There’s always some chance that something will not go well. There’s a lot that can go wrong that’s not predictable, especially early in pregnancy. And even ignoring health risks, a prefectly normal pregnancy and birth is no picnic.
It’s my body. It’s my decision whether I want to take the risks, put my body through all the discomfort and pain, and deal with the psychological issues.
I don’t know what choice I’d make if faced with this decision, but I tend to think I’d abort a fetus early in pregnancy than gamble with my health, go through the physical and psychological stress of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, and then give my baby up to someone else to raise.
It’s easy to say what’s the right choice for a person when you’re not standing in their shoes, and you’re not the one who has to deal with the consequences of the decision.
Another pro-choice, but not pro-abortion.
It is easy for me, as a man, to say abortion should be an option of last resort.
But the final decision is not up to me.
Nor is the final decision up to the government or religious groups.
The final decision is a difficult, but fundamental right of a woman to choose.
Do you have a cite for this? Everything I’ve seen or read and all of my personal experiences with people I know indicates that there is a vast shortage of healthy babies available for adoption, the waiting list is astoundingly long. Older kids, yes, it’s true, they are harder to adopt but babies? I’d need to see some evidence.
Ahhh, baloney. While I agree with your first statement “It’s my body and my decision” ( which is why I’m pro-choice and the discussion need go no further than that: it IS your decision, end of story ) The rest is self serving bullshit, boiling down to a whine of “I don’t wanna have a baby”. Fine, as I said, your decision, but hoping down to the clinic for a quick little D&C simply because you’re not willing to accept the responsibility of the consiquences of your actions in having sex is gutless in the extreme and not even close to being in the same ballpark as the “best choice”.
So you seriously think it’s better to go through the risks of pregnancy (and if you deny they’re there you’re a liar) to bring an unwanted child into the world, than to go through a medical procedure? What’s your reasoning?
So, Dave, you’re saying that it would have been better for my friend Maria to have gone through a medically fairly risky pregnancy, give birth to a biracial child with a high likelihood of birth defects, and then either hand it over to her mentally unstable mother to raise or risk being shot by said unstable mother for putting the kid up for adoption?
Her mom (who was actually her maternal grandmother) had threatened to kill her if she ever gave a baby up for adoption. The woman was holding a loaded gun to my friend’s head at the time, so it seemed fairly likely she’d really do it. Aside from the personal risks, biracial children tend to not get snapped right up by adoptive parents. Neither do kids with birth defects. A biracial child with birth defects…well, that kid’s likely to have a long, long wait for adoption, often in some fairly non-optimal foster homes.
The ideal solution would have been for her birth control not to have failed. However, life is very rarely ideal, and we have to muddle through, doing the best we can under the circumstances.
Your own link gives lie to what you are claiming. Yes, many children wind up in foster care, and are hard if not impossible to adopt out. These children are for the most part not infants. From your link:
The figures that you quoted from HHS deal with children older than infants. Unless you are claiming that people are chosing abortion to avoid giving birth to 5 year olds, they are totally immaterial to my position. Nice straw man, however, it took me almost an entire minute to run down the fact thet your percentages refer to an entirely different subject.
The “risks” of pregnancy are minimal for a healthy woman, and I’ve already said, several times, that risk to the health of the mother was a perfectly legitimate reason to terminate the pregnancy. Did you miss it every time I said it?
No. Did you bother thinking for twenty seconds about my post before replying? Let’s skip everything about risks to the health of the mother. Answer this question:
So you seriously think it’s better to go through pregnancy with all that entails in order to bring an unwanted child into the world, than to go through a medical procedure? What’s your reasoning?
Where the child is placed in an home that is physically, emotionally or sexually abusive. I’d rather have aborted a child than to discover later that I’d been the instrument of placing a child in that situation.
Less evil, but where the motivation of the adoptive parents isn’t to parent, but to replace a non-existant biological child, or to “Save” a child for God, or any other motive that may mean the parents are not up to the special challenges of adoptive parenting.
