I agree with safe legal and rare; I have no moral problems with abortion, but it’s medically inferior to not being pregnant in the first place.
Reseach is being done into male birth control, but it’s harder to shut down male fertility without shutting down the whole reproductive system. That’s where those “chemical castration” drugs came from; failed attempts at male birth control.
Because it’s harder on the woman’s body, as well as unpleasant and more expensive than not getting pregnant. Sort of like tooth decay; there’s nothing wrong with filling in a cavity, but it’s better if you don’t get one.
At the very least, because it’s a medical procedure with a certain amount of risk. Even if having an abortion is morally acceptable, not having an unwanted pregnancy in the first place is a far better alternative from anybody’s point of view.
Similarly, we can consider it morally acceptable to, say, get divorced or declare bankruptcy, while still recognizing that divorces and bankruptcies have significant downsides and we’d like to have fewer of them overall.
And just because of the downside, I don’t see a problem with saying that the ideal number of unwanted pregnancies, and hence the ideal number of abortions, is zero. However, I think it’s unrealistic to suggest that that number would ever actually be attained.
(Deliberately without reading other responses.) IMO it’s “bad” but inevitable; therefore it should be safeguarded, and those who seek it should be protected.
Of course we’ll never have “zero” abortions any more than we’ll have zero cases of anything else that people might find objectionable…from shoplifting on up.
Should zero abortions still be the “goal” though, still?
I agree with this. Abortion is not “bad”, and IMO can in many circumstances be “good”. But it’s certainly not preferable to not getting pregnant in the first place.
100% effective birth control would be the ideal. That will never, ever happen, and so there will never be no need for abortions. But I believe that improving birth control and reducing the number of abortions is a worthy goal.
Well I actually found a link to Saletan’s original piece so that you can compare it to Pollitt (it was in the NYT which charges for archived stories, but the Star Tribune still has it online)
About a year ago, Hillary Clinton said “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.” That inspired a thread similar to this one, and I think that statement bothered me for the same reasons Saletan’s comments bothered Pollitt.
Pollitt seems to be arguing about the rhetoric rather than the principle. Having read Katha Pollitt’s Nation columns for many years now, I seriously doubt that she would disagree that it would be a nice thing, in principle, for women to have zero unwanted pregnancies.
Her complaint seems to be more that by over-emphasizing the agreement that we all would prefer to see fewer unwanted pregnancies and hence fewer abortions, the “95-10” people are handing the anti-abortion advocates a rhetorical advantage: “We all think abortions are bad? Great—let’s ban 'em, and then there won’t be any!”
I don’t know if this hypothesis is actually true, but I don’t think it matters when it comes to saying what we actually think. It is better not to have an unwanted pregnancy than to have an abortion, and I don’t care whether I’m somehow “giving a handle” to anti-abortion activists by acknowledging that. Them’s the facts.
If the question is simply how we should pitch the PR for defending abortion rights in the media, though, then Pollitt may have a point.
So, do you feel that abortion is justified even in the last weeks of pregnancy? That an hour before a scheduled labor is induced, so to speak, that the fetus is not self-aware, and that 7 hours later, as an infant, it is? Or are infants in their first weeks also not self-aware?
I think that the question only becomes morally ambiguous in the third trimester but since only a fraction of one percent of all abortions occur in the third trimester, and since those instances are virtually always done for compelling medical reasons, I think the question, for all practical purposes, really only applies to abortions in the first two trimesters and mostly to first. In the first two trimesters, I think abortion is a morally neutral decision. It’s a decision a woman makes about her own body. It does not involve another person and it’s immoral to try to take that decision away from her. I don’t see terminating a pregnancy (within the first two trimesters) as being morally any different than lancing a boil. A fetus cannot be a victim, in my opinion and they may be freely destroyed in any number with a clear conscience. I wish more women would get abortions, not fewer. I think that in some cases, abortion is morally preferable than carrying a pregnancy to term (for crack addicted women, for instance).
The notion that an embryo or a developing fetus is a “baby” is a purely religious belief. This is especially true when we’re talking about very early stages of pregnancy when the “baby” is nothing but a few cells. I don’t see how it can rationally be argued that destroying a few cells is “killing a baby” without an appeal to religious belief.
To explain myself a little further: I think abortion is morally neutral. If nobody had them because we had eliminated teen pregnancies and all the reasons people choose to have them, as well as all the health and financial problems that force people to have them, it wouldn’t be bad. But it often bothers me when politicians discuss this - because it’s a pie-in-the-sky scenario that judges against abortion in the disguise of a moderate, “can’t we all just get along?” statement.
