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Serious question- my understanding is that when Americans say "reproductive rights" that's a euphemism for easy access to elective abortions for unwanted pregna

Serious question- my understanding is that when Americans say "reproductive rights" that's a euphemism for easy access to elective abortions for unwanted pregnancies. Compared to moving to a new state, wouldn't it be far easier to just use any of the available birth control methods? Take the pill, get the injection, get an IUD, use a Nuvaring, use condoms, etc. The idea of moving to another state so that you can... not use birth control and instead just get abortions every time you get pregnant... seems unlikely to me?

nostrademons 2y ago
Much of Texas is a contraceptive desert. The state has a number of other policies (eg. parental consent required for minors to access birth control, poor funding for reproductive health clinics, poor general health care in many places) that make even access to ordinary birth control difficult: https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/contraceptive-deserts https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/contraceptive-deserts If you are affluent, you won't have a problem, but if you are affluent you also won't have a problem traveling to California for an abortion either. Low-income women have a lot of economic and geographic barriers to finding effective contraception.
- SauciestGNU 2y ago
  And don't forget that conservatives are targeting Griswold v Connecticut (the Supreme Court case legalizing contraceptives), and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have claimed it was wrongfully decided. It's very likely that the Court will allow states to criminalize contraceptives, if not outright ban them throughout the entire United States.
deleted 2y ago
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redserk 2y ago
I’m assuming this question is genuinely in good faith but is coming from someone simply not informed about this matter: Birth control is not 100% effective and many people do not use birth control in a manner that ensures the highest effectiveness. Some people utilize multiple birth control mechanisms but even this leads to accidental pregnancies. If a combined effectiveness of birth control is 98%, that is still 2% of couples each year regularly having intercourse that encounter a pregnancy. I believe this is about the combined effective percentage of those using the pill combined with condoms. Some may say to use an IUD, however some woman cannot use a IUD and there may be complications with those who can. Even vasectomies have a failure rate.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Birth control is not 100% effective and many people do not use birth control in a manner that ensures the highest effectiveness. If you combine the pill, a condom, pulling out, and cycle timing, it’s going to be 100% effective. Even just pulling out combined with cycle timing is likely enough to hit 100. These scare tactics didn’t work on the last generation except to delegitimize the credibility of US sex education teachers.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    The problem with planning to pull out is that people don’t follow the plan. Unplanned pregnancies have been declining rapidly over time.
  - redserk 2y ago
    No, that’s not 100% effective. Perhaps that is what’s enshrined from a Catholic classroom but the only 100.0% (unless you’re God I guess) effective mechanism is abstinence, and abstinence is an unreasonable mechanism to advocate for. Bluntly speaking: “shit happens” We shouldn’t assume pregnancies and abortions happen out of recklessness.
maximus-decimus 2y ago
Let's assume condoms are 99% effective (which they're not), that means you'll get get a baby on average every 100 times you have sex. If you have sex everyday, you'll get your girlfriend pregnant over 3 times a year! Now of course that's absurd, but even if you had sex once a month, during ovulation, that's still an unwanted pregnancy every 10 years on average. Even if it were 99.9% effective, that mean out of 10 women using condoms would get pregnant every 10 years. Birth control isn't fail proof.
- stephenbez 2y ago
  Birth control effectiveness statistics are quoted based on using for one year not for each instance of having sex. Based on CDC stats, condoms are 82% effective with typical use, and 98% effective with perfect use. IIRC, typical use includes when people intend to use the method but don’t always use it consistently. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6304a5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6304a5.htm
  - maximus-decimus 2y ago
    Interesting, the 82% does make more sense then. 98% effective use per year twice as bad as my 99.9% monthly example though. That's one pregnancy every 50 years, or 1 pregnancy every 5 years for each 10 women. The Effective 82%... honestly it's so scary, that's 1 unwanted pregnancy every ~5.5 years.
mleo 2y ago
The success of birth control assumes the proper availability of education, a healthcare system that is available and not making bad decisions when being young or having bad luck when it comes to sex. The idea of abortions as birth control isn’t a concern. The choices are getting taken away from people who know what’s best for them for their health. There are families that want to have their child, but due to circumstances have their health become an issue during pregnancy. Doctors and health systems are chilled to take appropriate actions for the women. It’s nice to be well off and go elsewhere for health, but that option isn’t available to all. Even if abortion is elective, that is a healthcare choice left to the persons and health professionals. When my daughters consider colleges, it will be a topic of conversation and consideration.
linguae 2y ago
There is much more to the abortion debate than unwanted babies. A woman could want to carry a pregnancy, only to discover that the baby is unviable or suffer a miscarriage. There are also cases where there’s a complication in the pregnancy where the mother’s life is at risk. Such scenarios are often overlooked in the abortion debate.
japhyr 2y ago
Most people are not using abortion as their default method of birth control. The term "reproductive rights" is a good phrase because it's all encompassing. Many people think abortion just refers to terminating an "unwanted" pregnancy. But abortions are actually carried out in all kinds of situations. Sometimes the mother's life is threatened by a pregnancy. Sometimes the fetus is determined to have a condition where it will 100% suffer and die within days. Sometimes women choose abortion because they became pregnant after being sexually assaulted. You don't hear about these situations much because they're so traumatic, people don't talk about them with anyone they don't have to. These decisions really should be left to women and their health care providers. The people most fervently pushing "pro-life" legislation and policies are pushing to ban it for all of these situations. Women suffer in ways people can hardly imagine when these policies are put into place.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  There are no states, that I’m aware of, that would not permit abortions that threaten the mother’s life. I’m about as pro-life as is possible, and I’ve never met a person arguing against saving a mother of it requires terminating a pregnancy. Elective abortions to kill a child that might die later (AKA mercy killing) have no legal analogue after birth (different from taking off life support after coma, for example). Most, but not all, bans still allow abortions following rape. Everything else is hysteria and justification for elective abortions, the fourth leading cause of death in the US (to the tune of 400,000 a year). The conversation needs to change from women’s rights to human rights. The idea that a human has less rights because of its stage of development is such a regressive, barbarous concept that we need to move beyond as a society.