Currently healthy white infants are in demand. In addition, white babies who have minor health issues and healthy non-white babies don’t have big problems being placed due to the availability of children (there is, I believe, a significant difference in how easy it is to place a non-white child based on the part of the country you are in - many people looking to domestic adoptions only want a white baby - they are willing and eager to go international if race isn’t a problem - international adoptions are faster and less prone to incompletion). However, if we were to increase the availability of children (via more strict abortion laws, making it harder for a single mom to raise her child, or whatever), it would not take long for the less desireable children to be even harder to place. Moreover, some adoptive parents don’t like the birthparents rights movement, open adoptions, Baby Jessica situations, adoptions not reaching completion because the birthmom has changed her mind or open records that make seaching once the child is an adult much easier. These parent will choose to go overseas for adoption regardless of how many healthy white babies are available here - you don’t have the Russian mom demanding visitation, and the Colombian mom gave up her rights weeks before you even knew the baby existed.
In other words, the there is more to adopt instead of abort than meets the eye.
Dangerosa
(Pro Choice, adoptive parent, daughter of adopted child and daughter in law of a birthmother.)
Dave, the choice for many women is enormously difficult and painful, and to reduce it to something so simplistic is frankly insulting and hurtful. There are so many factors that go into making a decision like this.
Mine. And that’s all I’m going to say about that here, but you KNOW what I’m talking about.
I’ll try this again, adding emphasis to the part you appear to have missed:
I’m not quite sure why they would include that part if they were only talking about older children. In any case, the site says that four percent of children waiting for adoption are less than one year old. Yes, that’s a small minority of all the children waiting to be adopted, but the question was whether these unadopted babies exist at all, not what percentage of the total of unadopted children they comprise.
Well I am pro life. I am in favor of better birth control access and condoms being passed out in school. The only way abortions are going to stop is to encourage people to be more responisible. You get pregnant or get someone pregnant, fess up to your mistake and be an adult about it. Keep the child and raise it or give him/her up for adoption.
I am a feminist and I don’t want the first woman president to be aborted. Also people will abort girls more than boys and that is wrong. Murder is not my right as a woman just as it is not a right for a man.
Partial birth abortion is just too disgusting to think about.
Peter Singer argues in his controversial book Practical Ethics that adoption is at worst ethically neutral, and in many situations, morally correct.
His position is difficult to summarize because it consists of refuting every argument for the immorality of abortion, rather than coming forth with an argument of his own. It is the absence of ethical reasons not to abort that makes the act literally amoral.
featherlou: You are aware that Canada’s population, without taking immigration into account, decreased last year, right? What “hard choices” do you think you’ll be having to make? Population control just is not an issue for the developed world.
Incubus I think that whatever you choose and allow others to choose in any situation, follows to the letter the idea of pro-choice. Disagreeing with their decision is ok, but hindering them from making the decision is being hypocritical.
There’s an old email passed around that tells the story of two women. Both were poor, sick, had no husband or at least he was also sick, they had lost children previously, etc. Then at the end of the email it’s revealed that one child was Michealangelo and one was Hitler.
I’m never sure if this is pro-life or pro-abortion.
One thing for sure is it has nothing to do with pro-choice.
The above story and the phrase
seem to try and bring out people’s emotions. Perhaps if the person faced with the choice might think “I’ll choose to have this kid b/c it could be pres. or a famous artist, etc. In fact I must have this kid because I am uncertain what to do and what if this child is the next …” This is a choice based on sentiment and prepares a mother for nothing. Especially when in a few months time this sentiment is forgotten and the mother is left with the reality of a kid. I don’t think this is an intelligent way to make a choice.
Choice is when you look at the options, make some guesses at possible futures, seek practical experience, ask for knowledge from others who were/are in similar situations, ask others involved for their ideas on the subject, figure out your resources, assests, and potential assests, and then, finally, choose a course.
Point of all that, I don’t think many people know how to make choices and what you think is an innocent bumper sticker or a catchy little phrase is actually reckless in that it tries to illicit feelings (maternal instincts even) rather than rational thought.
To bring that unwanted child into the world for the purpose of being adopted by loving parents? Absolutely, not a question in my mind. Remember, my stand here is that adoption is a preferable choice to abortion, not anything else.
My wife and I have talked about this, and we are both of the same mind on it. We are firmly in the pro-choice camp, but we would never choose to have an abortion ourselves. The very idea of it makes us shiver down to our marrow… but that’s our choice to make, and others get to make the same choice. So to the extent of our own choices, we are anti-abortion, but we are still pro-choice.
Choosing something for yourself doesn’t mean demanding that same choice from someone else… and we don’t.