be acceptable if a woman is determined not to involve the police?
In order to weed out the liars, how much suffering are you willing to inflict on the truthful?
If a woman wants an abortion really badly (given the 18-year economic commitment, the incentive is strong) what’s to keep her from making false rape accusations, and then dropping them once she gets her abortion? How many innocent men do you think will be destroyed by these accusations? What kind of punishments did you have in mind for a woman who lies, assuming you could prove the lie? Are you going to build hundreds of new prisons for them?
So far, you’ve offered the thread the most articulate and rational arguments for a ban, and still your position has fatal easy-to-exploit flaws.
That’s really all I needed to read. It’s a presumptive and arrogant thing to say, telling me that my means of survival and eventual recovery were wrong.
When it happens to you, do it your way. Until then, your opinion on whether or not I was right is about as relevant to me as thong bikinis are to Inuits.
If the emotional trauma of going through a very thorough pelvic exam right after being raped is your idea of easy, I don’t think you and I are ever going to see eye to eye on that.
And forcing a woman to go through a pregnancy she doesn’t want and have a baby she doesn’t want is supposed to hammer that lesson into her?
Seems to me like the focus here is punishing someone for being irresponsible, which isn’t your job.
I don’t see how far that takes your argument. Ask anybody if they wish they had never existed, and most would say “no”.
I don’t mourn for all the trillions of sperm that never fertilized any eggs, because to me those sperm are no more “persons” than an embryo or fetus. The fact that sperm or eggs died and never accomplished their ultimate objective no more vexes me than an unborn entity that dies before reaching personhood.
Damn straight. Along with responsibility, responsibility, responsibility comes rights, rights, rights, however. So either let ze women take responsiblity as they see fit, or shush.
Nobody seems to have noticed that the central problem with the ‘poll’ statement was that it was completely nebulous.
I could quote a poll showing 90% of women in favor of abortion. It depends on the question asked.
Ask whether a viable fetus should be ‘aborted’ the day before a normal birth would take place and you’d get one answer, ask whether an early abortion to save the life of the woman would be ok and you’d get another. The ‘poll’ just quoted ‘52%’ with no reference whatsoever, as if that was somehow a justification for taking away my and every other woman’s rights.
Hey but it makes a change from hawking particular moral obsessions or hitting us over the head with a fetus, doesn’t it?
I know I said I was out of this thread, but I get upset every time I see people saying ‘Abortion should be illegal, except in the case of rape’.
If a fetus is a human being, it’s a human being no matter how it was conceived. That should have no bearing on the morality of killing it. If it’s OK to force a woman to give birth because her birth control failed, why is it not OK to force a woman to give birth because she was raped? In neither case did the woman choose to become pregnant. The difference has nothing to do with the conception, but with the act that lead to the conception.
It smacks too much of enforcing morality instead of protecting lives. I know what’s going on in the heads of some (not all) of the people who are againt women having the right to choose - I was there myself. Through most of my teenage years I was anti-choice, and I would have agreed that women who were raped should be allowed abortions. I felt that unborn lives should be protected, but I did not see abortion as the equivalent of murder. I DID see it as an easy out for women who were having sex, and I liked the idea of women being forced to suffer for their promiscuity. It was a sense of harsh justice, not compassion for the unborn, that drove my beliefs. Yes, I resented female sexuality, but I was also a messed up nerdy kid who wasn’t getting any. I was a fine example of how teenagers go through a phase where they see everything in unrealistic moral absolutes - Dying of lung cancer? You should have quit smoking when you found out it was bad for you. Pregnant with a child you don’t want? Shouldn’t have had sex.
Oddly enough, I was against the death penalty at the time. I’m not trying to equate being against capital punishment with being against legalized abortion - I can understand the arguments against capital punishment perfectly, and logically that side usually does make more sense - it’s not a deterrant, innocent people are executed, and it’s more expensive than keeping criminals in jail. I’m not even sure why I changed my mind (one of my siblings was murdered, but that was many years before I became pro-capital punishment), but it was a different process than when I decided that abortion should remain legal, which was the result of me logically thinking out the consequences of what I believed at the time. I still find abortion…evil is not the right word, but definitely not good, and I feel it can be a waste of human potential, but I find the alternatives far worse, and I would not deny a woman an abortion under any circumstances.