I have also given this idea thought, and was thankful to my Mom and Dad who waited 7 years to have a child, and told me frequently how wanted I was. I also planned for my own child, and again told her how wanted she was.
The idea then came to me that Mom’s do know best, and if I were the fetus who had a Mom that choose not to bring me into the world (at such and such a time, and for such and such a reason), I would trust that she knew best.
Anti choice people do not seem to trust Mom, as they must manipulate, guilt trip, and generally force women to do what they want them to do, calling it “God’s will” as if only Anti choice people could know God’s will.
I cannot stop thinking about you, and I have to tell you something.You do not know that your parents life would have been better had you not been born.
Just because you feel that you were a mistake, or perhaps were blamed by your parents for their problems… is not what Pro choice is all about.
I was a wanted child, and my parents still had problems; I just never felt responsible for their problems. If they had instilled in me a sense that if I had I never been born, maybe they would have been better off…Well, it is a known fact that children take on the burden of blame, and that it is wrong.
I have heard people who were adopted, describe feeling pain that they were not wanted. I have also heard women claim that they only got pregnant to trap a man into marriage. Human beings are complex, fallible, and full of contradictions, but children are never to blame for the choices that parents make.
One thing you could learn from feeling unwanted- is that this is not what you would offer the next generation (your own children). This is why I am Pro choice, because I feel that all children should be wanted .
I don’t know how you can reach this conclusion. Without abortion, or the borth control that many pro-lifers see as equivalent to abortion, you might have half a dozen kids all being poor and miserable together.
But God would be happy!
The only pro-lifers who would agree with the OP that it’s bad to not think of a potential child who might have been had down the road instead would as **Boyo Jim **suggests believe you should have had both children, and probably three more in between. The Duggars, for example.
Maastritch, here’s what I don’t get in your own example.
You did not have one child.
Later you did have one child.
You value the child you have more than the one you did not have. This should be self-evident from your actions, actually, since you chose not to have the first one and chose to have the second one.
But how do you get from “I had a child when it was convenient for me rather than when it was inconvenient” to “if I had had that inconvenient child I would have ended up having less children”? By your own reasoning, if you had had the first child instead of the second one you’d have one child - which is the exact amount of children you have now!
It’s like you’re adding a+1 and coming up with a, but that only makes sense in a computer program.
And since you’re the one who brought up RCC documents, look up “responsible parenthood”.
Something else, about timing of children in general: the best time biologically is, for many women, not the best time socially or professionally. And about the statistic on “having children very early prevents trying to have more later on”: that refers to teen pregnancies, not to having one when you’re already ginecologically old.
Maastricht and florez, thank you for your comments. To be clear, I don’t feel in any way responsible for the choice my parents made. (I wasn’t consulted.) Nor do I feel my life or theirs has been an unmitigated disaster. But I do feel it would have been better all around if they had chosen otherwise. And that, more than anything, is why I’m pro-choice.
But that is exactly my point! The pro life crowd wants to save the unborn person. But by saving him, they prevent the replacement child to live. The net result of their effort is ***zero ***saved lives. They only have managed to get the saved child to be born under worse circumstances.
No, because she’s not talking about variables or abstracts. She’s talking about her son, who exists as he does, as an individual, because sperm A met with ovum B. Any other month, a different ovum would have been present, and Maastrichtson wouldn’t be conceived. Any other sexual partner - like the aborted fetus’ father, had having a child together kept them together - or any other day, sperm A would not have been present, and Maastrichtson wouldn’t have been conceived. She may have conceived *another *son, but the one that lives now would never have existed.
But more to the point, she believes that if she already had a child, she would have been using contraception so as not to conceive additional ones at all. Whether it’s because of personal preference, cultural pressure, economic constraints or government mandate, there are many people who choose to have only one child.
I did think of one instance in which this argument might be useful, and that’s in retort to the emotional appeal some anti-choice people make, asking you to look at a specific baby and tell them it should have been “murdered” in utero. "What if Jesus was aborted"went around recently, as did “Steve Jobs should have been aborted”. I’ve also seen at least one website for people born of rape and/or incest to share their stories, and an overwhelming theme is “and people think I should have been aborted!” There are websites of alleged “abortion survivors”, and while I doubt their medical veracity, they are plum full of people using emotional manipulations of this nature.