  - mleo 2y ago
    There is a long line in healthcare between a potential need to terminate a pregnancy and threatening the life of the mother. That line is now being made by politicians and AGs after the facts, not by doctors and patients.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
david38 2y ago
Generally yes. It’s code for elective abortion. Yes, there is the situation where conservatives try to get around open loopholes by saying “no abortion whatsoever” because liberals are always crying “but what about when the mother’s life is in danger?”. We all know what’s really going on. Abortions happen people are careless or products fail. Americans can be quite careless in their use of contraceptives. I’ve seen it first hand. Very few people use abortion as a primary method of birth control. It’s - if condoms fail, or she forgets to take her pill, or was raped, having to raise a whole child is a pretty massive consequence. Personally, if I lived in Texas, I wouldn’t move either. I’d just get on a cheap flight out of state and get the abortion. There are other things too though when conservative ideologies take over, two of them being the introduction of covert biblical teachings in public schools (teaching the “current debate” between creationism and evolution ) and a general dismissal of environmental stewardship.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  >Personally, if I lived in Texas, I wouldn’t move either. I’d just get on a cheap flight out of state and get the abortion. They're trying to make that illegal too. They've already made it law in a couple of states (and are in a court case on whether it's constitutional), IIRC. And if you can't afford a plane ticket then anyone who provides financial assistance or provides transportation themselves for the express purpose of getting an abortion, well they're accessories to the abortion too.
tzs 2y ago
It also includes access to abortions when it is medically necessary. For example say you have a fetus that will not survive long enough to be born (or to live after a caesarean) and will almost certainly kill the mother long before then unless aborted. In a few states their anti-abortion laws prohibit doing that abortion until the mother is actually facing imminent death. These cases may be accompanied by agonizing pain for the mother in the days or weeks leading up that imminent death and doctors may not be able to give pain treatments because those could harm the fetus. Even in states that aren't that extreme many doctors are delaying medically necessary abortions out of fear that prosecutors would disagree with the doctor over what is medically necessary. Here's a case from Texas that illustrates some of this [1]. [1] https://apnews.com/article/abortion-kate-cox-texas-exceptions-e85664b2ab76bcb689b1b91913d3e33e https://apnews.com/article/abortion-kate-cox-texas-exception...
Qwertious 2y ago
>Serious question- my understanding is that when Americans say "reproductive rights" that's a euphemism for easy access to elective abortions for unwanted pregnancies. Banning abortion in practice leads to banning miscarriages that might have been abortions. It leads to doctors being afraid to ask if you're pregnant and afraid to do any procedures for fear of accidentally inducing a miscarriage and thus running afoul of the anti-abortion laws. Also, abortion laws are set to cause problems for in-vitro fertilization, too (which tends to produce excess viable fertilized eggs, and disposing of said excess eggs could legally be considered an abortion). In other words, it is legally dangerous for a woman to get pregnant in an anti-abortion state.
deleted 2y ago
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klyrs 2y ago
> Take the pill, get the injection, get an IUD, use a Nuvaring, use condoms, etc. Not all of these are available to everybody. Also, in states where abstinence-only education is the norm, teen pregnancies are commonplace; even if kids had access to such measures, they wouldn't know about them. And, keep in mind that Republican politicians are gunning for birth control too. Banning abortion is just phase 1, and there are conservative supermajorities in both the district court and supreme court.
StewardMcOy 2y ago
It's not quite accurate to say that "reproductive rights" is a euphemism for abortion access in the USA. If you go to rallies and listen, you'll hear a lot of talk about access to contraception also being at risk, based on our history. Contraception was widely illegal in the USA starting in the 1870s into the 1930s. but even then, some states continued to prohibit the use of contraception. It wasn't until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled that the government ruled that states could not prevent married couples from using contraception, as was the case in Connecticut at the time. It wasn't until 1972 that the Supreme Court did the same for unmarried couples. That's only one year before Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion nationwide. The people who remember what it was like before these things were legal are aging, but they often warn that the overturn of abortion access is a slippery slope. The goals of many political movements opposed to abortion don't stop there. Many would also like to ban contraception. In that sense, "reproductive rights" are synonymous with abortion because that's what's still contentious. After enough time has passed for illegal abortion to become the norm, that's when the slope can start slipping towards contraceptives. Reproductive rights supporters know this, and are fighting not just for abortion, but for many other rights as well. And that includes the right to have children. In modern days, that's most commonly seen in the fight for IVF, but it also includes the right against forced sterilization. "Reproductive rights" is a movement that doesn't say "we want to kill babies", but rather that "the government has no business whatsoever in individual reproductive decisions or health." It's not just about abortion.
snapplebobapple 2y ago
You probably hail from a place that has fairly settled abortion law though right? America never settled theres state by state in the 70s and 80s, as they should have, instead the supreme court stuffed an overarching and unconstitutional position down everyones throats. This led to the antiabortion lobby massively growing and the federal reversal of the ruling a couple years ago. Now we are living through what we should have lived through 50 years ago but we have a massively more polarized electorate, which makes a reasonable outcome much more difficult to achieve in a reasonable amount of time. as an atheist who is a big fan of abortion, its pretty frustrating.
locopati 2y ago
states are going after women who have miscarriages, which is a common possibility of pregnancy. why would anyone take the chance?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nostrademons 2y ago