That said, however, Saletan is primarily stating the obvious, especially when he says “I know many women who decided, in the face of unintended pregnancy, that abortion was less bad than the alternatives. But I’ve never met a woman who wouldn’t rather have avoided the pregnancy in the first place.” I can’t get too annoyed by that. As he says, as Clinton said, and as a bunch of the people here have said, avoiding a pregnancy is preferable to aborting it. There is a distinction, I feel, between saying “these things are preferable” and “this thing is bad,” and while that may be a slim difference, I think it’s important.
But I do think, to some degree, he’s ignoring what’s actually going on (and ignoring things to ‘improve’ your column is annoying): abortions are on the decline. Perhaps he’s correct and the pro-choice movement is not doing enough to help, his proposals may merit a closer look.
This is an imaginary scenario which does not occur in reality but I would answer that the woman has the right to have the fetus removed from her body but since the acting of removing it would not have to kill it, that induced labor and live birth (or caesarian) would preserve her rights without raising any ethical dilemmas. The baby could then become a ward of the state and put up for adoption. The right of the woman is to end the pregnancy. Sometimes that means the fetus has to be destroyed, sometimes not.
more than 10 years after I had my tubes tied i killed the bunny. I also happen to know that my kidneys shut down, and I get pre-ecclampsic, and all sorts of other nasties conspire to kill me. I was counting down the days until I could get in for one. I would have cheerfully committed any felony on the books to get one if they were not legal, in CT/the US.
:eek:
<and no, I was in the ER for something totally different, but at that time the navy ran a pregnancy test on every reproduction aged woman that ended up in the ER to cover their asses in case of some med or proceedure that might affect a pregnancy. I didn’t even consider a possible pregnancy. My words were ‘you have got to be shitting me’ when i was told.>
No, I dont believe they should be used as birth control, but you can NOT make a blanket statement that ‘nobody wants to have one’ because if you are single and broke, married and broke, about to enter college and broke [or someother reason where even the process of being pregnant would totally screw up your life and future] you can want one desperately enough to go to some total stranger and have them shove a coathanger or nonsterile instrument inside and risk dying, infection and infertility AND risk going to jail.
mrAru thinks that the first few women that are forced to go through a pregnancy because of the SD law should walk into the capitol building as soon as they and the sprout get out of the hospital, and drop the baby and the hospital bill on that jackasses desk. If HE wants them to have a kid that badly, then he should have to deal with the kid and the costs.
You know, almost every protester I have had to talk with [going into and out of my ob/gyns office down in the bible belt when I lived there and wasnt a navy dependant] had absolutely no realistic answer when I asked them if THEY would personally adopt the kid the instant it was born, and during the pregnancy pay all the bills and additional costs that being pregnant entails for the next woman walking past who wanted an abortion. The general response was ‘it isnt my problem she got pregnant, why should I spend that kind of money.’ and I pointed out that they seemed to be making it their business by trying to prevent the abortion.
And in addition…I think that quite a few females out there would significently benifit from assertiveness training. It does seem like many females (especially young ones) have sex with partners as a means to pleasing them. They are having sex, to please the other person rather then doing what they want.
Also abortion is not ALWAYS bad. Ending a potential life is not the best ideal in the world…but abortion is simply the ending of a pregancy. Miscarriages are often called natrual abortions. What if a baby has died in utereo? What if a baby has extreme profound birth defects? By extreme profound I mean either incompatible with life or so severe that the baby will be in a persistant vegeitative state (like with anacephally or the one where a doc can shine a flashlight through the skull)
Um, okay. A pregnancy is the same as tooth decay in this regard. Now I understand that whole, “Let’s keep it rare” mentality. After all, who wants a toothache?
Seriously, does anyone argue that “keep abortions rare” has absolutely nothing to do with the moral implications related to the fetus’s rights?
I suppose one can’t really control where a thread that you start goes…but I’ll still make that small request
We’ve had plenty of debates about when life starts, the nature of the z/e/f, late term abortions etc…
If possible, I’d like this thread to address the spectrum of beliefs, regarding the intrinsic nature of abortion…(and how that influences decision making), among pro choice folks…specifically the points Saletan and Pollitt make.
Huh? Of course you might well want to get an abortion if you already have an unwanted pregnancy. I was just pointing out that everyone in such a situation would vastly prefer not to have the unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
No, I certainly don’t think that most women who have abortions are “using abortion as birth control”, nor do I automatically assume that they were careless about using contraception. Nor do I think that a woman’s right to choose an early-term abortion should be restricted in any way.
But everybody who has a problem and needs to solve the problem would still prefer not to have the problem in the first place, no matter how appropriate and successful and legitimate the solution is.
