Abortion

[andrewducker]

I say that I'm pro-choice, but the truth is that I'm actually anti-abortion. Rather, I'm pro-making sure that women have the resources and education available so that there's no need for abortions save those performed for medical reasons. The best way to stop abortions is to stop the need for abortions -- not with abstinence education that tells girls they're naughty for getting knocked up but doesn't tell them how to prevent it, but with realistic sex education and more resources for young women who find themselves pregnant and unable to afford prenatal care and postnatal expenses of raising a child

Which pretty much sums up how I feel.

Stolen from the ever-vigilant Lady Sysiphus.

Comments

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Reducing the need for abortions is a good idea for many reasons, but there will always be a need for abortions. No method of birth control is 100% perfect, and human beings will never exercise perfect judgments. We don't just need to keep abortion available -- we need to make sure it's available on demand, and without guilt or apology.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely.

I agree with the doctor from Cider-House Rules.

Abortion shouldn't be necessary, but it is, so it should be made as painless as possible.

[cx650.livejournal.com]

I believe in abortion being readily available without guilt or prejudice with the caveat that it is NOT and never will be the ultimate form of birth control.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I hate to break up this cosy liberal consensus but why exactly?

Either you do, truely, believe that a womans body is hers and a foets has no legal personality till it is born or you don't. it's on/off, not a sliding scale.

Of cousre abortions are undesirable because they're operations ad have risks eg of asociated infertility etc.. but that's the woman's choice. Finance apart (which is a big but) if a woman really wanted to use abortion as her primary nmeans of birth control, then wy not?

What many people don't actually think about is that the morning after pill, which is a major effecive contraceptive in the UK at least, is an abortifacient NOT a contraceptive..

[cx650.livejournal.com]

The law has to draw a line somewhere. I don't pretend to know where it ought to be, but surely at some point the woman's body is no longer hers alone. It has to be shared with the life within her.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Why does the law have to draw a line?
Laws are what people make of them - they are not natural or in some way god-given.

Any line drawn as to "the time it is too late to have an abortion because the foetus has rights now" is fundamamentally arbitrary (the last developmental age that is non arbitarty as I understand it is at about 8 days old :-) and therefore open to lobbying to reduce it by illiberal factions, from say, 28 weeks to 24 weeks to 20 weeks - there has been a long history of such attempts in UK, US and Canada. The effect of this tends to be to burden the stupidest/most vulnerable/poorest woemn with babies who then prevent them becoming autonomous wage earners - smarter or richer women will either have got it done earlier or pay for a late abortion in a private clinic where in practice, you can get anything you like.

I repeat : you either believe a women's body is her own and ONLY her own, or you don't. Think about the consequences of other positions. Will you charge the woman who procures a late abortion (and her abortionist) with murder? will you put her in chains to prevent her injecting herself with an abortifacient flor the last two months of her pregnancy? will you allow her ex partner to take out an interdict against her restraining her movements , or forcing her to stop smoking or drinking (say) if he fears she may procure such a remedy? or is otherwise harming the foetus? these are all logical consequences of regarding the foetus as a legal person at *whatever* date of gestation.

It is way way too easy and pat liberal to say, "the rights of the woman and the foetus should be balanced". They should not. Foetuses are basically parasites until they are born (this is fact - I like babies :-) The only justification for such a breach of fundamental liberty is a religious conviction many or most people do not subscribe to. Having a liberal abortion law does not FORCE anyone to have an abortion, if your own beliefs will not countenance it.

The law in the UK is (for once) suprememely sensible on this matter - the limit is effectively that at which an abortion becomes dangerously late for the woman, in the sense that it is a real operation , not just a D and C. Effectively this does (sensibly) discourage the use of abortion as lazy contraception at the point where it involves severe chance of side effects (and also, secondarily of the birth of a living viable baby, at which point the baby now being a person who cannot be killed & indeed must positively be kept alive if possible, life gets difficult).


I get annoyed at this one as a semi woolly liberal myself because for once the knee jerk, compromise, liberal position is actually, if you examine it morally and practically, just wrong.

[andrewducker]

Foetuses are basically parasites until they are born

Foetuses are basically parasites until they are capable of surviving outside the womb.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> at some point the woman's body is no longer hers alone.

