5 ms·

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, a

by ehnto 5y ago

There are other reasons people want to get abortions, such as knowing they can't provide for the child or give them a safe/stable household. Adoption is rare, and the foster system in most countries absolutely ruins kids. So those aren't good alternatives.

dimitrios1 5y ago
This goes along with my thesis that if given the proper support, we would avoid the majority of them.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents. Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.
- pstuart 5y ago
  We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    >a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human. Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I think the way GP phrased it is a shorthand for "egg just after fertilization" - because today, fertilized eggs either get implanted early or rejected by the mother's body. When science and technology advances to the point of making it possible to gestate humans entirely outside of the womb, the way we talk about this will have to adjust to be more precise. (Implantation itself doesn't feel like the transition point either, but it's just the last obvious discrete step before the continuous progression all the way to birth.)
      - Thorrez 5y ago
        I don't see why we can't try to adjust to be more precise now. It seems strange to say that our current definition is not the correct long-term definition, but we'll keep using the current one. To me that's basically saying our current definition of human is wrong, and I don't see why it's acceptable to use a wrong definition.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  In countries with a good safety net (including parental leave and child care help), comprehensive sex education, free access to contraception and abortion and general health care, abortion rates are often lower. I'm not sure it avoids the majority since a decent amount of folks have the knowledge and tools to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place, but it does lower it.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.) That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  My understanding is that late term abortions are almost always cases of extreme tragedy already.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I know it's relevant because it's the politics that are setting the rules right now, but political agreement isn't really the crux of the discussion for me. It's about minimizing suffering and the ethics of controlling someone else's body. That said, I don't think there will be political agreement because it's not 100% about the rules around abortions anyway. It's a political instrument at this point. Either side is trying to win, not do what's right, and that's how things have gotten so extreme.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Most abortions are as soon as the woman knows she's pregnant. Very, very few are late term, and, as a sibling mentions, those are almost universally due to health risks (possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc). To be clear, you are right that a late term abortion is pretty horrific. They're also -traumatic-. No one is -intentionally- waiting around to get an abortion; there isn't room for political argument here because anyone who finds themselves pregnant at a late stage and doesn't want to be is already in the case of "reasonable exception". A medical complication, a change in financial status to where she can't support it (when before she thought she could), etc. No one is finding out they're pregnant in the first trimester, and then just can't make up their mind until the third, and we as a society need to set a date she has to make up her mind, or force her to keep it against her will. That's a made up justification, and as we continue to see, the same forces that make that justification don't even stop there.
WillPostForFood 5y ago
>Adoption is rare What you mean by that? There is extremely high demand to adopt newborns, which is why parents desperate for children adopt from other countries. There is currently a waiting list of 2 million families willing to adopt newborns. Children in foster care are different story - people are much less willing to adopt older kids.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I mean that most kids who end up without a home were never up for adoption anyway, for whatever reason the child was taken away from a home that couldn't take care of it and as you mentioned, they're too old now.
- nsonha 5y ago
  > children adopt from other countries Maybe finish adopting all those kids who exist and need families right now, regardless of where they’re from, rather than force people to give birth to more babies that need adoption.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Many people would like to adopt a newborn. Various laws and other barriers make it essentially impossible to adopt a newborn from another country. https://adoptionnetwork.com/types-of-adoption-options/domestic-vs-international-adoption/ https://adoptionnetwork.com/types-of-adoption-options/domest... > Domestic – If you are looking to adopt a newborn or young infant, you are looking at a domestic adoption. It’s that simple. > more babies that need adoption. That's a strange way of looking at it. When you say it like that, it sounds as if a new baby will create an imbalance between supply and demand. There's 2 million families waiting to adopt a newborn, so a new baby will help balance that, not imbalance it. Fertility is dropping, so I wonder if there will be an even higher demand for newborns in the future. https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09k7qw5/how-modern-life-is-making-men-infertile https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09k7qw5/how-modern-life-is... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sperm-counts-human-survival https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sper...
- 5y ago
arcbyte 5y ago
Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons. But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is. There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want babies but, because literally everything in biology can go wrong in ways that make abortion the only humane option, those poor women can't. And they don't need police investigating their terminations in the middle of unimaginable grief.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.
  - arcbyte 5y ago
    Perhaps we should make phone books bulletproof if we're going to idiotproof the world. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minnesota-guilty-plea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minne...
    - ehnto 5y ago
      So you don't think we should try and protect the lives of the parents?
  - lmm 5y ago
    AIUI those numbers were completely fabricated by pro-abortion campaigners, and are orders of magnitude higher than the real statistics.
- ehnto 5y ago
  > But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It is absolutely not convenience. To flip it another way, these are often homes you would never allow to adopt a baby, or homes where the child is inevitably taken by child services due to abuse or incapacity of the parent(s). Then they end up in foster care, far too late to be adopted by the nice well-to-do family with a white picket fence, and they bounce around the foster system. The foster system can't even handle all the kids that aren't adopted, and some kids end up too broken to stay in care. What happens then? At some point they just throw a bunch of broken kids into a shitty house together and have a child services worker come check in on them every day or so.

