Clarification is cool by me…
I wasn’t sure if Gestalt was clarifying or looking to engage a side debate on late term abortions.
Go get 'em in the 87 other abortion thread out there now though. 
I’m trying. 
They have an instinct to avoid getting killed, but they have no sense of “I am Rover, a unique being amid other unique beings” or “I’d be upset if I didn’t get to live to see my grandkids” or “I wonder why I’m here”.
I personally don’t think self-aware comes about until a good while after birth. But this isn’t something that can easily be measured and it is something that probably shouldn’t be. I believe that birth is an excellent common-sense boundary that respect’s a sentient being’s right to control their body and destiny while still cultivating a culture that respects life. There are some cases where I do not think infanticide is immoral (like in certain cultures with little access to birth control where births in certain circumstances can put the entire family in mortal danger), but I do believe it should be illegal and in our society should be considered immoral because it sets a bad precedence and is distasteful enough that it should be discouraged however possible.
Please keep in mind I am in no way representative of the pro-choice movement and my ideas have absolutely no chance of being implemented.
Well, beagledave has requested us to limit this discussion to the pro-choice perspective if possible [as, in preview, I see you’ve already noted]. And to people who are pro-choice, that is, who believe that a woman’s right to choose an early-term abortion outweighs the embryo/fetus’s right to life, then no, the fetus’s rights clearly aren’t the most important thing here.
Now, a pro-choice person can certainly believe that even an early-term fetus has some moral claim to human rights, even if its right to life doesn’t trump the pregnant woman’s right to an abortion. And from that perspective, sure, fetal rights could contribute to the force of the argument that reducing the number of abortions is a good thing.
But it would be kind of a silly point to argue, wouldn’t it? Remember, for pro-choice advocates talking about an unwanted early-term pregnancy that the woman wishes to terminate, the only acceptable alternatives (in the current state of technology) are either procuring a safe and legal abortion, or not having the pregnancy in the first place.
So fetal rights in such a case are mostly irrelevant; either they’ll be overridden by the woman’s choice to terminate her pregnancy, or they won’t have existed in the first place because the fetus won’t ever have been conceived. So why should pro-choice people argue for reducing abortions on the basis of fetal rights?
While I certainly don’t envy any woman who has to make that decision, I don’t see that it’s “bad” unless she does it under duress. If she really, really wants the baby but outside circumstances compel her to make that decision then I guess it could be called bad. But even then it’s still probably the better of two bad choices.
I would argue exactly that. “Keep abortion rare” is about reducing unpleasant surgery for women. Period. It’s better if they don’t get pregnant at all than have to get surgery but doesn’t imply that anyone thinks the surgery is “immoral.”
I would love to live in a world were abortions do not happen. But I do not feel it is my right to limit the choice to others. I especially don’t wish to limit abortion in the extreme cases of Rape, Incest or endangerment of the mother’s life.
I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of third trimester abortions. I have a friend whose son is now 14 and was a 10-week Preemie.
If the child is viable, I don’t think abortion is truly an appropriate choice anymore.
I believe that the day after pills should be used guilt free and are to be preferred to actual abortions.
I believe birth control products and training should be mandatory in all schools and that failing to know about Birth Control options should preclude getting a HS diploma or GED equivalence. Proper BC should reduce abortions.
I would really like to see third trimester abortion outlawed except for Medical emergencies and I would like to see Birth Control mandatory in all schools, private or public.
I guess I don’t fit neatly in either category you listed above.
Final Note: I don’t care passionately about this subject. I do not contribute to either side in the debate and I do not vote with Pro-Choice/Anti-choice as an important issue. I am much more in the Pro-Choice camp, but obviously I am not comfortable in said camp.
Jim
Fine. Then it’s probably more honest not to imply that the “keep it rare” business has anything at all to do with any compunctions surrounding pro-life concerns. Not that you have ever done so. But screw Clinton then, and his pious horseshit (if your position is typical).
That’s a little like what I said. But I don’t know how typical that position really is, so Clinton may not have been when he said that. He may really feel that abortion is, if not morally “bad,” at least undesirable.
