First of all, the argument about children in foster homes, or without parents is absurd. I can guaran-damn-tee you, if you ask any of those children if they would rather have never been born at all or not have parents they would chose the latter. I myself was born without a father. He died several months before my birth. I grew up in a negligent, and sometimes abusive, home. No one would want a child to grow up the way I did. But if someone decided to deny me my life because of that, I would call them a murderer. I was almost aborted. My mother was 16 when she had me. I already had a brother. My father had just died at the age of 18 at work. They lived alone, so my mother would have been a 16 year old with 2 children and no husband. Her sister was pregnant at the same time. My mother asked her to go with her to the clinic. After talking to the counselor, for some reason my aunt decided to have one. My mother changed her mind.
As I am a male, you may say i do not have a justifyable voice in such matters. I tell you that as someone who was born, just like every human on the planet, I have every right to tell you my mother has no right to deny me my life, unless it is detriment to her own.
The argument of when life begins has no room in the abortion debate per SCOTUS who says it ‘need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins’. I find that just a lazy way to totally ignore the whole abortion issue alltogether for political reasons.
According to the only report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that I could find, nearly half of the women who had an abortion in 1997 had had at least one previous abortion. Nearly one in five of those women had undergone at least two abortions. It is used as a form of birth control, just like the pill or condoms or whatever.
Plannedparenthood.org estimates from 200,000 - 1.2 million abortions were performed each year before abortions where illegal. Because the number of abortions after it was legal was only 700,000 I would think the low side of that guesstimate would be probable. We are having abortions today at the rate of about 1.4 million a year. That is one half of our total death rate in the US annually. And to steal from another topic, It is almost twice as much of all of the combined battle deaths the US has ever lost in all of the wars it has ever faught. And that is every year. Over 36 million abortions since roe v. wade. That is on the scale of Stalin and Mao, but these were done to the epitome of innocense.
So you will have to forgive me if I find the argument that it is possible it may be disasterous to my way of life. I find that the most repugnant of excuses. Life is what you make of it. And if you would let a child destroy your life then it is no ones fault but your own. Billions of people have learned to “live” with children. And I can assure you that pretty much all of them either failed or succeded on thier own merrits. Not because the child was born.
If you think a child would have that effect you do have a choice. Do not get pregnant. Whether you think it or not, you do have a responsibility.
It doesn’t matter if you think of it as a baby, or zygote, or just a bunch of cells. It IS a child. And unless you do something to it, or a freak occurence happens that misscarries, it willl be born. And have the same opportunity you and I have to be selfish and say “it’s all about me”. Or not.
I honestly am empathetic to the horror of neing burdened with something you have no control over. But you do have control like I said. And responsibility. Responsibility to yourself, if you think it would be too traumatic to have a child. And responsibility to the child if you do get pregnant. I know abortions would still happen if they made it illegal again. Some may be justified, and others would be just criminal acts. But that is with every moral law. Some murders would be considered justified too.
