I think this is the correct forum.
I am trying to get the pro-choice point of view.
Are there too many abortions occuring, the correct amount for the size of the country, or too few because of pro-life activist and conservatives?
If there are too many, should anything be done about it.
Should there be any limits at all on abortions?
Our population is still increasing at a substantial rate, so I would have a hard time understanding there being such a thing as “too much” abortion. Even were it not, I still wouldn’t have a problem with it. If we’re going to kill ourselves off, better abortion than war, starvation or ecological apocalypse to do it.
An interesting site here would be http://www.zpg.org/
As I happen to think that most abortions are morally-neutral events, I don’t particularly care about the raw numbers. However, from a purely utilitarian point of view, it seems a hell of a lot more dangerous and wasteful to abort a pregnancy than to prevent one in the first place. So my answer is that there are too many unwanted/unplanned pregnancies, not too many abortions.
I don’t understand the phrase “too many.” Like all debates this heated, that phrase is quite subjective towards to person considering it. To many pro-lifers, one abortion is too many.
But I think you’re confusing pro-choice with pro-murder. They aren’t the same. Pro-choice means just that. Favoring the right to choose. If the woman chooses to keep her baby, that isn’t the wrong decision for many pro-choice advocates. But to ask her to give up that right because there are “too many” abortions already, is not a valid option. She doesn’t care about the rest of the abortions, she cares about hers.
Now there is a book out there, written by a woman whose name eludes me, wherein she advocates abortions for females up through the eighth month. Planned Parenthood has also been known to give the advice of abortion a few times more than necessary. Maybe those are “too many” abortions. But many pro-choice are merely fighting for the right to choose.
The main point is that abortion cannot be looked at in black and white. It is never always ok to just keep the fetus and I believe it’s never always ok to abort it whenever it pleases you. But I believe that behind almost every abortion went tremendous thought and a bit of soul searching. Every abortion came from a female who made a decision after careful planning. To say there are too many abortions invalidates the beliefs of those individuals.
Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is lump a group together to create a conclusion when it should be the individuals we concentrate our arguments on.
Unless there are some involuntary abortions going on that I am unaware of, I can’t see how there could be too many. If a woman wants an abortion, and a doctor agrees, she has the right to it. Any less than that would be not enough.
Precisely. This ain’t porridge, folks.
stoid
Ok, then let’s rephrase it: Is abortion being used more and more as the preferred method of birth control, and should it be that way? In china and Russia, it is apparently so.
The only thing that is wrong with “abortion as birth control” is that it might have a negative financial impact on the woman. Abortions are expensive, and I don’t think they are the most financially viable form of birth control. But if there is no harm to the woman I don’t see the problem…
Oh my.
To be honest I find a lot of the responses to this OP pretty depressing.
Of course there are too many abortions. There shouldn’t be any. And before anybody leaps on me, I don’t mean abortion should be illegal. Or even difficult to procure. I don’t think it’s murder.
I mean there are at least half a dozen better methods of birth control that abortion.
Mekazzio, I agree with you about the world population, I can’t believe you refer to war and starvation the only other method of reducing it and not the pill and the condom.
even sven, there’s plenty wrong with abortion as birth control. It is more expensive- and that is not a negliable consideration. Also, it’s a medical procedure with signifigent risk to the women. Less of a risk than pregnancy, true, but more than most other methods of birth control. And many women, even those who don’t see it as anything akin to murder have found it emotionally harrowing.
Explain to my why it is not something to be avoided- when there are so many other methods of birth control. I don’t see how it could be preferable.
When I opened this thread, I was thinking “damn straight there are too many abortion. And if the “pro-life” people really wanted there to be less, they would get together with Planned Parenthood etc. and promote birth-control.”
Danmmit, if anybody reads this and chooses to read it as anti-choice I will be annoyed. It isn’t.
I wasn’t speaking about it as a birth control measure, but responding to it on the assumption that abortion equals killing. That’s not a view I share (heck, I’m all in favor of abortion up to the 45th month 
), but even if I did, I was saying that there are worse alternatives.
However, I would tend to agree with you. Abortion shouldn’t be common at all, because birth control isn’t exactly a difficult thing these days. Easier to take care of it before the fact than after, but the option should still be there.
Or everyone could just give in to the Homosexual Agenda and then nobody would ever have to worry about abortion or birth control again! 
