That may be your argument, but it’s not the argument of most of the anti-abortion crowd. They are predominantly motivated by religious beliefs.
So what?
That makes no argument against abortion.
I trust women and their doctors to make the best decisions for all concerned.
Every zygote is unique, but so is every sperm and every egg. Uniqueness is not a good reason to oppose abortion.
Is it surprising that every time you drive you might get into an accident? Let’s not send out any EMTs since obviously you were asking for it.
I don’t know about you, but it seems most “pro-lifers” are also against birth control. Birth control, easily and freely available, is the best way of reducing the number of abortions.
I can only think of two reasons why someone would be against both. The first is the religious argument of God wanting babies and sex only being proper if babies can ensue. The other is to punish women for having sex.
Even if legal obstacles did cause the delay in a woman’s obtaining an abortion before the fetus reached a “too-late-for-abortion” stage of development, the law doesn’t (and IMO shouldn’t) provide an exception in that case.
Even if a woman couldn’t get an early-term abortion because, e.g., she was imprisoned in a basement by her rapist for several months, IMO that wouldn’t justify making an exception to legal prohibitions on late-term abortion except in cases of severe danger to life or health.
I recognize that this incentivizes abortion-rights opponents to just keep making early-term abortions more difficult to get, in the hopes that increasing delays will just force more women into situations where it’s too late for legal abortion. And that’s wrong, but it has to be fought on its own ground, not by merely saying “Okay, since you wanted an early-term abortion but were unfairly prevented from getting one in time, we will suspend the legal recognition of a late-term fetus’s right to life in your case.”
Do you also say that to victims of rape? Oh, so sorry, it was forced on you and you were physically overpowered or maybe you had a gun on your head but you had sex so the kid is yours, suck it up buttercup?
Do you tell that to a pregnant 10 year old who was raped by a relative - so sorry little girl that your Creepy Uncle or your Dear Old Dad stuck his dick in you and shot his wad, but you, little girl, have had sex and so suck it up, buttercup, you’re a mother now even though you’re not old enough to drive yourself to a pre-natal checkup?
Also - getting an abortion SAVES the government money - you and your taxes don’t have to pay benefits for 18 years on a kid that doesn’t exist. So your economic argument fails entirely.
How about we require a DNA sample from every male citizen so when a woman turns up pregnant and society shakes a finger at her and scolds her for having sex we can locate the father and shake a finger at him and make sure he does his duty, or at least pays the state child support for the consequences of his happy fun times?
That’s part of the injustice here - men are half of what makes a baby, but all too often it’s women who wind up with all the responsibility, work, and costs. We COULD identify the father of every child if we wanted to do so but that MIGHT inconvenience men so it will never happen.
These debates always go into this side issue which I will respectfully state upfront that I have no intention to engage in. But I support legal abortion if a woman is raped. But, but, isn’t the fetus still a life, Mr. Hypocrite? Yes, I have no energy to flesh it out.
You do realize that the new Texas law does NOT make an exception for rape? Ever? At all? Even if the victim is a child?
Snip. Nobody is scolding anybody. It is recognizing a reality that there is a human life involved. I’m not a Puritan, but you have to take that responsibility, IMHO.
I don’t support that aspect of the law and I believe it is wrong not to do that.
If you don’t think that people don’t scold women for having sex you are very naive and have led a sheltered existence. Don’t gaslight me by telling me that doesn’t happen. I’ve been a woman for over half a century, far longer than you can claim, and yes, very much women get shamed for having sex. Or enjoying sex. Or just looking sexy to someone else.
It is not MY intention to scold anyone for having sex.
It’s not an objective “reality”, but rather a subjective belief, that full human personhood should be attributed to an embryo/fetus right from the instant of fertilization.
If that’s what you happen to believe, fine, but you don’t get to assume that everybody else should have the same belief that you do, or that your belief should dictate their laws.
So in the case of rape or incest, the fact that the embryo/fetus is what you consider to be “a human life” suddenly doesn’t matter? It’s okay to kill it if its mother didn’t consent to sex, but not if she did?
Are you equally willing to tolerate the murder of born persons who happened to be conceived as a result of rape or incest?
It doesn’t require much energy at all to “flesh out” what’s going on here in your argument: it’s blindingly obvious.
