5 ms·

I’m going to get hate for this, but here’s my perspective. I used to be pro-choice because I thought the motivation for pro-life was religion, and I thought th

I’m going to get hate for this, but here’s my perspective. I used to be pro-choice because I thought the motivation for pro-life was religion, and I thought that had no place in determining what others can do. Eventually I started to see abortion as something closer to murder. Obviously it’s much more complicated than that, but, to me, I view the fetus as a person, even if they aren’t born yet. There are absolutely cases where abortion can be justified, e.g. for the health of the mother, or if the mother didn’t make the choice to have sex (for example, rape). In this case I feel like it’s still murder; it’s just a terrible situation overall. In other cases though, I don’t see why abortion should be assisted. Yes, people will try to terminate in other ways. That sucks, but there’s no reason why we should be helping people murder other people just because they might hurt themselves otherwise. There are a lot of other arguments (like what if the child is born into a terrible situation) that are relevant but IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live. Definitely open to conversation on this/feel free to link any articles that you think might change my mind.

Xunjin 2y ago
That's why focusing on prevention is the way. And let me make a counter-argument for the sake of the discussion: Imagine a mother who had to give birth to her child and had to care until its adult life, in an abusive way, mistreating the child, hating that one human being and treating like garbage. What is worse, the “murder” of the child or raising someone in those conditions? The hypocrisy here is that most of the pro-life movement wants the child to be born but does not care at all when it's in the world. This video[0] shows an example of a politician how empathy makes you realize your error. Every so often, you have your view of the world, but how is important is your view in the expanse of the others? 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcGQdHj7fk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcGQdHj7fk
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  > What is worse, the “murder” of the child or raising someone in those conditions? Should we just begin murdering anyone who might not have a life that we define as good? That's essentially the argument that I'm hearing, except you're limiting the scope to unborn children. Though, I do completely understand your point. I just think that even in the worst of circumstances someone would generally prefer to live. I didn't have a particularly happy upbringing, and there were times I wanted to commit suicide, but I'm quite happy with where I'm at now.
  - Xunjin 2y ago
    But my point in the end was that if a society believes abortion should be banned, they need to give social support. For example in Brazil, few people know but a mother can abdicate their child to Child Support Services. They do try their best to care and prepare them to adoption programs.
jaredklewis 2y ago
I'm pro-choice, and one way I think about it is that I want to reduce suffering of children. I have children and I feel reasonably confident that they are capable of extreme suffering. We have imperfect information and there is no bright line between fetus and child (it's just a continuous development), but I strongly suspect that a fetus at say, 5 weeks, is less capable of suffering than a child. So imagine a situation where a mother and father have a falling out. By week 6 the mother feels there is no future in the relationship and feels she can't offer the coming child a good childhood on her own. I feel if a child is unwanted by the parents, they are more likely to suffer. So in this sense, abortion can be a form of harm reduction. It does not reduce ALL harm, but reduces the net-harm across all parties.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Here's a snippet from another reply I wrote: Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
  - richie_adler 2y ago
    > Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Yes. > Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? If the parents are unwilling or unable to deal with it every day for the rest of their life, yes. > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. That's too big an assumption. But, in any case, not being born, and not having a working brain capable of abstract thought and understanding of the situation, nor a way to express it, they don't get a vote.
- sorryimgreen 2y ago
  [flagged]
orbisonitrum 2y ago
Life is filled with grey scales, if you only see things in black or white you are not looking hard enough. Abortion may be a tragedy. Having to give birth to an unwanted child may be a tragedy. Having to give up your child because you lack the capacity to care for it may be a tragedy. Growing up as an unwanted child may be a tragedy. Abortions are a way to provide choice to people in tough situations. We have built a world where a lot of people are unable to care for their children in a decent way. In my opinion, that is the crime here. Blaming these people and calling them murderers, or forcing them into parenthood is just cruel.
- mejthemage 2y ago
  Where does "providing a choice to people in tough situations" end? When is it wrong to terminate a life because you're in a tough situation?
  - Xunjin 2y ago
    That's the point of any ethical/moral discussions. Is self-defence a situation that does allow you to kill another person? Does a mother who forgets to pull the hand break of the car and kills her son, should do jail time? Does a police officer who shots and kills a person which is in a degraded mental state but threats his life, be accused of murdering? Does a police officer who shoots a known murderer fugitive without following the standard procedure be prosecuted as a homicide? See the point?