If I had the opportunity today to vote whether or not to make abortion illegal in the U.S., I would vote NO (i.e. I would not choose to make it illegal). Does this make me “pro-choice”? I hesitate to identify myself as “pro-choice,” because I don’t want to be grouped together with people like Keenan. Personally, I don’t know when a person becomes a person, so I don’t know when, or if, abortion becomes morally similar to murder. I would feel profoundly uncomfortable contributing to or encouraging an actual abortion, more so the further along a pregnancy was, but I would feel unqualified to pass any judgment on anyone who did have an abortion, or making it impossible for them to do so.
Among people who want abortion to stay legal, you’ll find a wide range of opinions regarding the morality of abortion itself, from those who see it as morally neutral (a subset of which would claim that everything is morally neutral and no one should judge anyone else’s actions as “wrong”), to those who are just as horrified by it as pro-lifers are but who think that making it illegal would cause more problems than it would solve.
aruvqan, but if you had the choice, would you rather have gotten pregnant and had the abortion, or just not have gotten pregnant at all?
I don’t know what’s “honest” for Clinton and neither do you. Choice is a position on legality, not morality. It’s entirely possible to think that something is immoral but that it shouldn’t be made illegal.
Me. I don’t think that a mindless thing has rights.
I agree.
I suspect, based on this thread and others, that there are a larger number of the former types than latter on the SDMB (at least among posters who have declared a position in various threads).
Based on polling I’ve seen…my hunch is that in the general population of “pro choice” Americans…that there are more of the latter.
I think that’s why Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) said what he/she did. I don’t know if the Clinton’s believe those statements personally, but I think they were designed to appeal to “…those who are just as horrified by it as pro-lifers are but who think that making it illegal would cause more problems than it would solve.”
I believe that “human life” somehow comes into being over the nine-month gestational period.
At one end, aborting fetuses a day or so away from birth is really very bad and should be avoided in all situations except for clear endangerment of the mother.
At the other end is a tiny undifferentiated morula that’s a few hours or a couple of days old and I really couldn’t care less about killing this things, or at least anymore than I care about an egg flushed down the toilet with a used tampon or semen into a 15 year old’s sock.
The further you move to the former situation, the worse it is, and so I’m not going to make the claim that I don’t have any problem with abortion. But I understand that partial-birth or other late term abortions are exceedingly rare and I feel that the personal and social benefits of giving people the reproductive freedom of abortion far outweighs the moral benefit of protecting 8 week old embryos.
One problem is the phrase “abortion on demand.” Some anti-choice folks seem to affect the belief that women go about intentionally conceiving babies just for the fun of having an abortion. IMHO any rational person knows that this could not be farther from the truth.
The best explanation I’ve heard is that when a woman “wants” an abortion, she wants it like a person with a toothache wants a root canal, not the way a child in summer wants an ice cream cone. A mid- to late-term abortion, to the best of my knowledge, is no simple thing and generally involves inducing labor so that the woman goes through all of the literal travails which that involves. My personal experience with a spontaneous mid-term miscarriage was that it was worse than normal delivery by a factor of about a gazillion.
Brilliant idea. Military basic training (USAF, at least) requires trainees to pass a test on STDs and birth control, and I think high schools should do the same, although I have to be honest and tell you that I hadn’t thought of the idea before you brought it up.
One of my closest friends was once a counsellor at a women’s clinic that offered abortions. (It was owned by Dr. David Gunn who was murdered at another clinic he owned in Pensacola; by all accounts he was not only an exceptionally nice guy but absolutely tops in his job- in his entire career he only had one complication with an abortion.) While there she attended a conference for women’s clinic workers in New Orleans where a seminar was conducted on the ethics of abortion. She was very surprised when instead of essentially being the pro-choice rally that she and many other attendees were expecting to “ho-hum” their way through, the woman conducting it started out with “How many people here often debate the ethics of what we are doing?” At first only a few raised their hands, but as she went on with “There are no cameras or recording equipment present, there is no media rep here, let’s talk about this honestly… it is not just a clump of cells, what we are doing is ending a life form. It is not a baby, but it would be eventually if we did not kill it”, and when she asked the question again about how many often pondered whether or not it was ethical, almost every hand in the room was raised. She said there were tears in the session, but people left it more convinced that it should be kept legal than before they went in.
I would venture that very few if any folk who work in a women’s clinic start the day with a “Ooh boy! I’m gonna get to go end some pregnancies today and toss some fetuses into the biowaste disposal units! And they pay me for it!” They never convinced a woman to have the procedure but instead served to counsel them before and after (“this is what to expect… if you need grief or guilt counselling afterwards… etc.”). They in fact actually dissuaded some women from the decision, usually when it was obvious that the woman was extremely conflicted or when there were potential health issues at stake (for example, Dr. Gunn would not perform abortions on extremely obese women because the risk of a perforation and other complications was too great) or because the woman was so obviously ethically conflicted over what she was about to do that they feared she may become suicidal or at least extremely depressed if she aborted. They counselled women on alternatives such as adoption or state care, but they never once talked anybody into having the procedure. The Judgment House type tableau of a woman with her feet in the stirrups crying and pleading while the evil abortionist hovers over her with a mask and a chainsaw is so much B.S. propaganda- it is in fact illegal to perform an abortion on a woman when there is any reasonable evidence to conclude it is against her consent.
All of the women I know who worked in such facilities got almost physically nauseated over the women they saw come into the clinic for an abortion four times in two years and who clearly were just there to “have it removed”, no ethical problems at all. They were irritated by the number of STDs they saw in pregnant women who didn’t use protections just because they didn’t like it or had used some asinine “I’ve heard if you put toothpaste in your vagina it’s a spermicide” type notion, and in my friend J’s case the two times protestors from one of Dr. Gunn’s facilities showed up at one of his others (not aware that it had the same owner and a rotating staff)- one time a woman coming in for herself and another time a woman who came in with her teenaged daughter, both times upper middle class white women who swore the father was a black rapist (which was a common claim- apparently black rapists are just incredibly fertile rascals, and the fact the baby is biracial and born of violence somehow makes it so much more abortable than the babies of other women they harassed outside the clinic).
On the other hand the women who attended this conference discussed the other ipatients they’d had: terrified 12 year old girls whose lives would be essentially ruined if they had this baby, the woman whose husband had lost most of his family to Huntington’s Disease and who was showing signs of the condition himself and whose child would have at least a 50/50 chance of developing it, or the woman who had very definitely been raped and couldn’t bear the thoughts of having her attacker’s baby, or the domestic violence refugee who was penniless and living in a secret shelter and had just discovered she was pregnant by the crack addicted husband who had cracked her skull, the Jewish woman whose first two children died of a genetic disorder whose name eludes me but that is exclusive to people of Semitic origin and for whom any subsequent children would probably die as well, the 49 year old grandmother who thought she was through menopause and whose 55 year old husband had a heart condition and wanted to retire in a year, etc etc etc, and these women they were able to help out of what could have been a nightmarish situation for both mother and child.
The attitude of these women who worked in the clinics (not all professional staff from abortion clinics are female, of course, but most are) informed my opinions on the subject more than any other info. I completely understand why any individual would have ethical issues with abortion and even why they would consider it murder. These people should not have abortions. I personally do not consider it murder and I do not consider it the removal of a clump of cells but something in between (yet considerably closer to the clump of cells in the first trimester) but I firmly believe it should be kept legal, as the ethical and social problems caused by its illegality are to me unquestionably more horrific than the ones potentially caused by its legality. To me there is never reason to bring an unwanted and unloved child into the world, and while you can say “adoption is an option” it simply isn’t always, particularly if the child is born with a lifelong Special Needs problem or is just black or biracial (there are far more black/biracial infants available for adoption than there are adoptive parents for them), etc…
Sorry, long go nowhere posts, but yes, I think abortion is bad, and that it needs to be kept legal.
I’d just like to add that I see a false dicotomy here. Many women who had to resort to abortion did so because their normal methods of birth-control failed.
Thank you, I doubt we could ever get such legislation pushed through. I hope I am wrong.
Many people think one of the liberties in America is to keep their kids ignorant (I mean protected from certain knowledge ).
Jim