I was infertile for three years and have an adopted son. It was SO TEMPTING to believe that other fertile women who didn’t want the fetus they conceived should be forced to be my baby factory. I am so glad Roe vs. Wade prevents that - it was horrifying to me to think I could think of another human being in those terms, to think she should be forced to be pregnant (I later was, it was a MISERABLE experience for me, having a wanted child), deliver (a girlfriend nearly died during delivery) and then give her child to me.
My mother in law was forced to do that in the 1950s - her scars and the scars of her daughter, now known to us, will never heal.
Well, my roommate in college said this exactly. She said abortions were ‘cheaper because the guy always pays for it…:: giggle :: " and that “condoms were gross”. She had three abortions in the course of a single school year. Of course I’d vomit if I found out she was ever the mother of anything, right down to a rhinovirus, but I think where a lot of Pro-Choice (and pro abortion) folks lose their audience is when they insist on raising up every woman who’s ever had a D&C up to the level of Hip Happenin’ Saint RAWK! Some of the folks on your side are just as jacked up as the people on the prolife side.
I think you underestimate the amount of empathy an abortion-seeker/haver is capable of. I don’t see where empathy for a person’s misfortune makes their own misfortune any more tolerable.
Who does that? There’s a world of difference between saying “women don’t have abortions for shits and giggles”, which is, I think, a fairly accurate generalization, and saying “get down on your knees and worship these goddesses of women’s rights!!!”, which is, of course, absurd.
Your roomate was pathologically stupid, and as such, represents no one except pathologically stupid people. That’s not exactly a “side”.
Eh. It could simply mean that women who tend to be inept at using birth control are inclined to have abortions once the number of unintended pregnancies outstrips their ability to take care of the offspring.
In my experience of being acquainted with a few teen moms, the pregnancy that resulted in a child was often part of a pattern of making poor choices about birth control use for one reason or another (with the resulting trend that many of them have also had abortions as well). I took the multiple “accidents” as a sad indication that they really were not quite in control of their reproductive abilities (contrary to all the rhetoric about abortion being the hallmark of reproductive autonomy)
Things have changed a lot since the push to legalize abortion began in the 60s. Women in modern countries have a helluva lot of wonderful, reliable birth control options nowadays that weren’t known 35 years ago. In many European countries they seem to be making good use of modern contraception and have much lower abortion rates than the USA does.
Too bad that in America we’re all too focused on arguing the morality of abortion to worry about promoting responsible contraception use and unintended pregnancy prevention.
While of course pro-lifers are known to often oppose birth control on moral grounds (a viewpoint that I’ve never agreed with myself - it always seemed natural to me to embrace contraception as a means to reduce abortion), I don’t think pro-choicers really help the matter when so many seem to try to argue that birth control is futile anyway (with all the anecdotes of pregnancy in spite of perfect contraceptive use that make it sound as if unwanted pregnancy were the same sort of unavoidable random tragedy as getting hit by lightning), and by being hesitant to concede that abortion is an undesirable thing (at the very least, in the same sense that we can all agree that choosing to euthanize a pet is, for most people, an undesirable thing even if there are cases when it can be morally justified).
Yes, I’m willing to concede there are the exceptional cases out there, but I think it’s more useful to look at the common scenario than the odd outliers. Far more unintended pregnancies and abortions are spawned by people who didn’t know how to use contraception properly or weren’t motivated to use it consistently than by the miracle sperm that managed to overcome perfect use of multiple forms of contraception.
It would be nice if we could all be pro-responsibility. It is considered acceptable by many (myself included) to say men who impregnate a woman have an obligation to their child whether they “want” the kid or not - after all, if they really don’t want to create a kid, they do have condoms and vasectomies (or even - gasp! - abstinence if they find those options unbearable). Women have far more birth control choices, and yet a lot of pro-choice rhetoric makes it sound as if they are incapable of being held to the same standards as men when it comes to not conceiving unwanted offspring in the first place or having any parental obligations to it. As a woman myself, I’ve always seen that as kind of patronizing.
And again, who does that? I’ve never heard anyone imply that birth control is futile. I simply hear people acknowledge that it’s not perfect.
I concede no such thing. Abortion is undesirable because it’s expensive, invasive, and inconvenient. I’ve had one, and I’ll tell you right now that I was far less distraught than I’d be if I had to put down my cat. My cat is sentient and has a personality and is dear to me.
I’m very pro-responsibility. I just don’t believe that abortion is necessarily irresponsible. And frankly, I don’t believe that men should be any more obliged to have children than women should be. While the choice as to whether a child of theirs will be born can’t be theirs, the choice as to whether they will parent and/or support that child should be. Of course, practically speaking, judging by the number of deadbeat dads (and moms, but that wasn’t the issue) in the world, it is, isn’t it?
And yet, if she posted that story on I’m Not Sorry, what would you say? That she was stupid or a brave champion for women’s rights?
Uh, no. I’m prochoice, but I just don’t think that we can say without fail that every abortion is a smart, well thought out abortion. Some people are idiots. On both sides of the coin. We have to be careful not to hand out medals to everyone who posts a story on I’M NOT SORRY.
Please point out where anyone in this thread who has said that we should hand out medals or who claims every abortion is a smart, well-thought-out abortion? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re the one making the generalizations about the pro-choice position.