Abortions are not only expensive and time-consuming, they’re also physically painful and, for a lot of people, emotionally upsetting as well. Like any form of surgery there’s a risk. I have heard that too many abortions can result in infertility but I’m not an MD and I don’t know if this is actually true. My overall point: I agree it’s crazy to think of abortion as a substitute for birth control and I don’t know anyone who defends abortion on those grounds. Abortion should be there–safe, legal and affordable–as a recourse where birth control has failed or in case of rape. And birth control does fail sometimes.
TexasSpur, I think you’ve got a misleading set of questions up there. As others have said, pro-choice isn’t about finding the perfect number of abortions. And I feel quite sure that if abortions and birth control were widely available, as they are in European countries, many pro-choice people would be disturbed if at some point there came to be some kind of unprecedented rise in the ratio between abortions and use of birth control.
I would add to Mekhazzio’s thoughts that raising people’s standard of living is another proven means to reducing the birth rate (certainly in poor countries but in the US as well). But that’s another thread, I guess.
I didn’t search every word of the site (so I may have missed the explanation), but could you tell me exactly how we have avoided war, starvation and ecological apocalypse through abortion? I’d be interested in any substantial model or research that leads anyone to this conclcusion, not simply some unsupported opinion (not that yours necessarily is).
I’d be particularly interested in the model that demonstrates that more people would die (in the absence of abortion) than fetuses currently do through abortion, since that seems to be your point.
Thanks.
I believe that abortion should be considered a woman’s last line of defense against unwanted children, to be used only when other methods fail. I suppose it could be said that the fact that some women use abortion as a substitute for birth control mean that there are too many abortions, but as far as the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate goes, that is irrelevant. If a woman has a right to get an abortion, the circumstances leading to her pregnancy don’t matter.
We need to educate children about the various forms of birth control and how to obtain them.
I think there are too many abortions: many of them could have been prevented by investing more money in birth control refinement and development, and many more by better sex education programs and whatnot.
However, I think there is insufficient access to abortion services in much of the country, and this is a major problem. To some degree, abortions will always be necessary, and they need to be available to those who want them.
an interesting counter argument site would be http://www.overpopulation.com/
What AHunter3 and others have said!!
Actually, at the time I first joined Planned Parenthood about 10 years or so ago, (holy shit, am I really getting that old?) they had a great newspaper ad that was titled “10 effective ways to reduce the number of abortions” in which they listed things like sex education, availability of contraceptives, etc. And then it said at the bottom “…and 1 ineffective way…” and showed a picture of someone protesting outside a clinic. I think that ad pretty much said it all.
Wonderful! Just because the most apocalyptic doomsday scenarios haven’t come true, this means we don’t have to worry about overpopulation?!? Haven’t these people been keeping up with environmental problems like pollution, depletion of the world’s fisheries and old growth forests, …
I don’t think anyone was trivializing these issues. If you look back at what this was in response to, I think you’ll see that’s not the point. The point is that one shouldn’t use hyperbole like “ecological apocalypse” to support abortion unless one is prepared to provide evidence for that claim.
And, again–lest the point be missed–evidence would have to demonstrate not only that this “apocalypse” was (is) imminent, but that abortion is what has saved the day. That pollution and old world deforestation exist is not in dispute. What is at issue is the point that Mekhazzio made.
Why must they “get together with Planned Parenthood etc” in order to do so? That hardly seems like a requirement.
FTR, it’s a common misconception that pro-life agencies do not promote birth control. In actuality, many of them DO. Those agencies with a religious slant typically have some restrictions on the types they advocate, though. The Catholic agencies don’t recommend artificial contraception, for obvious reasons, but they do advocate natural family planning. (These techniques have become a lot more reliable in the past decade or so.) Also, the Protestant organizations that I know typically recommend natural family planning for married couples, but without any moral condemnation of non-abortificient techniques. (However, they do promote abstinence for non-married individuals, partly because they wish to avoid sending a mixed message to them.)
One might take issues with their particular approach, but the point remains. The claim that pro-lifers don’t advocate birth control is not strictly true.
Not to forget the all to important point that birth control doesn`t nessassarily control anything. Sure it helps reduce the risk of pregnancy, but there is always a risk that one of those little guys is a real trooper and can stand your life on your ear.
And what is too many? Are they holding up traffic, all these abortions? I dont like the question very much, they way it is phrased.