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Most would prefer tragedy and suffering over death
  - orbisonitrum 2y ago
    All I'm saying is that when you decide that there's only one morally superior way of looking at this, you're not looking hard enough. Adoptions are complicated, teenage parenthood is hard, what rights to bodily autonomy do we want, what are the rights for unborn babies? If two rights clash, who gets to decide which right wins? There's always going to be exceptions, and a lot of the time I think it makes sense letting the people who will be directly affected make the hard choice. And calling them murderers is not helpful.
hazmazlaz 2y ago
Fetuses aren't people (it could be argued that they become people some time between the second and third trimester, but that's not really relevant because D&C is almost never done in the third trimester). Pregnant women are people. Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? >>>IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live. The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  My view is that fetuses are people. > Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The mother made a choice (ignoring cases of rape) to have sex which could, even with contraceptives, lead to the outcome pregnancy. > What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? IMO, both parties deserve to live. If a fetus threatens the mother it should be terminated for her health. If the fetus doesn't, then the mother shouldn't (morally) have an abortion. > The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop. You're missing the point of my question about "who deserves to live". Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
  - joshuamorton 2y ago
    > Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The common example of the violinist analogy disagrees here. You are under no obligation to provide continuing physical support to another person, even one everyone agrees is fully grown/sentient/alive/etc. Similarly, you are under no obligation to donate your liver/kidney/blood, even if you already promised to do so, even if not doing so will cause someone's death. In every case except abortion, we respect medical bodily autonomy to an extreme degree. And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis (see "Savior Siblings"). > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Not always, lots of people desire medically assisted suicide. Blanket assuming that everyone desires to live regardless of circumstance is factually incorrect.
couchdb_ouchdb 2y ago
I would urge you to watch this movie: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/ It made me change my mind.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  I'll take a look
zzo38computer 2y ago
The situation is more complicated than most "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are believing (like most stuff is; it is not only abortion that does). Like other things, it is worth making a discussion, from multiple points of view. I think that some of the considerations being made such as whether or not the fetus is human is not really so relevant, and is missing the point. The child being born into a terrible situation is not really the point either (or at least, is not really the most important point), since there will be better ways to deal with that. I am against abortion in general, but many of the bans of abortion are way too excessive (banning discussion and communication of information about such things, allowing to sue people without evidence, etc, are probably excessive regardless of what is being banned, though). If abortion seems necessary in this case, the government should not interfere with it (doing so will just make it more messy than it needs to be). However, it is generally better to avoid being pregnant at first, if you are able to do that; and I think that people should not try to have too many children anyways (during these days); such prevention before you are pregnant is better than afterward, isn't it? But you should still have the right to your own body anyways, and if you are pregnant then before the child is born it is still your body. (There is mistreatment of your own body, but still you properly would have the right to it.) A better way for the law to handle is that the policies can reduce the need for abortion, rather than trying to affect it directly. And, sometimes is necessary, that you will value the actual life rather than the potential life, anyways; but, if the mother instead wishes to risk such a birth that might not work and will harm her, that will be her choice to accept or not accept such a risk, I think. I do believe that abortion is "immoral", but that actual situations are not always ideal situations so that such a thing might be necessary sometimes anyways. Doctors should still provide necessary care anyways. (I think the Catholic church does allow necessary emergency medical procedures that will save the mother even if they have abortion as a side effect, anyways (and yet, many people still don't like that either). Even then, not everyone is or should be Catholic or whatever religion, but that does not make the Catholic church worthless either, even though they (like many large organizations) have done many bad things too.) I think that many "pro-life" is not a real "pro-life"; they are "pro human birth" without the other consideration. However, this is not true of everyone, so you should not assume that everyone is the same, because it isn't. A real "pro-life" should pro any life including those who have already been born and also the non-human animal and plant life. (Deliberate abortion of humans birth is one thing, but some people like it is more important than everything else and than all other life and that does not make sense and it is wrong.)
