Along the lines of what you said, but also thinking less globally, I could imagine two extreme positions:
(1) There are too many people having kids who shouldn’t be having kids.
(2) There are too many people not having kids who should be having kids.
I don’t even think it is a close call between these two extremes: (1) is way, way closer to reality. If we are going to be talking about restricting reproductive rights, I think that the argument for forced sterilizations is way stronger than the argument for forcing women to carry fetuses that they don’t want to term.
Just to be clear, I think that the best thing to do is not to restrict reproductive rights in either way, but I must admit that I have a much harder time defending the proposition that people should not be sterilized for the sake of their unborn children than I do defending the proposition that we should restrict abortion for the sake of the unborn children.
"If you think abortion is murder, then you would require an investigation into every single miscarriage, not to mention each of every woman’s menses to ensure she did not “murder a child”.
No it isn’t. Everyone agrees the people who die awaiting blood transfusions, bone marrow, and organs are human lives lost because we don’t have enough to go around. And yet literally no one is suggesting we make donating those things compulsory, even after death. A motorcycle accident victim whose organs could save several lives has more right in every jurisdiction to let them rot with him in the ground, than a living woman in many jurisdictions has to deny the use of her reproductive organs for nine months to a single individual.
I’ve donated about a dozen pints of blood over the years, and I’ve also been pregnant once for about 2 months. Even without the much more burdensome 7 months plus childbirth that would’ve followed if I hadn’t gotten an abortion, that pregnancy caused me much more suffering than all those blood donations combined. Don’t kid yourself; the debated personhood of the fetus is not the reason it’s treated differently.
I’m pro-choice because the idea of abortion disturbs me deeply, and I’m pretty sure I’d never get one myself were I a woman. So I figure that if anyone is at the point where they think an abortion is the proper course of action, they probably have a pretty good reason for choosing that option, even if I don’t know what that reason is, and might even disagree with it if I did know what it is. Basically, I trust women to make their choices even when things are at their worst.
I am pro-choice because I don’t know when “Life” begins. But I am comfortable with it not beginning at inception.
At some point between a zygote and a new born baby, a human life exist. I don’t know what that point is.
I am pretty confident no expectant mother changes her mind in the third trimester and decides to kill her baby.
The argument that a Zygote is a human being, I think, is rooted in some religious concept that the zygote has been endowed by God with a soul. And I reject that.
Me too. And if some pregnant woman does change her mind and decides she wants to abort a healthy and viable late-term fetus just because she no longer wants a kid, I’m perfectly fine with the law telling her “sorry, it’s too late for you to make that choice: the development of the fetus has progressed to a point where its degree of personhood and consequently its right to live outweigh your right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.”
I don’t like abortion. I’m not sure, however, whether it should be illegal- I don’t favor it being illegal in cases of rape, incest, or in case of endangering the mother’s health.
I do believe that those who say they are pro-life yet are against universal health care are only pro-birth, not pro-life.
This old saw is just too much. The terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” should be universal in these threads so that we don’t always bicker more than we already do about the issue. UHC has nothing to do with abortion. Because a person doesn’t believe that a woman should be legally allowed to --what they believe is–murder her baby in utero does not mean that the same person should have a particular position on whether the government pays for everyone’s health care. One has nothing to do with the other.
We do this nonsense too much. You can’t be pro-choice because you won’t let me choose to carry a gun, or let me choose not to get a Covid vaccine. Oh yeah, well you can’t be pro-life because you eat meat or aren’t in favor of the latest government program for the poor. They are labels in the context of the abortion debate, not universal labels which apply to everything. They are sufficiently neutral, and are terms that each side adopts. We should at least agree to start/stop there with the debate.
We bitch about people who claim to be “pro-life” but whose actions seem to indicate they don’t give a damn about that life once said life is born and out in the world. That is relevant, and pertinent to the debate. You have people demanding that every fetus be born but they take absolutely no responsibility for the children born because of their demands.
If someone is unwilling to take in unwanted babies and raise them, if someone is opposed to giving aid to families that need it in this world, then they should STFU and mind their own business and NOT be making demands upon the bodies of other people.
IOW: As I said. You have sex and have a kid. I can believe that the government shouldn’t allow you to kill the kid in utero, but also believe that as I paid for my child, you should pay for yours. The term doesn’t require government payment at each step.
The argument is that the zygote is unique not that it has a soul… I am the result of a particular zygote. Had it not been fertilized, I would not exist. Souls might get a second chance, zygotes don’t.
Is it a surprise from having sex that a woman might get pregnant? If it was a shock, then it would be different. Everyone knows going in. It’s not a terrible thing to admit the obvious.
Which is why, if you don’t want to set up a polarized adversarial situation between male and female people — given that we’re biologically hardwired to crave sex — you don’t interfere with the female folks’ authority to deal with their own bodies and their reproductive capabilities as they see fit.
Don’t like abortion? Convince them not to abort. And be careful about the situations in which you have sex. But passing laws and using coercive force to prevent women from doing what they’d otherwise do in these cases is oppression.
So we can abort the shit out of babies that come from in-vitro? Is rape considered “a woman having sex”?
Due to their party’s stance on birth control, sex education, and other related issues, many women have long believed that the Republican party wants to legislate their sex life, not just abortions. Turns out they’re right.