Have you ever met someone who was aborted who thinks abortion is a good thing? 
I agree; I think you misunderstood my point. The OP asks if it is possible to be pro-choise and think of the foetus - not a viable, or third-trimester, or just before birth foetus, but any foetus - as a baby. I brought up the just-before-birth-foetus-in my argument because most of us can agree on that being a baby, and I wanted to clarify that if you thought of all foetuses like that, then you would think that all foetuses are babies (I’m not defending that position, like you I find it factually erroneous), and then you would hardly sanction first-trimester abortions, unless you were alright with comitting infanticide.
I agree with others who say this is no great revelation, nor does it explain some unexpected aspect of the pro-life stance. In fact, it’s altogether typical of that stance in that the rights of the mother are a matter of indifference, written off as “a matter of inconvenience”.
And truth be told, I don’t find infanticide automatically appalling. I see, for example, a distinction between a scared teenager who delivers a baby in the bathroom during her high-school prom and a platoon of soldiers who march into a village and bayonet every infant in sight. The circumstances can mitigate the situation massively, even if the result is the same.
It’s clear that mentally disabled human beings who have a mental capacity equal to a chimp are legally considered a person. If you killed one of these people, you’d be charged with murder. If you killed a chimp, you might be charged with violating the endangered species act, or various other laws, but you’d never be charged with murder.
This just shows that our laws are inconsistent, because our legal traditions arose from our attempts to get along with each other in a pleasant way, rather than a formal logical exploration of a set of agreed-upon moral axioms.
And this is why we can’t expect logical consistency in laws about abortion either. Laws about abortion aren’t the logical result of a set of moral axioms, they are a set of rules about what we humans have agreed to do in various circumstances, for the sake of creating the sort of society we’d like to live in.
And this is why the pro-life people arguing that it is morally wrong to kill a perfectly good unborn baby are missing the point. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I kind of agree that it’s wrong, but the important question isn’t whether I think it’s right or wrong, the important question is what I’m going to do about it.
So do I advocate that a woman who had an abortion be charged with murder? This is impossible. Do I advocate that people who perform abortions for pregnant women be charged with murder? Why would I do that when I’ve already decided that it doesn’t make sense to charge the mother who decided to kill the baby with murder? The abortion wouldn’t take place without the mother’s instigation, right?
And so I have to decide, well, I may be against abortion but what next? I might try to persuade people not to have abortions, but what do I do when they don’t listen? I might try to provide services to prevent unwanted pregnancies (education, birth control, etc), but what happens when an unwanted pregnancy happens anyway?
I don’t want to live in a society which criminalizes abortion, even if I think abortion is morally wrong. Same as I don’t want to live in a society which criminalizes adultery, or lying, or alcoholism, or drug use, or gluttony, or gambling, or religion, or membership in the Communist Party or the Klan. Criminalizing abortion is unenforceable and counterproductive, and so I’m against it. Which means that despite being “pro-life” it turns out that I’m actually pro-choice since if someone has decided to have an abortion I’m not in favor of using force to stop them, or punishing them afterward.
Of course it does, children are expensive and pregnant women can require both expensive medical care and have problems with their work.
Of course not; no self, no self determination.
Since a child is a person while a fetus is not, your analogy doesn’t work.
Hey, OMG, you mind responding to the thought experiment I posted upthread? I’ll repost it here for your convenience.
A thought experiment, and I intend this especially for **classyladyhp **and OMG:
We allow babies to be given up for adoption now–that is, legally, a mother can relinquish both parental rights to a child and the duty of care for that child.
In the future, don’t fight the hypothetical, we develop a uterine replicator device. For the same amount of surgical effort as an abortion, the fetus can instead be removed from the mother and placed into one of these devices, gestated, and born. Babies born from the uterine replicator have the same or lower rates of birth defects, and develop equivalently to in-womb babies.
In the case where this technology exists, does the mother have a moral right to remove the fetus from her uterus and give it up for adoption while it is still unborn?