by ehnto 5y ago

dimitrios1 5y ago

This goes along with my thesis that if given the proper support, we would avoid the majority of them.

ehnto 5y ago
I'm not certain there is a level of foster care that could provide good outcomes. I think that's a bit of a pipedream. If your argument is instead that a shitty life is better than no life at all, I couldn't really disagree. But I think it's somewhat inhumane to bring a new life into the world knowing it will be suffering.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  I think the main reason kids in foster care suffer is that the kids are already old and have been through a traumatic situation that caused them to have to be put into foster care. That trauma plus the transition can leave emotional scars. Another problem is the foster parents cannot fully take in the kid. The kid can be taken away from them by the government and given back to the kid's original parents. Putting a newborn up for adoption is different, it doesn't have either of those problems. There are 2 million families in the US waiting to adopt a newborn.
pstuart 5y ago
We should provide free birth control and better sex education. Morning after contraception should also be free -- a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  >a fertilized, un-implanted egg is not a human -- it's a potential human. Is there a scientific reason for that idea? I don't see how implantation can really be considered a transition from potential human to human. I think with enough scientific advances a human could be raised entirely outside the womb, and in that case there would be no implantation.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I think the way GP phrased it is a shorthand for "egg just after fertilization" - because today, fertilized eggs either get implanted early or rejected by the mother's body. When science and technology advances to the point of making it possible to gestate humans entirely outside of the womb, the way we talk about this will have to adjust to be more precise. (Implantation itself doesn't feel like the transition point either, but it's just the last obvious discrete step before the continuous progression all the way to birth.)
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      I don't see why we can't try to adjust to be more precise now. It seems strange to say that our current definition is not the correct long-term definition, but we'll keep using the current one. To me that's basically saying our current definition of human is wrong, and I don't see why it's acceptable to use a wrong definition.
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
In countries with a good safety net (including parental leave and child care help), comprehensive sex education, free access to contraception and abortion and general health care, abortion rates are often lower. I'm not sure it avoids the majority since a decent amount of folks have the knowledge and tools to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place, but it does lower it.

RickJWagner 5y ago

I'd hope someone would know fairly early in the pregnancy if they will be able to provide for a child or not. (i.e. before the baby can feel pain, is basically a complete human being, etc.) That's why there's so much interest in defining limits around abortions. Late term abortions are pretty much described as horrific by the vast majority. There should be room for political agreement here.