As a nineteenth century woman wisely asked:
"What is it to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc, if I may not keep my own body and its uses entirely within my right?"

You can't seriously be suggesting that pregnant women be exempted from having human rights?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

In contrast, wrt morality, I see abortion as absolutely neutral and no more immoral than trimming one's toenails. I see it as a risky (as is true of any surgical procedure) and unnecessarily complex and difficult form of birth control, given that there are far simpler options, so promoting safe, effective, and easily accessible birth control is obviously just as important as promoting safe and easily accessible abortions. The only moral component I see wrt abortion is that anything that reduces the numbers of humans born that does not harm people (and from my PoV clusters of cells are in no way people) is a moral good because reducing our population is very much a moral good.

[andrewducker]

my PoV clusters of cells are in no way people

Well, some of them are. My flatmates, for instance.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Ah, I definitely should have added "non-independent" and "inside someone else's body" to that particular comment.

[andrewducker]

The two aren't the same.

At, for instance, 26 weeks of gestation, around 95% of babies _are_ capable of independent life. They just happen to be inside a woman.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

My turn to say 100% agreement.

Shall we get hitched??

pro-choice

[jodikid.livejournal.com]

Lately I have spoken to several young men claiming to be pro-choice. My main irritation is that by in large they have mistaken the term pro-choice to mean pro-abortion, if I have been give the right to choose why is it suddenly wrong to choose LIFE?

Re: pro-choice

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It is a common confusion: there is also the confusion where the anti-choice people are claiming to be "pro-life" and "anti-abortion"... there are a lot of strong feelings around it.

But really, there are two places to stand: pro-choice, which means you believe a woman who is pregnant has the right to choose for herself what to do, and anti-choice, which means you believe a woman's decision what to do about her pregnancy ought to be taken away from her.

The one thing guaranteed to make me genuinely angry is a man making any generalised comment* on abortion other than to say "it's up to the woman who's pregnant, surely".

*generalized: Obviously a man who is involved with a woman who is pregnant has a right to comment on/discuss his specific relationship to this specific pregnancy, at the time or afterwards.

Re: pro-choice

[allorin.livejournal.com]

"The one thing guaranteed to make me genuinely angry is a man making any generalised comment* on abortion other than to say "it's up to the woman who's pregnant, surely"."

Surely that's gender-neutral? Why should one woman be allowed to have an opinion on what another woman should do with her pregnancy, if men can't?

Re: pro-choice

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It's never going to be entirely gender-neutral, because women can get pregnant, and men can't.

You mistake me, though. I wasn't expressing a moral or ethical judgement when I said that men sounding off in a generalized way about abortion make me angry. I was just pointing out that they do. For obvious reasons: these are people who have never once thought about abortion in terms of "I might get accidentally pregnant: how would I feel then?" Men sounding off in a generalised way about abortion generally come across as smug bastards speaking from a great height about an issue that will never directly affect them but which they feel they have the right to preach about.

My ethical position is that, for any pregnancy, there is exactly one person with the right to decide what to do about it, and that is the woman who is pregnant. She may and she should take advice from her doctor, other medical advisors, and people she's involved with, but it's her decision.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Mistakes will ALWAYS happen. That's Chaos Theory for you.

I'm anti-saddling a poor kid with a parent or parents that couldn't give a toss about it. That's a far bigger crime than abortion, IMHO.

I think both you and Lady Sysiphus need to have a look at that phrase, "Anti-Abortion", and consider a new one....

[andrewducker]

I am anti-abortion.

But I also consider it necessary.

Just like I'm anti-killing, but still see occasions when it can be necessary.

[sylphigirl.livejournal.com]

this is not a black and white issue. a fetus is not a mindless thing, as far as popular science has led me to believe. it has a brain, and senses, and experiences. while it does not have full sentience the point is that left without intervention, it will 99% of the time develop full sentience. whether you believe a baby in the womb is a person or not, you cannot argue with the fact that by having an abortion you choose to prevent a baby from becoming a person. abortion is making a potential person die.

the moral question then surely arises from the moment the child is conceived, and the hair splitting around what constitutes a thing with rights is irrelevant to the moral debate?

rambling now...