16bytes 2y ago
> I view the fetus as a person, even if they aren’t born yet. What changed my mind here was the realization that this position comes out of Catholic doctrine that defines "a person" at the moment of conception. Once you made that assumption, it's reasonable to say that abortion ends a person's life (aka murder). This assumption doesn't match biology, however. In the first trimester, it simply isn't a person yet. It's not a proto-person, and it's not simply a cake that needs to finish baking in the oven. Becoming a person takes active work by the mother's body that isn't completed until well into the pregnancy. You could call that point "viability", but it's not a precise instant in time. If there's no person yet, then it's the mother's body and it's up to that person what they choose to do with their body, just like in every other instance of bodily autonomy. It's obviously OK if you believe in the same doctrine, but then it's also not a simple case of ethics anymore.
- sorryimgreen 2y ago
  [flagged]
staticautomatic 2y ago
Not everyone who's pro-choice is able to make their peace with this fact or willing to say it aloud, but yeah, abortion often is basically murder (not in the common law sense) and that's OK.
- sorryimgreen 2y ago
  Why is that ok?
  - staticautomatic 2y ago
    I would probably characterize the moral position as “because even more harm is done by forcing someone who isn’t willing or able to care for the child to bring it into the world.”
lieks 2y ago
I agree that abortion is evil, but in my perception, once someone gets to a situation where they're willing to murder their own child, it won't be a law that'll stop them. This problem should be considered moral, not legal.
sepositus 2y ago
It comes down to how you interpret the sanctity of life, and your worldview usually governs that. A materialistic worldview, which denies any and all spirituality, is likely to take a purely scientific stance and assert a fetus is not human. Meanwhile, worldviews that see procreation as a gift from a higher power will naturally push back against that assertion. The only common ground that seems to be available between these two camps is in extreme cases (i.e., the mother's life is at risk or rape). Otherwise, I think they are fundamentally incompatible.
scarface_74 2y ago
But why is that your choice? Do you also think IVF should be illegal? We are already seeing the end state of giving the government power over a woman’s body. I had a friend whose wife got pregnant and neither one of them knew beforehand how dangerous it would be for her. They definitely wanted the child. But his first priority was his wife. So if it had come down to an abortion or letting his wife die, he was going to choose an abortion. Even if the doctors thought it was the best course of action for the wife, the doctor would have still been afraid to do it because of criminal liability in todays environment in red states. My friend and his wife decided to induce labor two months early instead and take their chances. The baby is now a healthy 12 year old. After seeing what his wife went through, he decided to get a vasectomy and they adopted 5 years later.
ndriscoll 2y ago
Some fetuses fail to develop correctly, and the baby is born with one-or-multiple conditions that will almost certainly be fatal within the first year if not first few weeks or days. Their short life will be filled with suffering. You can always find a perspective where any choice you make here is wrong. You're not asking whether they deserve to live; you're asking whether you are a worse person to deny them the chance or to condemn them to their reality. There simply is no good option, even if you take for granted that a fetus is a child and you are entirely focused on doing what's best for them. There are probably people who are flippant about it, and maybe those people are essentially murderers, but the common case is probably a variety of complex moral dilemmas and special cases to consider, and it's probably a bad idea to jump to the murderer label by default lest you apply it to people who didn't want to have to ask such questions.
bandushrew 2y ago
We can accept that you are a person, the fetus is a person and the mother is a person. Which of those should be coerced to give up a piece of their liver to save your life? Morally speaking…
Throwaway33f904 2y ago
No hate, just a nudge towards humility and empathy. As someone who's lost a newborn and had to make life-impacting medical decisions leading up to it... I can't imagine those getting abortions are doing so lightly and don't forever bear their own burdens. Let's support, advise, and trust each other to make our own decisions. I don't know what shoes anyone else walks in and wouldn't presume to make decisions for them.
eaglefield 2y ago
I don't think I would classify all stages of fetal development as persons, though obviously that line is crossed at some point during pregnancy. However, I read Judith Thomsons "A Defense of Abortion" at some point and she succesfully convinced me fetal personhood doesn't actually matter that much to the morality of abortion. It can be found on the internet[0], and is only 13 pages. Alternatively I think the wikipedia article outlines her three main arguments quite well[1], and is a quicker read. The most known part is her violinist thought experiment, which can be read to only allow abortion in cases of rape. However, the subsequent parts convinced me that, abortion is moral in general. So long as reasonable steps have been taken to avoid pregnancy. [0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