I’m sure there are “important” famous people who, like Maastrichtson, wouldn’t have been born if their mom hadn’t terminated an earlier pregnancy. Of course, I can’t come up with any names, and it’s a debate tactic of truly limited usefulness, so I’m not going to work very hard to find any.
If pro-choice is ‘about’ this or not, it certainly involved this, and this effect can not be honestly divorced from the abortion debate.
Though PBear42’s position could be easily changed to it would have been better if her was never created/conceived.
But the contributing factor that I believe the abortion issue brings is a further devaluing of human life, which reinforces the concept that it’s OK to get rid of people who are burdensome, so it makes it easier to accept that it would have been better without this person. So while it may not be what pro-choice is about, this is certainly a effect of it.
Which actually strengthens the OP’s point, delivering and raising a child under less then ‘ideal’ (whatever that is) circumstances can leave a child feel like it would have been better if they were aborted, so with that reasoning it seems better to abort and wait for better circumstances, actually that would make it the child’s choice.
But you seem to be stubbornly attached to this notion, you alone, that the hypothetical kid is equivalent to an actual kid. You keep asserting this is a natural consequence of a pro-life position, but you haven’t explained why.
Someone might force you at gunpoint to stop killing a (born) child. That same person would not force you to get pregnant at gunpoint, even though in both circumstances doing nothing means one less life in the world. Is this person logically inconsistent (whether he’s pro-life or not), is he missing the syllogistic conclusion that he really ought do take every active step to ensure the world has every life it can reasonably see produced, since he thinks killing a (born) child is immoral? Or is it the logical man’s goal to ensure the world has no less people alive than they would if he did nothing (again, whether he’s pro-life or not)? And if it’s the latter, how the hell does he make that determination?
Your argument is absurd. As someone mentioned earlier, you’re debating with yourself.
I want to take issue with this, her opinion is just as valid as any one else, just because most or even a others think a different way does not make them right or her wrong. It is her thinking, and the ability to even stand alone on it, that has lifted us up as a society. What you use as a way to discourage and discredit, is actually the way we break group think mentality.
Wow, you’re right! That’s good enough for me, I’ve seen the light. Abortions for everyone, it’s on me!
Which actually strengthens the OP’s point, delivering and raising a child under less then ‘ideal’ (whatever that is) circumstances can leave a child feel like it would have been better if they were aborted, so with that reasoning it seems better to abort and wait for better circumstances, actually that would make it the child’s choice.
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No, that would make it the fetus’s choice, and I do not believe in making any fetus responsible for my decision of what to do for the highest good of my family. That would be crazy.
And what she doesn’t seem to get is that keeping something from existing is not murder. Murder specifically requires KILLING something. The entire pro-life stance is that killing something is wrong.
Now, there is another Catholic teaching that one should not use contraceptives, but it has nothing to do with pro-life positions, and, more importantly, even it restricts itself to blocking semen from one person to enter another, not just deciding not to have sex. If so, then all priests would be murderers.
Her argument is: If abortion is murder, then preventing a child to be conceived is also murder. There is no logical system in the world where that syllogism is valid. The real syllogism is that: Willfully killing an innocent human being is murder. A fetus is an innocent human being. Therefore willfully killing a fetus is murder. This is 100% logical.
Reductio absurdum only works if there is no logical position in the way. There is one here: murder is not defined as merely preventing someone from existing.
Considering that Sperm -A alread met Ovum -B while she was combining two methods, I’d say it’s more “if I already happened to have that one child I never met, instead of having aborted it, I would have aborted the one child I have met.”
She’s mixing statistics, a very narrow set of what-ifs and the love she feels for the actual one child she made and chose to meet, as well as having the notion that those people who think she should have aborted neither already-bred child would be forcing her to have that abortion on any pregnancies beyond number one, by having made her bring number one to term. My head hurts.
If anti choice arguments were carried to their logical conclusions, women would be FORCED to carry pregancies to term, not permitting a woman to have a choice over her own reproduction.
If a woman feels she is not in a position to offer her best to a future child, then she is making both a logical and ethical choice to have an abortion.
The extent to which anti choice people feel they have a right over the personal decision of a woman-concerning her own body and the outlandish comparison to people who kill others, makes me wish you anti choice/pro life people would use your gifts for the good of the world, like ending wars-- where real killing takes place.