Much of Texas is a contraceptive desert. The state has a number of other policies (eg. parental consent required for minors to access birth control, poor funding for reproductive health clinics, poor general health care in many places) that make even access to ordinary birth control difficult: https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/contraceptive-deserts https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/contraceptive-deserts If you are affluent, you won't have a problem, but if you are affluent you also won't have a problem traveling to California for an abortion either. Low-income women have a lot of economic and geographic barriers to finding effective contraception.

SauciestGNU 2y ago
And don't forget that conservatives are targeting Griswold v Connecticut (the Supreme Court case legalizing contraceptives), and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have claimed it was wrongfully decided. It's very likely that the Court will allow states to criminalize contraceptives, if not outright ban them throughout the entire United States.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

redserk 2y ago

I’m assuming this question is genuinely in good faith but is coming from someone simply not informed about this matter: Birth control is not 100% effective and many people do not use birth control in a manner that ensures the highest effectiveness. Some people utilize multiple birth control mechanisms but even this leads to accidental pregnancies. If a combined effectiveness of birth control is 98%, that is still 2% of couples each year regularly having intercourse that encounter a pregnancy. I believe this is about the combined effective percentage of those using the pill combined with condoms. Some may say to use an IUD, however some woman cannot use a IUD and there may be complications with those who can. Even vasectomies have a failure rate.

jimbob45 2y ago
Birth control is not 100% effective and many people do not use birth control in a manner that ensures the highest effectiveness. If you combine the pill, a condom, pulling out, and cycle timing, it’s going to be 100% effective. Even just pulling out combined with cycle timing is likely enough to hit 100. These scare tactics didn’t work on the last generation except to delegitimize the credibility of US sex education teachers.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  The problem with planning to pull out is that people don’t follow the plan. Unplanned pregnancies have been declining rapidly over time.
- redserk 2y ago
  No, that’s not 100% effective. Perhaps that is what’s enshrined from a Catholic classroom but the only 100.0% (unless you’re God I guess) effective mechanism is abstinence, and abstinence is an unreasonable mechanism to advocate for. Bluntly speaking: “shit happens” We shouldn’t assume pregnancies and abortions happen out of recklessness.

