FTR, I am pro choice. I only posit this question as I have problems with it myself.
So the obvious answer to the question is: Health or STDs dummy.
I get that, but in this impossible hypothetical, I’d like to leave those two issues off the table.
So what would be wrong if a woman had it in her mind: "Ya’ know what? Screw condoms, I don’t like the way that they feel. And birth control pills? Nah, they make me moody. And I damn sure aint get’n my tubes tied.
I’m single and I’m gonna fuck like crazy. If I happen to get pregnant, I’ll just get an abortion. No big deal, it’s not like it’s a real human anyway."
Do you see any moral issues with this? If so, what are they?
A fetus may not be a human being, but a clump of cells is still life. I think it’s a pretty careless attitude to take toward any life, however insignificant. To me it’s like people who smash bugs regardless of whether the bug is doing anything to them. Some people don’t think twice about squashing a life out of existence. I think this attitude toward living things can result in a kind of carelessness toward more sentient beings. People can become desensitized to the power and fragility of life. I’m not religious, but there seems to me to be something very powerful about this ability to create life and I don’t think it should be taken for granted.
-Definitely pro choice but definitely not pro-abortion
I’m just a guy but my understanding is that abortions are not done using unobtrusive magic. It is basically outpatient surgery and not something that is done lightly, or often, without possible health consequences. There are both moral and physical issues at stake. That is why I think the person on the spot is the one who needs to decide if an abortion is the right course.
I think a person who uses abortion as birth control is an idiot and is doing harm to herself but I don’t have the abilty to tell someone’s motive by looking at them. Maybe it would be a good idea to require some kind of consoling for those who have more than x abortions. I don’t know a good value for x.
This hypothetical lady would have been pregnant for up to six, seven weeks, right? Being pregnant is no small thing. A woman’s body and hormones get into overdrive, starting at conception, to prepare for the pregnancy. And most changes take weeks, maybe even months or longer to taper off, even after an abortion or miscarriage.
I am pro-choice - the “wrong” thing about using abortion as birth control is that it is not a particularly pleasant experience. There may be some women who like that sort of thing - I would place that kind of person under a psychological disorder label - but for normal everyday women - not really a lot of fun.
And of course as mentioned above - cost, time, chance of complications.
A stitch in time saves nine and all that… why wouldn’t you just use the pill…or any other quite convenient method?
I guess to me it depends how advanced the pregnancy is. I don’t know how late I think abortion should be legal absent medical issues, but I definitely think there would be something wrong with repeatedly having late term abortions just because for some bizarre reason you want to (not that that happens).
If someone plans to take the abortion pill every time she gets a positive pregnancy test when her period is a few days late, well…fine I guess. It wouldn’t necessarily be that outlandish of a strategy either. I can get pregnant but my cycles are messed up and it doesn’t happen easily, so if I chose not to use birth control and knew I’d just have to have an abortion every once in a while…well, someone might make that choice under those circumstances. I wouldn’t though.
It’s like not having insurance, but, instead, paying the full price for any damages you might cause or incur. Yeah, it’s a “fix,” but it’s the most expensive fix! Why not just get the insurance, eh? Take the pill, use the latex thingummy, the spermicide cream, or get yerself snipped.
Also, at a meta-level, why give ammunition to the side that wants to ban the procedure for everyone, for always, by using it in the manner they claim we all want to use it? It’s like when some nitwit shoots up a restaurant, and gun-rights organizations sigh heavily: another idiot imperiling our rights by acting irresponsibly.
I think a more realistic example is a woman who can’t use the pill for health reasons, who has no insurance/can’t afford to get her tubes tied/is too young so doctors won’t do it, and whose partner won’t get a vasectomy/won’t wear a condom/the condom breaks.
If that woman is unlucky enough to get pregnant, she may have several abortions over the course of her child-bearing years. I’d hope that she’d search for alternatives – seems like there are new birth control methods/devices all the time – but if abortion is the only option, I won’t judge her. The little slut in your OP isn’t immoral so much as she’s thoughtless and ignorant and taking unnecessary risks.
I personally know women who refuse to take birth control for ‘frivolous’ reasons (claims that it made her hair break off, or made her gain weight) and also dislike condoms. These women basically try to not get pregnant with luck, shaky timing and ‘pulling out’. They end up pregnant. More than once. I have no problem at all with their choice to have abortions.
Birth control pills aren’t a problem for me. Easy to get, doesn’t cause any uncomfortable side effects…great. If regular birth control were a problem, I would have no problem getting abortions. As many as unnecessary, unless my doctor told me it was a problem.
For the record, I am pro-choice in the sense that I don’t believe a fetus in the womb is a person. Took me a long time to decide that I think that, but I do. I know some pro-choice people are NOT convinced that the fetus isn’t a person, but they are pro choice anyway. I think that is bad-ass, and I totally get why they would be against multiple abortions that can be prevented with pills.
Point 1) Really expensive choice for birth control, but ok, sure.
Point 2) Really bad for your system to do that multiple times (I’m talking surgical abortions, not the “oh Fuck Me” pill), but ok, sure.
So, not so much morally wrong, or even wrong for individuals, as much as… highly unlikely to have been the best possible choice for that situation, and therefore not a preferred response.
What does it matter? It isn’t like we know who’s had abortions, let alone why they had them.
No moral issues wrt the fetus itself. I would be angry that they’re tying up valuable healthcare resources, though. Especially if they utilized any form of reduced-cost or free service. Birth control is cheap, easy, effective, and doesn’t waste doctors’ time every time she gets unlucky. A widespread practice such as this might lead to increasing the price of abortions for everybody. And using up free services reduces the amount of free services available to low-income people who may need them just as much, if not more, than her.
Of course. In California, for instance, if someone qualifies for the Family Pact program on MediCAL (and there are lots of ways to do that: income, lack of insurance, blah blah), an abortion would be 100% free. FWIW, all birth control is free under Family Pact, so it’d be just as easy for our hypothetical woman to get a free IUD or free sterilization even. In California, at least. Literally almost every girl/woman I knew in high school and college used this program to get free birth control (and annual exams, UTI treatment, STD tests, etc.).
Medicaid covers it in some states, and a lot of places like Planned Parenthood charge on a sliding scale. So it would be a waste of resources, but then, who doesn’t risk wasting healthcare resources by making choices like smoking, drinking, being overweight, tanning, etc.? A bunch of abortions still isn’t going to use near the resources of treating lung cancer or something, I wouldn’t think.
I see. Thanks. I adjust my answer then. If a woman is paying for her own abortion, I will mind my business about how many she gets. If it turns out she is on Medicaid and is getting it footed, I probably will still mind my biz, but I wouldn’t have the gall to tell others to mind theirs’.
(ETA: I can’t resist adding that I wasn’t so clueless as to think birth control and things like that weren’t covered by certain programs. It is the abortion being covered that surprised me.)