Xunjin 2y ago

That's why focusing on prevention is the way. And let me make a counter-argument for the sake of the discussion: Imagine a mother who had to give birth to her child and had to care until its adult life, in an abusive way, mistreating the child, hating that one human being and treating like garbage. What is worse, the “murder” of the child or raising someone in those conditions? The hypocrisy here is that most of the pro-life movement wants the child to be born but does not care at all when it's in the world. This video[0] shows an example of a politician how empathy makes you realize your error. Every so often, you have your view of the world, but how is important is your view in the expanse of the others? 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcGQdHj7fk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcGQdHj7fk

shepherdjerred 2y ago
> What is worse, the “murder” of the child or raising someone in those conditions? Should we just begin murdering anyone who might not have a life that we define as good? That's essentially the argument that I'm hearing, except you're limiting the scope to unborn children. Though, I do completely understand your point. I just think that even in the worst of circumstances someone would generally prefer to live. I didn't have a particularly happy upbringing, and there were times I wanted to commit suicide, but I'm quite happy with where I'm at now.
- Xunjin 2y ago
  But my point in the end was that if a society believes abortion should be banned, they need to give social support. For example in Brazil, few people know but a mother can abdicate their child to Child Support Services. They do try their best to care and prepare them to adoption programs.

jaredklewis 2y ago

I'm pro-choice, and one way I think about it is that I want to reduce suffering of children. I have children and I feel reasonably confident that they are capable of extreme suffering. We have imperfect information and there is no bright line between fetus and child (it's just a continuous development), but I strongly suspect that a fetus at say, 5 weeks, is less capable of suffering than a child. So imagine a situation where a mother and father have a falling out. By week 6 the mother feels there is no future in the relationship and feels she can't offer the coming child a good childhood on her own. I feel if a child is unwanted by the parents, they are more likely to suffer. So in this sense, abortion can be a form of harm reduction. It does not reduce ALL harm, but reduces the net-harm across all parties.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
Here's a snippet from another reply I wrote: Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
- richie_adler 2y ago
  > Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Yes. > Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? If the parents are unwilling or unable to deal with it every day for the rest of their life, yes. > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. That's too big an assumption. But, in any case, not being born, and not having a working brain capable of abstract thought and understanding of the situation, nor a way to express it, they don't get a vote.
sorryimgreen 2y ago
[flagged]

orbisonitrum 2y ago

Life is filled with grey scales, if you only see things in black or white you are not looking hard enough. Abortion may be a tragedy. Having to give birth to an unwanted child may be a tragedy. Having to give up your child because you lack the capacity to care for it may be a tragedy. Growing up as an unwanted child may be a tragedy. Abortions are a way to provide choice to people in tough situations. We have built a world where a lot of people are unable to care for their children in a decent way. In my opinion, that is the crime here. Blaming these people and calling them murderers, or forcing them into parenthood is just cruel.

mejthemage 2y ago
Where does "providing a choice to people in tough situations" end? When is it wrong to terminate a life because you're in a tough situation?
- Xunjin 2y ago
  That's the point of any ethical/moral discussions. Is self-defence a situation that does allow you to kill another person? Does a mother who forgets to pull the hand break of the car and kills her son, should do jail time? Does a police officer who shots and kills a person which is in a degraded mental state but threats his life, be accused of murdering? Does a police officer who shoots a known murderer fugitive without following the standard procedure be prosecuted as a homicide? See the point?
shepherdjerred 2y ago
Most would prefer tragedy and suffering over death
- orbisonitrum 2y ago
  All I'm saying is that when you decide that there's only one morally superior way of looking at this, you're not looking hard enough. Adoptions are complicated, teenage parenthood is hard, what rights to bodily autonomy do we want, what are the rights for unborn babies? If two rights clash, who gets to decide which right wins? There's always going to be exceptions, and a lot of the time I think it makes sense letting the people who will be directly affected make the hard choice. And calling them murderers is not helpful.