maximus-decimus 2y ago

Let's assume condoms are 99% effective (which they're not), that means you'll get get a baby on average every 100 times you have sex. If you have sex everyday, you'll get your girlfriend pregnant over 3 times a year! Now of course that's absurd, but even if you had sex once a month, during ovulation, that's still an unwanted pregnancy every 10 years on average. Even if it were 99.9% effective, that mean out of 10 women using condoms would get pregnant every 10 years. Birth control isn't fail proof.

stephenbez 2y ago
Birth control effectiveness statistics are quoted based on using for one year not for each instance of having sex. Based on CDC stats, condoms are 82% effective with typical use, and 98% effective with perfect use. IIRC, typical use includes when people intend to use the method but don’t always use it consistently. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6304a5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6304a5.htm
- maximus-decimus 2y ago
  Interesting, the 82% does make more sense then. 98% effective use per year twice as bad as my 99.9% monthly example though. That's one pregnancy every 50 years, or 1 pregnancy every 5 years for each 10 women. The Effective 82%... honestly it's so scary, that's 1 unwanted pregnancy every ~5.5 years.

mleo 2y ago

The success of birth control assumes the proper availability of education, a healthcare system that is available and not making bad decisions when being young or having bad luck when it comes to sex. The idea of abortions as birth control isn’t a concern. The choices are getting taken away from people who know what’s best for them for their health. There are families that want to have their child, but due to circumstances have their health become an issue during pregnancy. Doctors and health systems are chilled to take appropriate actions for the women. It’s nice to be well off and go elsewhere for health, but that option isn’t available to all. Even if abortion is elective, that is a healthcare choice left to the persons and health professionals. When my daughters consider colleges, it will be a topic of conversation and consideration.

linguae 2y ago

There is much more to the abortion debate than unwanted babies. A woman could want to carry a pregnancy, only to discover that the baby is unviable or suffer a miscarriage. There are also cases where there’s a complication in the pregnancy where the mother’s life is at risk. Such scenarios are often overlooked in the abortion debate.

japhyr 2y ago

Most people are not using abortion as their default method of birth control. The term "reproductive rights" is a good phrase because it's all encompassing. Many people think abortion just refers to terminating an "unwanted" pregnancy. But abortions are actually carried out in all kinds of situations. Sometimes the mother's life is threatened by a pregnancy. Sometimes the fetus is determined to have a condition where it will 100% suffer and die within days. Sometimes women choose abortion because they became pregnant after being sexually assaulted. You don't hear about these situations much because they're so traumatic, people don't talk about them with anyone they don't have to. These decisions really should be left to women and their health care providers. The people most fervently pushing "pro-life" legislation and policies are pushing to ban it for all of these situations. Women suffer in ways people can hardly imagine when these policies are put into place.

jonhohle 2y ago
There are no states, that I’m aware of, that would not permit abortions that threaten the mother’s life. I’m about as pro-life as is possible, and I’ve never met a person arguing against saving a mother of it requires terminating a pregnancy. Elective abortions to kill a child that might die later (AKA mercy killing) have no legal analogue after birth (different from taking off life support after coma, for example). Most, but not all, bans still allow abortions following rape. Everything else is hysteria and justification for elective abortions, the fourth leading cause of death in the US (to the tune of 400,000 a year). The conversation needs to change from women’s rights to human rights. The idea that a human has less rights because of its stage of development is such a regressive, barbarous concept that we need to move beyond as a society.
- mleo 2y ago
  There is a long line in healthcare between a potential need to terminate a pregnancy and threatening the life of the mother. That line is now being made by politicians and AGs after the facts, not by doctors and patients.
  - jonhohle 2y ago

david38 2y ago

Generally yes. It’s code for elective abortion. Yes, there is the situation where conservatives try to get around open loopholes by saying “no abortion whatsoever” because liberals are always crying “but what about when the mother’s life is in danger?”. We all know what’s really going on. Abortions happen people are careless or products fail. Americans can be quite careless in their use of contraceptives. I’ve seen it first hand. Very few people use abortion as a primary method of birth control. It’s - if condoms fail, or she forgets to take her pill, or was raped, having to raise a whole child is a pretty massive consequence. Personally, if I lived in Texas, I wouldn’t move either. I’d just get on a cheap flight out of state and get the abortion. There are other things too though when conservative ideologies take over, two of them being the introduction of covert biblical teachings in public schools (teaching the “current debate” between creationism and evolution ) and a general dismissal of environmental stewardship.