You want abortion to be illegal if a pregnant woman voluntarily chose to have sex, because you “believe that the government shouldn’t allow you to kill the kid in utero” on the grounds that it is “a human life”.
But you’re willing to entirely abandon that defense of what you claim to consider “a human life” as long as the pregnant woman didn’t consent to having sex.
It could not be more plain that the only consistent reason why you oppose abortion is that it allows women to evade potential negative consequences of consenting to sex. In other words, as DMC observed, it’s not about “protecting life”, it’s about controlling women’s sexual behavior.
That claim would sound more convincing if you weren’t a self-confessed advocate of “punitive pregnancy”, where a woman has to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term if she consented to sex (in the name of the sanctity of fetal human life), but is excused from it as long as she didn’t consent to sex (and fuck the supposed sanctity of fetal human life).
It is far more important that women not be at risk of getting stuck with an unwanted pregancy every damn time they opt to have sex than that the life of embryos with no investment in their life yet be kept alive.
Look: they’re alive, they’re human, it’s killing. Fine. We do that in war too, folks. We decide that there are things worth killing for. Even when mostly that’s bullshit because it’s to protect this regime or that regime, or investment in oil or investment in strategic alliances or whatever. Why is that worth killing for? Is it because it’s boy stuff?
Why can’t the girls decide that sometimes there’s something worth killing for? Hey, at least they’re intimately connected with the lives in question. So if they decide it’s gotta go, who is better positioned to make that evaluation? And these particular lives are also, simultaneously, a part of that woman’s own body. Weird, huh? But true. Wrap your head around that for a minute. It’s not just a human life. It’s also a part of her bod. That’s how it works.
This is what women are driving at when they say that if it were males who got pregnant, there’d sure as shit be no impediments to abortion when one wants one. Hell yeah, we’d allocate ourselves the authority to make that judgment call. We have a nice long history of deciding that sometimes you gotta kill when it’s in the overall best interest etc.
Then fix your party. Full stop. We’ll be over here waiting.
Once that’s done we can discuss, in an adult manner, ways to drastically reduce the number of abortions that are performed. Sex education, freely available birth control, better assistance for single mothers who choose to not abort, etc., would all have an enormous effect. Until you fix your party, you continue to vote for people who scold women for having sex.
Who in my party scolds people for having sex? I don’t need to fix anything. Maybe your (general your) mother and church friends scolded you for sex. The anti-abortion idea is not that you cannot have any sex, or only marriage sex, but that if you do get pregnant, then understand that is why there is sex and it is not a surprise, and you have to take responsibility for the life you created. And Dad does as well…financially or otherwise.
I’m on the “pro-choice” side because it’s quite obvious that an embryo isn’t a person, and the vast majority of abortions take place at that stage or not long after, and the fight is over restricting them, since there are already restrictions against late-term abortions. We are currently in a state where we should increase, or at least not further restrict, access.
I don’t buy into the argument that an embryo should have rights equal to a human when it is quite obviously not as sentient as a whole plethora of animals we consume or use, and is less sapient than quite a bit of them, too. Call me back when the majority of anti-abortionists are hardcore vegans.
But neither do I buy into some of the justifications for the right to abortion. For instance, we make laws about things that will never affect us all the time. There’s nothing special about abortion that means we should automatically disregard the opinions of old men, or else only children would be able to make laws about schools, etc.
I keep trying to answer the question in the OP, but first I read the thread and find myself answering various people, and then I run out of time to answer the question, and then I come back and need to read more thread to catch up. And so on. This post is getting ridiculously long and this explanation might belong in the Why Are You Always Late thread.
I think it would be a lot more effective to support parents after the children are born. I strongly suspect there are a lot of people who would have more children if they didn’t have to worry about affording either the money or the time needed for taking proper care of them.
Up to 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage not caused by human intervention – otherwise known as spontaneous abortion. So it seems to me that if God’s in charge of the universe, then God has no objection to abortions.
Seems to me that your analogy means that everyone who’s pregnant is in a state of moral peril, whether or not they have or contemplate having an abortion.
I suspect that the very state of being human puts one in a state of moral peril; but see no reason why we should restrict that state to pregnant women, or to issues involving fetuses for that matter.