Um… are these my options? Because simply having an abortion doesn’t make one a champion of womens’ rights. And I don’t understand how your friend’s stupidity has any bearing on the overall morality or legality of abortion on demand.
I’m much less concerned about ‘dumb’ abortions than ‘dumb,’ poorly planned pregnancies and child rearing. If someone’s having multiple abortions, she’s probably the sort of person who wouldn’t do well with a pregnancy and/or baby (or at least not at this point in her life). In her case, having an abortion is probably the most responsible thing she can do.
And who’s handing out these medals, exactly? The point of the site is to give support and voices to women who have had abortions, whether they are mothers, rape victims or dumb enough to think they can’t get pregnant if they stay on top.
Despite abortion being a ‘hot’ topic that’s often in the news, especially around elections, rarely do we get to hear from real, live woman who’ve had one. They don’t have to be ‘proud’ just because they’re not ashamed.
I’ve never heard a pro-choicer argue that birth control is futile, just as I’ve never seen a pro-lifer hand out condoms or fight for subsidized birth control. When someone mentions that they got pregnant despite being on the pill/using a condom/whatever it’s more to stress that it can happen to anyone, not just whores and idiots. Keeping abortion ‘safe, legal and rare’ is a shared goal of pro-choicers and pro-lifers, but aborting an unwanted fetus is a desirable thing, apparently, to millions of women.
The links you provided do not explain the methodology behind how the statistics in those links translated to the statistic you give of 15-30% of all women having an abortion in their lifetime. I am interested in the methodology and was hoping you could provide a cite that was clearer on that point.
For that matter, I would also be interested to see U.S.-specific statistics, because I wonder if they differ significantly from the stats you’ve provided that deal more with European nations. There are significant cultural differences that make it reasonable to believe the U.S. may be different from Europe in this respect.
I was simply hoping you might know where that information could be seen online. That’s all.
You made the statement on the first page that you said no one uses abortion solely for birth control. I provided an example of one who did. It doesn’t comment on the morality of abortion or the legality, just that there are less than brilliant people everywhere.
When someone expressed the emotion of ‘getting sick’ at some of the stories on I’m Not Sorry, he got jumped on. The fact is, there are abortion stories that make me sick. There are prolife stories that make me sick. While I wouldn’t want abortion to be illegal or unavailable, my goal as a prochoice woman is to reduce the number of abortions period. To educate women about all options from adoption to shutting your legs, to birth control, to voluntary sterilization for the voluntarily childfree. The saddest stories I hear are of women who want to be sterilized but their doctors won’t do it because they ‘might change their mind’. That also makes me sick.
I don’t want to get into a bruhaha, I’m in enough trouble already. I just saw a poster being unfairly scolded for simply saying that some of the stories made him sick. That’s not unheard of.
There used to be a piece on Guttmacher about the stats - don’t know if its still there (last I bothered to look for it it was five years ago). The methodology is to survey doctors and women, and try and get matching numbers. There is no national or international reporting requirement (and that, in itself, would be scary). So the numbers are the best they can estimate. They have been consistent year over year (trending downwards, but without the wild swings of a random number generator).
The Guttmacher/WHO paper was published in the Lancet, you can read it online if you register and pay. Actually, the 13 October 2007 issue of the Lancet which published the Guttmacher study also published many other studies and reports on abortion worldwide.
The RCOG comes up with its numbers by auditing abortion provision within the UK, as part of clinical governance and service provision audits are done regularly in the health service and are usually difficult to fake. If you search the RCOG website you’ll find the most recent abortion audit.
The WHO also has a lot of good evidence. Try www.who.int and search abortion.
Exactly. Just try to get your tubes tied in America if you’re younger than thirty-five or any age and haven’t had a child yet.
On a related note, Here is a story about how Holland has the lowest rate of teen pregnancy across Europe and the highest average age at first sexual encounter, which is probably due to its compulsory sex education in schools. This study shows that teen pregnancy rates are *nine times * higher in the US than in Holland.
Oh, and by the way, in the United States, the teen abortion rate is nearly eight times higher than the rate in Germany, nearly seven times higher than that in the Netherlands, and nearly three times higher than the rate in France.
We want to end abortion? How about some real education and availability of birth control options?
You want lots of babies to be born? How about providing free health care and education to mothers?
I also wonder how much cultural attitudes have to do with this. We’ve had at least two threads here where Dutch Dopers have mentioned that over there it’s just understood that your teenager will be having sex, under your roof, while you’re home, and you’re just going to buy a full sized bed, make breakfast for their boy/girlfriend in the morning and it’s not a big deal. That tells me there are probably different conversations going on with Mom and Dad from early childhood than in most families over here, and I suspect that has a huge impact on teen behavior - maybe bigger than anything that can be done in school or the media.
Well, no - he said the site made him sick, not “some of the stories” - which seemed to me to imply that he was sickened by every single story there, or just by the existence of a site that allowed women to tell their stories about abortion.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me I’d have found it very different and entirely unexceptionable if he’d just initially said that some of the stories were sickening, and I imagine he wouldn’t have been jumped on half so much either.
resumes lurking, also does not particularly want a bruhaha