KittenInABox 5y ago
My understanding is that late term abortions are almost always cases of extreme tragedy already.
ehnto 5y ago
I know it's relevant because it's the politics that are setting the rules right now, but political agreement isn't really the crux of the discussion for me. It's about minimizing suffering and the ethics of controlling someone else's body. That said, I don't think there will be political agreement because it's not 100% about the rules around abortions anyway. It's a political instrument at this point. Either side is trying to win, not do what's right, and that's how things have gotten so extreme.
lostcolony 5y ago
Most abortions are as soon as the woman knows she's pregnant. Very, very few are late term, and, as a sibling mentions, those are almost universally due to health risks (possibly also a major change in financial status, relationship, etc). To be clear, you are right that a late term abortion is pretty horrific. They're also -traumatic-. No one is -intentionally- waiting around to get an abortion; there isn't room for political argument here because anyone who finds themselves pregnant at a late stage and doesn't want to be is already in the case of "reasonable exception". A medical complication, a change in financial status to where she can't support it (when before she thought she could), etc. No one is finding out they're pregnant in the first trimester, and then just can't make up their mind until the third, and we as a society need to set a date she has to make up her mind, or force her to keep it against her will. That's a made up justification, and as we continue to see, the same forces that make that justification don't even stop there.

WillPostForFood 5y ago

>Adoption is rare What you mean by that? There is extremely high demand to adopt newborns, which is why parents desperate for children adopt from other countries. There is currently a waiting list of 2 million families willing to adopt newborns. Children in foster care are different story - people are much less willing to adopt older kids.

ehnto 5y ago
I mean that most kids who end up without a home were never up for adoption anyway, for whatever reason the child was taken away from a home that couldn't take care of it and as you mentioned, they're too old now.
nsonha 5y ago
> children adopt from other countries Maybe finish adopting all those kids who exist and need families right now, regardless of where they’re from, rather than force people to give birth to more babies that need adoption.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Many people would like to adopt a newborn. Various laws and other barriers make it essentially impossible to adopt a newborn from another country. https://adoptionnetwork.com/types-of-adoption-options/domestic-vs-international-adoption/ https://adoptionnetwork.com/types-of-adoption-options/domest... > Domestic – If you are looking to adopt a newborn or young infant, you are looking at a domestic adoption. It’s that simple. > more babies that need adoption. That's a strange way of looking at it. When you say it like that, it sounds as if a new baby will create an imbalance between supply and demand. There's 2 million families waiting to adopt a newborn, so a new baby will help balance that, not imbalance it. Fertility is dropping, so I wonder if there will be an even higher demand for newborns in the future. https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09k7qw5/how-modern-life-is-making-men-infertile https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09k7qw5/how-modern-life-is... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sperm-counts-human-survival https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sper...
5y ago

arcbyte 5y ago

Well he did qualify the reasons he provided as being only 0.1%. So obviously there are 99.9% more reasons. But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It's more convenient to murder this baby than to not murder it so murder it is. There is a very important and overlooked 7% of abortions that are medically related that save the whole concept of legal abortion for me. Mothers who want babies but, because literally everything in biology can go wrong in ways that make abortion the only humane option, those poor women can't. And they don't need police investigating their terminations in the middle of unimaginable grief.

KittenInABox 5y ago
My understanding is that prior to abortion being legalized, attempted abortion was not an uncommon cause of death. If someone is so willing to avoid pregnancy that they kill themselves, I don't know if it can be reasonably described as convenience anymore.
- arcbyte 5y ago
  Perhaps we should make phone books bulletproof if we're going to idiotproof the world. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minnesota-guilty-plea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/us/youtube-shooting-minne...
  - ehnto 5y ago
    So you don't think we should try and protect the lives of the parents?
- lmm 5y ago
  AIUI those numbers were completely fabricated by pro-abortion campaigners, and are orders of magnitude higher than the real statistics.
ehnto 5y ago
> But then here you come with the ~93% of reasons that boil down to convenience. It is absolutely not convenience. To flip it another way, these are often homes you would never allow to adopt a baby, or homes where the child is inevitably taken by child services due to abuse or incapacity of the parent(s). Then they end up in foster care, far too late to be adopted by the nice well-to-do family with a white picket fence, and they bounce around the foster system. The foster system can't even handle all the kids that aren't adopted, and some kids end up too broken to stay in care. What happens then? At some point they just throw a bunch of broken kids into a shitty house together and have a child services worker come check in on them every day or so.