Qwertious 2y ago
>Personally, if I lived in Texas, I wouldn’t move either. I’d just get on a cheap flight out of state and get the abortion. They're trying to make that illegal too. They've already made it law in a couple of states (and are in a court case on whether it's constitutional), IIRC. And if you can't afford a plane ticket then anyone who provides financial assistance or provides transportation themselves for the express purpose of getting an abortion, well they're accessories to the abortion too.

tzs 2y ago

It also includes access to abortions when it is medically necessary. For example say you have a fetus that will not survive long enough to be born (or to live after a caesarean) and will almost certainly kill the mother long before then unless aborted. In a few states their anti-abortion laws prohibit doing that abortion until the mother is actually facing imminent death. These cases may be accompanied by agonizing pain for the mother in the days or weeks leading up that imminent death and doctors may not be able to give pain treatments because those could harm the fetus. Even in states that aren't that extreme many doctors are delaying medically necessary abortions out of fear that prosecutors would disagree with the doctor over what is medically necessary. Here's a case from Texas that illustrates some of this [1]. [1] https://apnews.com/article/abortion-kate-cox-texas-exceptions-e85664b2ab76bcb689b1b91913d3e33e https://apnews.com/article/abortion-kate-cox-texas-exception...

Qwertious 2y ago

>Serious question- my understanding is that when Americans say "reproductive rights" that's a euphemism for easy access to elective abortions for unwanted pregnancies. Banning abortion in practice leads to banning miscarriages that might have been abortions. It leads to doctors being afraid to ask if you're pregnant and afraid to do any procedures for fear of accidentally inducing a miscarriage and thus running afoul of the anti-abortion laws. Also, abortion laws are set to cause problems for in-vitro fertilization, too (which tends to produce excess viable fertilized eggs, and disposing of said excess eggs could legally be considered an abortion). In other words, it is legally dangerous for a woman to get pregnant in an anti-abortion state.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

klyrs 2y ago

> Take the pill, get the injection, get an IUD, use a Nuvaring, use condoms, etc. Not all of these are available to everybody. Also, in states where abstinence-only education is the norm, teen pregnancies are commonplace; even if kids had access to such measures, they wouldn't know about them. And, keep in mind that Republican politicians are gunning for birth control too. Banning abortion is just phase 1, and there are conservative supermajorities in both the district court and supreme court.

StewardMcOy 2y ago

It's not quite accurate to say that "reproductive rights" is a euphemism for abortion access in the USA. If you go to rallies and listen, you'll hear a lot of talk about access to contraception also being at risk, based on our history. Contraception was widely illegal in the USA starting in the 1870s into the 1930s. but even then, some states continued to prohibit the use of contraception. It wasn't until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled that the government ruled that states could not prevent married couples from using contraception, as was the case in Connecticut at the time. It wasn't until 1972 that the Supreme Court did the same for unmarried couples. That's only one year before Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion nationwide. The people who remember what it was like before these things were legal are aging, but they often warn that the overturn of abortion access is a slippery slope. The goals of many political movements opposed to abortion don't stop there. Many would also like to ban contraception. In that sense, "reproductive rights" are synonymous with abortion because that's what's still contentious. After enough time has passed for illegal abortion to become the norm, that's when the slope can start slipping towards contraceptives. Reproductive rights supporters know this, and are fighting not just for abortion, but for many other rights as well. And that includes the right to have children. In modern days, that's most commonly seen in the fight for IVF, but it also includes the right against forced sterilization. "Reproductive rights" is a movement that doesn't say "we want to kill babies", but rather that "the government has no business whatsoever in individual reproductive decisions or health." It's not just about abortion.

snapplebobapple 2y ago

You probably hail from a place that has fairly settled abortion law though right? America never settled theres state by state in the 70s and 80s, as they should have, instead the supreme court stuffed an overarching and unconstitutional position down everyones throats. This led to the antiabortion lobby massively growing and the federal reversal of the ruling a couple years ago. Now we are living through what we should have lived through 50 years ago but we have a massively more polarized electorate, which makes a reasonable outcome much more difficult to achieve in a reasonable amount of time. as an atheist who is a big fan of abortion, its pretty frustrating.

locopati 2y ago

states are going after women who have miscarriages, which is a common possibility of pregnancy. why would anyone take the chance?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]