I didn’t intend it to be a great revelation. But many peoply here kept defending the pro-choice position in a way that indicated that they didn’t really understand why the pro-life people don’t agree with them. And I think that you’re being a bit hard on the poor pro-life people by accusing them of being inconsiderate towards the mother. From their point of view what they believe to be the foetus’s interest in remaining alive ranges higher simply because most pregnancies don’t kill the mother but all abortions kill the foetus (which, as I said before, they consider just as much a human being as her).
If you agree that infanticide can be condoned in some instances then you don’t have to prove that foetuses aren’t infants for a pro-lifer to understand why you’re pro-choice, but if you don’t then you have to prove to them why a foetus isn’t the same as an infant. If you start doing that you’ve inherently answered no to the question posed in the OP. I know this is a completely circular argument, but I’m just trying to show that the question isn’t really that hard to answer, because it more or less contains the answer. I’m not sure I know what we’re arguing about anymore.
His article also suggests that human life begins at some point before birth and an abortion after that prenatal point is also wrong. So he’s not exactly pro-choice either.
OK; how about “gloatingly sadistic” instead? Quite a few are. “Indifferent” is the nicest that the anti-abortion scum get towards the women they are trying to victimize; it goes downhill from there.
Which simply shows how low a creature they consider her to be.
Not really, no. Possibly you’re making the assumption that getting an abortion is a bad decision in and of itself, but I don’t agree and have never stated otherwise.
If you’re not making this assumption, then I don’t understand why you’re trying to changing the sequence from:
- Woman is prone to making bad decisions
- Bad decisions lead to unwanted pregnancies
- Unwanted pregnancies lead to abortions
…to…
- Woman chooses to get abortion.
- Choosing an abortion mean the woman makes bad decisions.
It’s as though “A suggests B suggests C” is being converted to “C suggests A”, which doesn’t follow, much like “beagle suggests dog suggests mammal” fails to lead to “mammal suggests beagle.” Sure, a given mammal might be a beagle, and a given abortion patient might be prone to bad decisions, but I wouldn’t start making generalizations based on either premise.
I’m only questioning the methodology of the study you cited and explaining why I find it unconvincing. The study doesn’t address, or even try to address, “who obtains the majority of abortions” and if you want to expand the discussion in this direction, I suggest you find a cite that you respect detailing the demographics of abortion across the entire, let’s say, U.S. population, rather than the very limited scope of the study you’ve already cited, which was exclusively of 237 women who lived in mid-eighties Baltimore and who were already receiving attention from social workers and were overwhelmingly poor, under-educated and under-employed.
I’m just gonna let this one go.
Even among poor women? Even, dare I say, among the 237 women profiled in your cited study, which is specifically what I was addressing? The fact is, we don’t know because that data was either not collected or not cited.
Okay, feel free to doubt it, I won’t try and stop you. But if in this particular study, let’s say, three women who were impregnated by rape, aborted that fetus, and took it out on their other children, those three women alone would be enough to affect the results because the sample size is quite small.
They might indeed be. This study, though, does not convince me for reasons I think I’ve adequately explained.
Have they? I’d find that to be a tad surprising, to say the least. I know there are backlashes in various states, and vocal opponents, and federal-level pro-life politicians (though how much of this is mere lip service is anyone’s guess). Frankly, I’d be quite bemused if Roe and similar decisions were discarded anytime in the next decade and the U.S. returned to pre-1973 standards. If anything, I’d expect a significant increase in Canadian gynecological clinics set up along our southern border and near our major airports, to tend to your medical refugees.
Excess numbers of babies, though… You can continue claiming the two aren’t linked, if you like. I won’t stop you.
Whether they are or not, I’m okay with their hypothetical wishes being overruled by another person in the specific circumstances of pregnancy. It’s unclear to me why the state is better suited to make that determination.