hazmazlaz 2y ago

Fetuses aren't people (it could be argued that they become people some time between the second and third trimester, but that's not really relevant because D&C is almost never done in the third trimester). Pregnant women are people. Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? >>>IMO at that point you’re essentially asking who deserves to live. The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
My view is that fetuses are people. > Does a pregnant woman somehow magically lose rights once she becomes pregnant? If the answer is yes, pregnant women do lose rights, then how much? Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The mother made a choice (ignoring cases of rape) to have sex which could, even with contraceptives, lead to the outcome pregnancy. > What weight do you put on the rights of a hypothetical person-to-be compared to a fully alive not at all hypothetical pregnant woman? IMO, both parties deserve to live. If a fetus threatens the mother it should be terminated for her health. If the fetus doesn't, then the mother shouldn't (morally) have an abortion. > The answer is the pregnant woman. She is the one who deserves to live, every time, full stop. You're missing the point of my question about "who deserves to live". Should we encourage abortions for single mothers because their child might not have a happy life? Should we abort fetuses who have some disability? I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance.
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  > Nobody is losing rights. Nobody has the right to end the life of another barring cases like self-defense. The common example of the violinist analogy disagrees here. You are under no obligation to provide continuing physical support to another person, even one everyone agrees is fully grown/sentient/alive/etc. Similarly, you are under no obligation to donate your liver/kidney/blood, even if you already promised to do so, even if not doing so will cause someone's death. In every case except abortion, we respect medical bodily autonomy to an extreme degree. And indeed in other cases we often find it immoral to force someone to assist a family member's survival on an ongoing basis (see "Savior Siblings"). > I'm sure that any of those individuals, once born, would prefer to live regardless of circumstance. Not always, lots of people desire medically assisted suicide. Blanket assuming that everyone desires to live regardless of circumstance is factually incorrect.

couchdb_ouchdb 2y ago

I would urge you to watch this movie: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/ It made me change my mind.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
I'll take a look

zzo38computer 2y ago

The situation is more complicated than most "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are believing (like most stuff is; it is not only abortion that does). Like other things, it is worth making a discussion, from multiple points of view. I think that some of the considerations being made such as whether or not the fetus is human is not really so relevant, and is missing the point. The child being born into a terrible situation is not really the point either (or at least, is not really the most important point), since there will be better ways to deal with that. I am against abortion in general, but many of the bans of abortion are way too excessive (banning discussion and communication of information about such things, allowing to sue people without evidence, etc, are probably excessive regardless of what is being banned, though). If abortion seems necessary in this case, the government should not interfere with it (doing so will just make it more messy than it needs to be). However, it is generally better to avoid being pregnant at first, if you are able to do that; and I think that people should not try to have too many children anyways (during these days); such prevention before you are pregnant is better than afterward, isn't it? But you should still have the right to your own body anyways, and if you are pregnant then before the child is born it is still your body. (There is mistreatment of your own body, but still you properly would have the right to it.) A better way for the law to handle is that the policies can reduce the need for abortion, rather than trying to affect it directly. And, sometimes is necessary, that you will value the actual life rather than the potential life, anyways; but, if the mother instead wishes to risk such a birth that might not work and will harm her, that will be her choice to accept or not accept such a risk, I think. I do believe that abortion is "immoral", but that actual situations are not always ideal situations so that such a thing might be necessary sometimes anyways. Doctors should still provide necessary care anyways. (I think the Catholic church does allow necessary emergency medical procedures that will save the mother even if they have abortion as a side effect, anyways (and yet, many people still don't like that either). Even then, not everyone is or should be Catholic or whatever religion, but that does not make the Catholic church worthless either, even though they (like many large organizations) have done many bad things too.) I think that many "pro-life" is not a real "pro-life"; they are "pro human birth" without the other consideration. However, this is not true of everyone, so you should not assume that everyone is the same, because it isn't. A real "pro-life" should pro any life including those who have already been born and also the non-human animal and plant life. (Deliberate abortion of humans birth is one thing, but some people like it is more important than everything else and than all other life and that does not make sense and it is wrong.)