Depends. Did the father rape the mother? Was it, even if consensual, a casual encounter in which the father either had no intention of producing a child or just didn’t give a damn if he did? If it’s either of those circumstances, then no, I don’t think the father has an interest in the matter. (Yes, I do think he should still be on the hook for financial costs. If one person runs their car into somebody else and is wholly or partially at fault for the damages, they (or their insurance) is liable for the costs; but that doesn’t give them an interest in the sense of having a say in whether the injured person repairs their car or sells it or junks it. Let alone in decisions about their medical care.)
If the father is the mother’s partner, then in any healthy relationship they should talk about this, and listen to each other. Ideally they should have done so before the conception had a chance to take place; but even if they did, sometimes people’s feelings change when faced with the reality instead of the theoretical. But unless and until we can remove an embryo from the mother without causing her difficulties and implant it in the father, it needs to be the mother’s decision.
Even if so: few if any of them even attempt to live their lives according to every word of it.
There are enough contradictions that I’m not even sure that it’s possible to live one’s life according to every word of it.
Our standards for which creatures are edible and which are not, at least in modern times, have indeed a good deal to do with which ones are “chatting” with us; in the sense that those commonly kept as “pets” are very often considered off limits for food.
(I include myself in this; but I’m aware of it.)
Also if the fetus has been found to be non-viable; or has a slight chance of surviving birth briefly, but only to die soon and in pain; or the mother’s health is at risk.
If my parents hadn’t had sex that day, or for that matter at that particular time, or possibly in a different position or with different timing versus when my father took a hot bath, I wouldn’t exist. If they hadn’t met, I wouldn’t exist. If either of them hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t exist . . .
and you know what? I wouldn’t care. Because I wouldn’t exist.
For that matter: because my mother was pregnant with me, other individual unique eggs that might otherwise have ripened and been fertilized never got the chance. Did I murder those unique individuals? And what about all the unique sperm that were involved, but didn’t succeed in fertilizing that egg?
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I am pro-choice for multiple reasons:
For one, a blastocyte, embryo, or early stage fetus has no mind, and can no more care whether it gets to develop further than an unfertilized egg or a sperm can.
For two, if women are not in control of our own bodies, then women can never be equal citizens. No one is under any other circumstances, outside of war, required to give up their body to the use of another, even if the other will die without it.
For three, abortions will happen anyway; except that women will die as well as embryos. Imagine being desperate enough to go at oneself with a coat hanger – and remember that this is a thing that otherwise happens; as well as entirely unqualified people claiming to be medical personnel providing abortions in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
For four, because if I imagine being forced to keep another being actually inside my body for months on end when I didn’t want it there, the idea is so repulsive that even thinking about it is hard to do. It’s a crime to insist on putting part of one’s body inside the body of someone who doesn’t want it there. A fetus is of course incapable of committing a crime; the blame falls instead on those trying to force the continuation of an unwanted pregnancy.
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There is no bright clear line for the point at which a human mind develops. There can’t be – I don’t suppose it happens on the same day for every infant or every fetus, even if we could agree on exactly what a human mind is and what indications could be used to show when and whether one is present. The only practical solution, it seems to me, is to set the line at the point at which the fetus leaves the mother’s body; after which point, if the mother can’t deal with what’s then an infant, the infant can be handed to somebody else.
The question of dealing with a fetus that’s viable outside the womb although not yet not full-term does seem to me to be tricky. At our current state of knowledge, inducing live birth in the earlier portions of this time seriously risks the born child’s long-term health; while making sure the birth isn’t live arguably might be destroying a being that might already have a human mind and could have lived separated from the mother. But such abortions are very rare and generally done because new information has become available about risks to the mother’s life or health and/or because new information about the condition of the fetus shows it to not be viable; and they would be rarer yet if both birth control and early abortion were readily available. I think issues of late-term abortion should be left to the mother and her doctors; with consultation with whichever family members the mother feels are relevant. Very few people take such a decision lightly, and even one who does will have trouble finding doctors who will take it lightly.
Your party is full of slut-shaming, abstinence-only education pushing, “buy your own birth control, you hussy” yelling men and their handmaidens. Fix them, we’ll reduce abortion greatly, then we can agree to disagree on the much fewer abortions that would still take place.
This isn’t new, either.
What about birth control assistance? Surely Republicans would all be on board, right?
And if you really care, you can always read a thesis that has looked into this issue directly:
https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=socio_stu_stu_schol
Again, fix your party, then we’ll talk.