Because one is catching a bad break and the other is an atrocity? Because in one case the woman accepted the small chance that her birth control would fail, but in the other she was the victim of a brutal assault? Because if a failure of birth control earned one a pass on abortion, then anyone who wanted to terminate would just claim that the condom broke?
I don’t know, the situations are just different in a number of ways. The most important of which is that a rape victim garners an entirely different type and degree of sympathy than the victim of a birth control mishap. As I said earlier, it’s not so much about the arguments in favor of a rape exception hanging together logically in an airtight way, and more about the emotional response to one situation or another.
(And I should clarify here again that, in the quoted post above, I was speaking hypothetically and for other people. I was not saying that I, personally, consider abortion to be ethically distasteful.)
Trust me, arguing about the semantics of abortion is a total waste of everyone’s time. Just quietly roll your eyes, be thankful that they’ve yet to stumble upon “anti-life,” and get on with it.
Because they are anti-choice to the extent that they do not believe a woman should have the choice that is relevant to the discussion - the choice as to whether to have an abortion.
I am not pro-abortion. I think a better world would be one in which no abortions happened. I am no more pro-abortion than you are pro-child-poverty.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this thread since my initial post. I do want to stress that I agree with those who say that the issue is quite complex, and that people who oppose the right of a woman to choose abortion are not a monolithic group and may have any number of reasons for their position.
I did come up with a hypothetical that I would like to pose to Qin Shi Huangdi and any other posters who oppose the right to choose abortion.
Suppose that tomorrow a pharmaceutical company announces that they have perfected an artificial womb. Any time a woman has an abortion, the fetus is now removed and placed in the artificial womb where it can be raised as successfully as if it were being carried to term. The woman no longer has any rights to the child and never has any contact or responsibility again. From the woman’s perspective her life is identical to what it would be if she had had an abortion under current circumstances; however her fetus will develop into a living baby.
Either we both get to label the other side with loaded terms, or neither do. Like I said, one side has done it already, and nobody cared until the shoe was on the other foot.
How on this planet is anti-abortion a loaded term? YOU ARE ANTI-ABORTION!!! You don’t see the anti-death penalty people calling themselves pro-life, do you?
We are not pro-abortion, I do not wang one woman to be forced to have an abortion, or forced to give birth.
So the controlling ethic here is: “Two wrongs make a right”?
You guys are going to go round & round on this for 100 posts only to wind up exactly where you started from (only more bitter), and in the meantime you will have lost the opportunity to talk about the actual points of disagreement. Ideally everyone would use value-neutral terms, but if not just let it go. Otherwise it’s like eating a picture of a cake, if you catch my meaning.
Needle exchange programs also come to mind. To many opponents, it is easier to live with the idea of IV drug users propogating bloodborne diseases–killing off each other and endangering others when their infections spillover into the non-user population-- than any strategy that aims to prevent this from happening but doesn’t involve locking up people for life.
The thought is that negative consequences deter people from making bad choices, and to be fair, that probably does apply to most situations. The mistake is in thinking this is a guiding principle for the entire universe of choices out there. And also, there’s the short-sightedness in thinking that by forcing individuals to deal with the consequences of their bad choices, innocent bystanders aren’t affected. Why should a hemophiliac who receives donated blood be put at elevated HIV risk because some silly person thinks handing a heroin addict a free needle is giving them license to shoot up?
It’s also not even two wrongs. And Shodan knows it. Every single person I know who is “pro-life” will admit they are opposed to a woman having the right to choose an abortion. They are not opposed to all choice, but they admit freely they are opposed to the relevant choice under discussion. They therefore are, by at least one legitimate definition, “anti-choice.”
Every single person I know who is “pro-choice” will admit they would prefer a world in which abortion never occurred. They want zero abortions. The overwhelming majority of them support increased access to birth control of other forms, and would rather abortion was not used as a method of birth control. They are by no legitimate definition “pro-abortion.”
For the most part I agree with you, but I’m guessing **Shodan **doesn’t, and it’s not worth fighting over. Better to argue about the ideas you’re trying to describe rather than than the symbols used to describe them.
Sorry, I imagine posts like mine are sort of a drag, but I think they’re accurate and it’s one of the few issues that catches in my craw, so what am I gonna do?
Additionally, some pro-choice women do have moral qualms about abortion and/or feel they would not, could not ever choose abortion for themselves. But as a political matter, they feel very strongly that reproductive choice should be defended.
Anti-life…I guess they just hate self-replicated forms of organization. Down with plants, animals and bacteria! The world would be better if we were a big dead rock!
Anti-choice…I guess they want a world where every decision is guided by dice rolls, or some kind of computer program ordering you around.
Where do facts and accuracy come into play? As a wordsmith, one of my complaints against the anti-aborts is how they have misused the language.
ETA:
And some of us Roe v. Wade is a good law that has withstood the test of time and if some people don’t like it, they should try to get it overturned instead of harassing woman about their choices in health care.