In that case, the parents’ best interests are not being served in any tangible way by denying the transfusion because their concern (that their child’s soul will be endangered) is not something that be evaluated in any meaningful way. It’s only analogous to pregnancy if a pregnant woman is considered “possessed” by an intangible “child-spirit” that she wants “exorcised”, when the blunt reality is she has a growing organism inside her that will over a period of several months increase her personal discomfort significantly and even afterward impose an emotional and financial burden that I’m not comfortable forcing on her when alternatives exist to remedy the situation.
In any case, if a pro-choice stance can be likened to infanticide, I see no reason a pro-life stance can’t be likened to totalitarian government-mandated reproduction:
“So, comrade, you have failed to fulfil your duty to the Party. That is double-plus ungood, as the state needs soldiers to wage our war with Eurasia (with whom we’ve always been at war, incidentally)…”
That is, if I wanted to play that pointless game.
It would turn conservatives into second class citizens.
Its not generosity in the past. You have put the violinist in the condition in which he finds himself.
Well, possibly.. I can’t speak for all the pro-choice people in this thread, of course. Personally, I think I have an adequate understanding of the pro-life stance, and those who hold such a stance are perfectly free to continue doing so, but I’ll continue challenging any argument that their beliefs should influence law, because I find their arguments to be idealistic and short-sighted and apt to do a fair amount of harm in exchange for a questionable, possibly nonexistent, amount of good.
Well, I just don’t see why their interpretation of the fetus’s interest should take priority of the mother’s interpretation of her own. And given my own direct observations of a westernized democracy that has no real barriers to abortion and yet has suffered no ill-effects, I have to wonder what purpose is served by another westernized democracy trying to impose or re-impose such barriers.
I dunno, but the arguments are fun, anyway. Ths one isn’t as much fun as that “spaceship” version a while back, but it’s okay.
You know that you can put a baby up for adoption right? They can take the baby from you in the delivery room if you want. you never even have to see it.
Because people like her are electing presidents that are appointing supreme court justices that will overturn Roe v Wade. You really think Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia wouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade if they could? You really think that a Tea Party President won’t nominate even more radical right judges? This is a war of ideas and “I don’t care what you say, I’m right” is a good way to stimulating the back alley abortion industry.
Please cite to where we can harvest conservatives for organs while they are still alive?
I must say, I don’t think you’re being entirely fair. Just because my argument is hypothetical it is not automatically invalid. I haven’t any children, nor have I ever been pregnant. If you have, then obviously you have the benefit of an experience which I haven’t, and you can’t really blame me, in my ignorance, for believing that looking after an infant would be more taxing than being pregnant. In my defence, an infant requires near constant attention, and often deprives you of sleep to a degree that most pregnancies do not (at least not for their full duration), and most of the women I have known who have had children have seemed a lot more exhausted one month after giving birth than one month before.
Anyway, I still think the hi-jacking argument is a bit off: Surely women have abortions because they don’t want to end up with a baby, not because they object to being hi-jacked.
I don’t blame you for not knowing what it’s like to be pregnant, I’m just pointing out how silly it is, in that case, for you to make assertions about what it’s like to be pregnant.
Women have abortions for all sorts of reasons. I don’t want babies, AND I object to the hijacking. Being pregnant sucked, even when it was with a baby I wanted, but I lived with it because I wanted that baby. I certainly would not live with that again for a baby that I don’t want, and I shouldn’t have to, because my organs are mine, and I don’t owe the use of them to anyone, not even my own children.
Yopu’re not relying on the relatively small number of post-viability abortions (1% or about 10-20K abortions/year) as a reason to ignore them are you?
I don’t think there is a pent up demand for infanticide either but I still think it should be illegal.
I’m not even female and this strikes me as blatantly, patently absurd. Even if someone is handed a newborn and responsibility for it (and for some reason cannot just refuse on the spot), an infant’s care can be temporarily and perfectly legally passed off to a nanny or babysitter. It’s somewhat harder to do so with an unwanted guest in your uterus.