16bytes 2y ago

> I view the fetus as a person, even if they aren’t born yet. What changed my mind here was the realization that this position comes out of Catholic doctrine that defines "a person" at the moment of conception. Once you made that assumption, it's reasonable to say that abortion ends a person's life (aka murder). This assumption doesn't match biology, however. In the first trimester, it simply isn't a person yet. It's not a proto-person, and it's not simply a cake that needs to finish baking in the oven. Becoming a person takes active work by the mother's body that isn't completed until well into the pregnancy. You could call that point "viability", but it's not a precise instant in time. If there's no person yet, then it's the mother's body and it's up to that person what they choose to do with their body, just like in every other instance of bodily autonomy. It's obviously OK if you believe in the same doctrine, but then it's also not a simple case of ethics anymore.

sorryimgreen 2y ago
[flagged]

staticautomatic 2y ago

Not everyone who's pro-choice is able to make their peace with this fact or willing to say it aloud, but yeah, abortion often is basically murder (not in the common law sense) and that's OK.

sorryimgreen 2y ago
Why is that ok?
- staticautomatic 2y ago
  I would probably characterize the moral position as “because even more harm is done by forcing someone who isn’t willing or able to care for the child to bring it into the world.”

lieks 2y ago

I agree that abortion is evil, but in my perception, once someone gets to a situation where they're willing to murder their own child, it won't be a law that'll stop them. This problem should be considered moral, not legal.

sepositus 2y ago

It comes down to how you interpret the sanctity of life, and your worldview usually governs that. A materialistic worldview, which denies any and all spirituality, is likely to take a purely scientific stance and assert a fetus is not human. Meanwhile, worldviews that see procreation as a gift from a higher power will naturally push back against that assertion. The only common ground that seems to be available between these two camps is in extreme cases (i.e., the mother's life is at risk or rape). Otherwise, I think they are fundamentally incompatible.

scarface_74 2y ago

But why is that your choice? Do you also think IVF should be illegal? We are already seeing the end state of giving the government power over a woman’s body. I had a friend whose wife got pregnant and neither one of them knew beforehand how dangerous it would be for her. They definitely wanted the child. But his first priority was his wife. So if it had come down to an abortion or letting his wife die, he was going to choose an abortion. Even if the doctors thought it was the best course of action for the wife, the doctor would have still been afraid to do it because of criminal liability in todays environment in red states. My friend and his wife decided to induce labor two months early instead and take their chances. The baby is now a healthy 12 year old. After seeing what his wife went through, he decided to get a vasectomy and they adopted 5 years later.

ndriscoll 2y ago

Some fetuses fail to develop correctly, and the baby is born with one-or-multiple conditions that will almost certainly be fatal within the first year if not first few weeks or days. Their short life will be filled with suffering. You can always find a perspective where any choice you make here is wrong. You're not asking whether they deserve to live; you're asking whether you are a worse person to deny them the chance or to condemn them to their reality. There simply is no good option, even if you take for granted that a fetus is a child and you are entirely focused on doing what's best for them. There are probably people who are flippant about it, and maybe those people are essentially murderers, but the common case is probably a variety of complex moral dilemmas and special cases to consider, and it's probably a bad idea to jump to the murderer label by default lest you apply it to people who didn't want to have to ask such questions.

bandushrew 2y ago

We can accept that you are a person, the fetus is a person and the mother is a person. Which of those should be coerced to give up a piece of their liver to save your life? Morally speaking…

Throwaway33f904 2y ago

No hate, just a nudge towards humility and empathy. As someone who's lost a newborn and had to make life-impacting medical decisions leading up to it... I can't imagine those getting abortions are doing so lightly and don't forever bear their own burdens. Let's support, advise, and trust each other to make our own decisions. I don't know what shoes anyone else walks in and wouldn't presume to make decisions for them.

eaglefield 2y ago

I don't think I would classify all stages of fetal development as persons, though obviously that line is crossed at some point during pregnancy. However, I read Judith Thomsons "A Defense of Abortion" at some point and she succesfully convinced me fetal personhood doesn't actually matter that much to the morality of abortion. It can be found on the internet[0], and is only 13 pages. Alternatively I think the wikipedia article outlines her three main arguments quite well[1], and is a quicker read. The most known part is her violinist thought experiment, which can be read to only allow abortion in cases of rape. However, the subsequent parts convinced me that, abortion is moral in general. So long as reasonable steps have been taken to avoid pregnancy. [0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Thomson.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion