For pro choice folks, Is abortion "bad"?

Great Debates
61

Abortion can be bad. It can, under certain circumstances, be highly traumatic to the person who would’ve been the mother. Under certain other circumstances, it can be deeply troubling to other people if it appears to be elected for in a cavalier & repetitive fashion.

Abortion can, of course, be a blessing and a great relief. Millions of women have “voted with their feet” — very very few of them were under duress; very very few of them chose an abortion that they did not in fact want. And while some of them made this choice with an air of gravity and a sense of profound loss (e.g., wrong time, wrong man, wrong decade of my life, wrong chromosomes, or gee I wish I’d known I was pregnant before I took all that Accutane, but under some other circumstance I wish I could have this baby), other abortions are not so imbued (e.g., don’t want a baby, birth control failed, early relatively non-invasive procedure available, gee am I glad I don’t live in some repressive regime where this would be difficult or impossible).

I am comfortable designating the rate of abortions as unnecessarily high (perhaps 90% is as good a figure as any), and I am comfortable designating the unnecessary abortions as “sad” and in some sense “bad”. I would like to see abortions trimmed down to those cases where pregnancy was originally intended and desired but something has gone wrong on some level and in some sense. I’d like to see “oops” abortions rendered virtually nonexistent through better birth control technology for both sexes (requiring both sexes to affirmatively turn birth control OFF in order to cause a pregnancy); I’d like to see abortions caused by inadequate sex education, puritanical doublethink-denial of one’s own desire to get laid, and other forms of social barriers to possessing and being adept as using control of one’s reproductive capacities made virtually extinct by eliminating the social causes thereof; and of course likewise for pregnancies resulting from any and all forms of nonconsensual sex.

I would still want abortion to be legal, safe, convenient, and affordable for the remaining situations in which a woman is pregnant and no longer wishes to be.

I would be happy and proud to join my financial controbutions with those of pro-life people to make it less and less likely that people find themselves pregnant without intending to be.

Ultimately, though, I would not take it upon myself to point to a specific abortion (post or potential) and say “this one would be ‘bad’ if it happened” or “this was a ‘bad’ abortion”. That’s not for me to judge. That’s for the pregnant woman to judge. It’s her call.

62

You missed a word, but a really important one: I would say “An unwanted pregnancy is the same as tooth decay in this regard.” I would say that a pregnancy that the woman does not want is by definition a bad situation. Having a child you don’t want and don’t think you can care for, risking your life for a pregnancy, or having an abortion are all choices that most rational women would prefer not to have to make.

We should be researching safer, more effective, and more convenient birth control, so that fewer women find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. We should also be trying to educate everyone on what forms of birth control work and what forms don’t, so that we get fewer of the “I thought toothpaste was a spermicide” sort of situations.

We will never get the number of abortions down to zero, nor should we- there will always be birth defects, changes in a woman’s situation during pregnancy (financial crisis, finding out that continuing the pregnancy would possibly harm her health, et cetera), and things like that.

63

I believe abortion is morally repugnant, but has to be legally protected.

Moreover, I don’t think making it illegal will significantly reduce the number of abortions.

The best way to prevent abortions is to provide the mothers with economic alternatives that make raising a child possible.

So, yeah, I’d agree with the 95-10.

64

Tay Sachs, I believe.
And I agree with you 110%!

65

I agree that abortion is justified in that situation, but I don’t agree that it was probably Tay Sachs, at least not as Sampiro described it. Tay Sachs is a fatal genetic disorder caused by a recessive gene. That means that any subsequent child would have a 25% chance of inheriting Tay Sachs. That’s high, but it’s not “any subsequent child would probably die as well”.

66

Good example of where Birth Control like Tubal Ligation would be a better choice than to get to the heart wrenching point of playing the odds. Just my opinion.
I am all for Tubal Ligation and Vasectomies being free to anyone who wants the procedures done.

Jim

67

Apart from the simplistic nature of suggesting that abortions are “bad”, it borders on labeling women seeking abortions and abortion providers as “bad”, which I think is probably the tone that Pollitt is perceiving and objects to.

It’s basically a strawman - virtually no one on the pro-abortion rights side regards abortions as “good”. At best they are a sad necessity for many women.

I haven’t seen this touched on much, if at all in this thread. This initiative, coming from a group plunged in obscurity roughly as deep as “Republicans For Choice” (assuming such an entity exists), is fraught with deception and insulting assumptions about what the other side believes.

Physicians know quite well, for example, the limitations of lab tests, including but not limited to alpha-fetoprotein assays (which are capable of detecting enhanced risk of birth defects). Medical professionals do not advise women to have abortions based on such a test, which is the insulting and wrong assumption made by “Democrats For Life”. Compelling physicians to notify women about possible “false positives” associated with AFP testing is just another attempt by anti-abortion rights advocates to get government in the door of the doctor’s office to compel recitation of a canned spiel. (One never hears about laws to compel physicians and adoption referral services to tell women about the complications and death rates associated with carrying a pregnancy to term). Government-mandated discussions of adoption referral procedures fall under the same heading.
As to that proposal to make ultrasound machines available to nebulous parties to conduct screenings - that sounds like a plan to get government handouts to anti-abortions rights organizations so they can buy ultrasound equipment to further their agendas. Based on the quality of medical information provided by such groups in the past (i.e. “Silent Scream”), this would be a misuse of taxpayer money designed to fund propaganda.

Money to fight domestic abuse and teach the facts about pregnancy in schools? Wonderful. Pro-abortion rights Democrats have been supporting such funding for ages. It’s about time the other side jumps aboard.

There’s certainly room for both camps to agree on measures designed to reduce unwanted and dangerous pregnancies. Deception and stereotyping have no place in such efforts.

68

What is the difference, morally, between a fetus at 24 weeks and one at 27 weeks? That is, a late term second trimester and an early third trimester fetus?

Gestalt

69

Oh, I did not know that. I just thought Tay Sachs because it seems to be commonly thought of as Eastern European Jewish and always fatal, from what I gather.

70

AHunter3 and I agree almost completely on abortion issues, if I recall correctly.

In an ideal world, there are no abortions because there are no unwanted pregnancies and no risk and no birth defects. I’m not holding my breath.

71

Nothing, really. It’s all about whether the fetus can survive outside of the womb. Obviously there isn’t any hard and fast line for that, but since the vast majority of abortions occur well before that’s a possibility, it doesn’t really matter. The carictature of healthy, near-term babies being knifed in the womb by cackling, evil “abortionists” is a figment of the imagination.

72

It’s possible that it was Tay Sachs, and that she was misinformed about the risk, or that she had had a prenatal screening come up positive for Tay Sachs.

73

The latter. I don’t think abortion is morally “bad”. It can be traumatic, but that’s not really a moral issue.

I agree with the “safe, legal, and rare” slogan because preventing unwanted pregnancies before they start is less expensive, safer, and more effective at preventing unwanted children from being born than simply making abortion available. I like the root canal analogy - there’s nothing immoral about getting your tooth drilled, but it’s cheaper and less painful to just take care of your teeth so you don’t have problems in the first place.

Not as it’s written. I take exception to a couple of the points:

“End the discriminatory practices against pregnant women in the health insurance industry by removing pregnancy from all “pre-existing condition” lists in health care.”

Pregnancy is obviously a major factor in a woman’s health, and if insurance companies are allowed to discriminate against any pre-existing conditions at all, why shouldn’t pregnancy be among them?

“Prohibit transporting a minor across a state line to obtain an abortion. Makes an exception if the abortion was necessary to save the life of the minor.”

If it’s not OK to force a grown woman to give birth, why on earth would it be OK to force a 17 year old to give birth? That’s exactly what this prohibition would do to minors who live in a state where they can’t get an abortion.

“Requires states that have parental notification to inform parents of state statutory rape laws.”

Parental notification laws and statutory rape laws are bad enough in themselves; how does connecting them benefit anyone? Now, the young girl with an unwanted pregnancy doesn’t just have to worry about her parents’ wrath, but also about sending her boyfriend to jail. Lovely.

74

I think abortion is bad, in the same sense that major surgery for a condition that could have been caught and corrected earlier is bad. In lots of cases, abortion is less bad than the alternatives. And, as in any medical procedure, the person undergoing it should be the one to make the final decision. In cases where abortion was not preventable, it isn’t even bad in this sense.

Just as it is morally questionable to complain about the expense of surgery while cutting preventative measures, it is morally questionable to complain about abortion while not supporting birth control in all its forms.

That fetuses without any brain activity are not persons is well proven by the way we act when they abort naturally. We don’t bury them (except for a few who do it as part of their anti-abortion argument) and we have no major medical research effort underway to make sure all viable fertilized eggs implant. If the same percentage of newborns died as fertilized eggs didn’t implant, you know we’d move heaven and earth to stop it.