andrewducker | Abortion

Abortion

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

Foetuses are basically parasites until they are born

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

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.

my PoV clusters of cells are in no way people

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

I agree 100%. Then again, I also don't see human life in itself as in any way more sacred or special than the life of any other complex organism. OTOH, I place great value in human experience and sentience, but not in the lives of mindless or near mindless beings that happen to share human genetics, regardless of whether they are irreparably brain-damaged vegetables or fetuses. Until a child is born the only wishes that I consider to be of any import or moral worth are the wishes of the woman whose body it is in. Until it's born it should be treated no differently from any other body part. The only coherent arguments that I can see or treating this situation differently are religious ones from faiths that I neither share nor agree with.

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

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.

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?

Quite true, but the rights and life of the actual, fully sentient person with actually memories and experiences IMHO, completely and totally outweighs any rights this being has. Such beings are still part of someone else's body and so should not in my view be considered as separate organisms in any legal or moral sense.

I also felt this, but it raises the question of how they survive outside the womb? With the help of the parents? With the help of intensive care in a baby unit? When they can survive on a hill outside Rome for one night?

It's still arbitrary and I say this from the point of view of a person who doesn't like it being arbitrary.

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.

"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?

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....

you are treating the idea of "when a child is born" as a fixed term, but births happen at all kinds of times, regularly while the baby is not fully developed and in some cases where it cannot survive without medical aid. however, without further complications, a baby can finish its development and survive without that aid.

so at what point while the baby is still inside the mother and capable of survival using medical technology is it acceptable?

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...

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.

UK law defines human existance as starting from birth - that's when your birth certificate says you became a member of society. Doesn't matter at what gestational age you are born.

This does cause problems for premature kids - I know a couple of children who were born around 26 weeks gestation and who were forced to start school at the age of four (due to the inflexibility of the current education system), which is bad enough, but even worse when you consider that they were actually only the equivalent of three and a half years old in developmental terms.

However I don't see how else you could organise the system, unless you want to completely deprive women of all rights to an independent existence from the moment they enter puberty.

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.

Certainly, should it be the case of "life of the mother or life of the 26 week-old foetus" the mother wins every time.

But when it comes to "Both live, or just one lives, at the whim of the mother, for no medical reason" then I'm not there.

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.

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