Help with abortion argument

Great Debates
41

  1. No one thinks abortions would cease if they were outlawed. There would just be fewer of them. The estimates of the number of illegal abortions in America prior to 1973 range from about 200,000-1,200,000 per year, so we can take a midpoint estimate of 700,000. After Roe, that went up to 1.6 million per year, which is more than a twofold increase (it’s now decreased somewhat).

  2. As pointed out, by the early 1970s only a trivial amount of women were dying from illegal abortion complications.

  3. Abortion is killing a baby, and I have less than zero interest in making it safer for people to kill children at less risk to themselves. If you don’t want to risk dying in an illegal abortion, don’t have an abortion. (with the usual exceptions for cases where the physical health of the mother is in serious danger).

In other words, I agree with your friend.

42

+1.

43

There are many problems with this response. You are misinterpreting what a “penalty” is. Take drunken driving. The penalty for getting caught is, say, 24 hours in jail, a fine, and a license suspension. The possibilities of harm that may result from driving drunk is death by burning alive in a fiery car accident.

We would never say that we punish drunk drivers with death by immolation. It is one of the possible consequences of a personal choice to violate a law. It is not something society imposes.

I would also like a cite that if abortion were illegal, a full 51% of the population would have back alley abortions.

44

So, you take exception to my post by making the exact same point that I’d made in mine, in yours. Got it.
I most emphatically disagree with your last point: “…if abortion were illegal, a full 51% of the population would have back alley abortions”.

Being one OF the 51% of the referred-to portion of the population, at [almost] 55 years of age, I am unable to need to have a “back alley [or any other type of] abortion”. There are many, many, many more of us included in that cited “51%”.

Horrors for many of you, I know.

45

At least our abortion laws aren’t quite as restrictive as Paraguay, where a ten-year old rape victim is being denied a potentially life-saving abortion.

46

I think you misunderstood his post.

47

Yes, that was how I was interpreting it. My logical responses kinda broke down after I heard “I don’t care what happens to people who do something illegal”

48

And if the physical health of the mother is in serious danger and she dies from an illegal abortion, would you agree it’s her own damn fault? She deserved what she got?

They use to say the same thing about rape victims. She was wearing tight jeans. She was walking alone at night. Obviously, she was coming on to men and deserved to be raped.

Nobody has a right to use a woman’s body without her permission.

49

This is what the pro-choice person in the OP could have said, instead of emoting. To me, what mason1972 reports is a gaffe where a pro-lifer shows lack of caring for others.

That’s why it isn’t medically necessary for it to be done in hospitals. That doesn’t explain why it isn’t done in U.S, hospitals.

I think the reason abortions are rarely now done in American hospitals is that hospital marketeers don’t like the idea of facing protests. The little additional income the hospital would get for doing a low-margin procedure isn’t worth the hassles.

Before Roe v. Wade, I think it was pretty common for abortions to be done in a hospital. Of course, this was written up, for insurance purposes, as something else.

One argument for Roe v. Wade is that, before it, whether a woman could get an safe abortion had to do with factors that are highly correlated with wealth and social status, such as whether she had a long-time gynecologist, perhaps the same one as her mother. And if new to town, an affluent woman could fly to New York or Canada. Overturn Roe, and whether abortion is safe will depend on finances.

50

The whole idea of thousands of women dying from back-alley, coat-hanger abortions has about as much basis in reality as the American Muslim population being a fifth-column demographic ready to go kill for Allah and the Prophet: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2510/before-em-roe-em-v-em-wade-em-did-10-000-women-a-year-die-from-illegal-abortions

51

If Roe is overturned, I think states outlawing abortion will do so in a more draconian way than in the past.

Before Roe, the chances that an anti-abortion nurse would turn in a doctor, at her hospital, for doing an illegal abortion were, while not zero, low. This was due to there being much more deference to physicians. And if someone was arrested for being an abortionist, the penalty would be low by todays standards, if only because prison sentences then were generally shorter than today for almost all crimes.

By contrast, in today’s U.S., there is a large anti-choice constituency whipping itself into an emotional frenzy over this issue. Lots of them consider abortion not just a moral wrong, but murder. In this atmosphere, doctors and nurses would be much more reluctant to break the law, living in fear that a colleague might be one of those obsessed over the issue.

Plus I think America today is more law-abiding. Hospital and insurance administrators, whose predecessors looked the other way, would go bonkers over the idea of the law being routinely broken, regardless of what the law was.

I suppose there will be, if Roe is overturned, a feminism-inspired underground consisting of idealistic medical professionals who risk their licenses and freedom to perform abortions. However, they’d have to stay so far underground as to be hard for women in need of abortions to locate. As a result, if Roe is repealed, back alley abortions would be a bigger problem than they were 50 years ago.

I consider myself a moderate on this issue. I hope women who are on the fence regarding abortion don’t do it. But I don’t trust pro-lifers to, if in power, discourage abortion in any kind of moderate way. So I support the status quo.

52

Personally, I think that if RoevWade is overturned, there are going to be a LOT more illegal abortions in this country, but it’s going to be a different type of abortion.

First of all, there will be the wealthy, who will always be able to get abortions, either by travelling or by invoking a “health of the mother” clause and having a doctor attest that their mental or physical health would be jeopardized by having a baby.

However, for the not so wealthy, in this internet age, we are going to see a lot of illegal abortion medications sold over the internet. Some may be actual RU-486 but a lot are going to be various other concoctions/poisons. There are going to be a lot of unscrupulous people making money off poisoning women with various substances that may or may not induce abortions and there are going to be a lot of women showing up in the ER with incomplete abortions, damaged fetuses and/or significant medical problems. JMHO.

53

Her response doesn’t show much concern for the fetus she’s so concerned about, does it? It strikes me as being more anti-choice than pro-life.

54

The main thing about abortion is it self defense as it is in many cases. only a doctor and a woman can know her situation. or what she can bear. There is a loss of many human lives each time a man ejaculates even in the case where there is a conception.

A fertile egg is not a chicken, a pollinated apple blossom is not an apple. Too many people are just pro-birth, once the child is born they could care less. The money spent traveling and the time pro birth people spend on protesting could well be spent on saving the lives of the already born.

One test to show if a already born person is less important than an embryo , they could put themselves in a lab with 25 frozen embryos. the lab is on fire, they can save the 25 embryos or save an already born person ,If they save the already born person it shows they value the life of the already born more than an embryo.

The best way to stop an abortion is to have a good birth control., and help teach and help the woman all they can.

How many people have had funerals for an early miscarriage? I had 2 and never felt I lost a child. I spent 10 days in the hospital trying to save a pregnancy but missed carried , and was very ill for a long time after that.

One can look to Africa where they show pictures of a woman and several children who are just skin and bones, because they cannot feed their young, is a slow death by starvation any worse than an abortion?

55

This is a good point, thanks!