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Strictly speaking you don't have a foetus at the moment of conception. What you have is a zygote. Then an embryo.
It isn't a foetus until about 11 weeks after conception when the major organs have formed.

> it will 99% of the time develop full sentience

No, about 1/3 of pregnancies end naturally in the first trimester due to either the embryo or placenta not forming properly.

> abortion is making a potential person die

I'd be wary of saying anything like that because that has also been used as an argument against contraception.

You could equally argue that not giving blood (or bone marrow or a spare kidney) makes people die.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Contraception is also "making a potential person die."

Do you really want every sperm to be sacred? How often will you have sex if every pregnancy is an inviolable life?

You either consider foetuses persons and limit the autonomy of born people (women) or consider the foetus not a person and allow sexually mature women to be treated as adults not slaves to a bunch of cells inside them.

Everything else in this discussion is sentiment. It's a straight choice in logic and law: it or you because it depends on you.

[andrewducker]

You either consider foetuses persons and limit the autonomy of born people (women) or consider the foetus not a person and allow sexually mature women to be treated as adults not slaves to a bunch of cells inside them.

I don't think that foetuses are persons at 2 weeks, I think they are at 26 weeks.

It's purely a personal judgement of course.

But it's a bit more complex than your approach.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

It isn't. That's exactly the point I'm making. It';s an on or off choice, whether you like it or not, IF, you are intersted in adult women having the same rights as all other adults (ie men- I'm afarid..)

It's complex if you consider it from the point of view of the foetus-as-person - as a believing catholic would.

Giving rts to foetuses inherently makes all adult sexualy active women potetially subordinate to someone/something else.-

J is for once right, in that there is no comparable situation for men. How would you feel if you were told that you could never leave the house again, or that you had to stop using the Net, or that you had to start drinking wine or stop eating chocolate (to pick something more trivial) or else a little boy in Vietnam might die? or be born handicapped? or never go to school? And that laws would enforce what you did in favour of the little boy in VIetnam? That's the kind of loss of autonomy you'd potentially be subject to.

The reason in law viability is or was the limit of abortion was because the kiling of a child who could survive outside the wonb was deemed murder by English statute. This was nothing to do with abortion law, but it inter-acted to put a cap on till when abortion was lawful. I *think* it was repealed by the last abortion reform so in fact abortion in specuial circs eg to save the life of the mother ,right to the last breath, is now lawful - but I'd need to check.

Where you could more interestingly go with this debate is why we are so hung up on the rights of new born babes who are essentially blobs. Pure sentimentality. They don't have dreams and hopes, they don't have autonomy, and I think we both think/know they don't have souls. Potential isn't enough, or you condemn condoms. Many sophisticated societies have practiced exposure of new babies where their birth was unfortunate - as Mike points out :-) I'm not sure postnatal abortion is always such a bad idea. the main reaso we think it is is because we have a ready market for new born babes on the adoption market. If having a baby was the ruins of all your hopes and dreams, as it once was, and abortion illegal, post birth termination starts to look fairly sensible.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> making sure that women have the resources and education available so that there's no need for abortions save those performed for medical reasons.

Education is definitely very important (and currently a bit lacking in some areas, although the UK isn't nearly as bad as the US).

I think it's important to inform people of all the risks they're taking. Like all activities, sex has it's risks.
If you choose to climb mountains for fun you might fall off one, if you choose to have sex for fun then you might get pregnant (or cause someone else to become pregnant).

Another point is that it's also good to educate men about their contraceptive options and to point out to them that they also have a responsibility to take care to avoid causing an unwanted pregnancy.

Although the CSA is deplorable in many ways, one good effect it has had is to cause young men as well as young women to be much more aware that sex without contraception could have a long term effect on their lives.
There has apparently been an increase in condom use among adolescent males in the last few years because of fears of having to pay child support.



It's interesting that the number of terminations performed in the UK in the first year that abortion was legal was almost exactly the same as the estimated number for the previous year, when it had been illegal. All that changed was the number of women who survived the procedure.

It's reasonable to conclude from this that (outside of American soap operas anyway) almost noone has an abortion for trivial reasons, and that women who have abortions are almost always sufficiently desparate to end the pregnancy that they would do so even if the only option was a dangerous, illegal procedure.