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Is the whole "don't have sex to avoid pregnancy" thing that difficult to understand, or do people just come up with all these dumbass excuses for the sake of argument?

The problem with that line of thinking is that cheek cells will not in the course of nine or so months develop into a viable human being, nor is abortion in any way self-defense unless the mother's life is actively threatened. The fetus is not actively attacking her in a vicious manner, as a would-be rapist or murderer is.

This is a direct quote from a legal definition of self-defense: "Use of force is justified when a person reasonably believes that it is necessary for the defense of oneself or another against the immediate use of unlawful force. However, a person must use no more force than appears reasonably necessary in the circumstances.

Force likely to cause death or great bodily harm is justified in self-defense only if a person reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm."

I'm sorry, but I don't consider the average nausea and vomiting as great bodily harm, nor do I consider a temporary weight gain as great bodily harm.

http://www.lectlaw.com/def/d030.htm

Looking back over your first post, you're quite right. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers DO approach abortion from different angles and have no common ground to speak off.

Secondly, my argument applies only to the self-defense position of pro-choicers, not any other position, such as bodily integrity, Roe vs. Wade, or any other point that can be brought up. I merely meant to point out that legally self-defense very likely would not hold up.

Morning sickness (mainly in the first trimester) and weight gain (most noteable in the later stages) are two of the MAIN side effects. Yes, there are others, but very few of them are life-threatening. Those which are usually treatable and for those that aren't, abortion for the mother's life was legal even BEFORE Roe vs. Wade. I stand by what I said. Having an abortion for discomfort is reprehensible.

Agreed.

All in all, I had a relatively good pregnancy. Sure, I was hospitalized for my morning sickness for a while, and had anemia throughout, and so had to be quite quite careful about which vitamins I took and which foods I ate, but all in all, it was an average pregnancy. I didn't even gain any weight on myself throughout the pregnancy; I was back down to my pre-pregnancy weight about a day after the birth, despite gaining about 30lbs over the course of the pregnancy.

While I agree that morning sickness and weight gain are both VERY common side effects to pregnancy, I'm actually quite offended that you would downplay pregnancy to just those two effects.
Sure, my pregnancy went relatively well, and it was mostly average. But it wasn't ******** easy. It's a difficult thing to go through, physically and mentally. Physically, your body is entirely supporting another human being, not to mention that it's harder to sleep, it's harder to be able to walk around/do physical work that you used to be able to ... there's any number of things physically that makes pregnancy and labour difficult, in just an average pregnancy, with nothing going wrong.
Then, the mental aspects of being pregnant; even if you wanted your child, you're likely going to have mental issues with the pregnancy, because of your changing body, your changing hormones, and how the pregnancy changes just about everything about how you live.

Pregnancy is in NO WAY an easy experience. Is it worth it? Of course. Does it threaten your life? Sometimes. Is it something I would wish on someone that doesn't want to go through it? No.

ShadowIce also made a good point in that I don't think I've ever heard of a woman getting an abortion because she wanted to avoid morning sickness/weight gain.

It's alright. I understand completely about not having time. biggrin


Two problems with this. First (and this is just copy/paste, so forgive me) when you make this statement, you are doing something very similar to what Pro-Choicers do when they cry out that abortion can't be murder because abortion is legal and murder is by definition illegal. Just because something is law doesn't mean people are going to believe it is correct or justified. Even if you are correct in your legal interpretation (and not everyone would agree that you are, although I'm not going to go into that right now), this argument is going to put you in a bind. If you're going to say, "Abortion can't be self-defense because the law says so!" you're going to have to explain why Pro-Choicers aren't correct in saying, "Abortion must be allowed because the law says so." If the law is the be all and end all of self-defense, I don't know why it wouldn't be the be all and end all of abortion. Two, I don't see how the fetus is defending itself against her. It's using her. It isn't as if it is some kind of independent entity that could exist without her or that would be better off if she hadn't had sex. If she hadn't put the fetus/etc in the position of her being pregnant, it wouldn't exist at all.

The problem isn't just with the law though, it's kind of a bit of common sense mixed in there. For instance, and I used this analogy before and it got kind of confused so just to explain something before I go on. XD I'm not comparing this to pregnancy, I'm trying to make it clear why abortion can't be self defense using a different senario that has similar actions (as in reciprocal self defense) taking place.

If you were to push someone over the edge of a 20 foot building, and they grabbed your arm to save themselves, that would be self defense (why not the edge? They're not all that smart). Even if they broke your arm, but managed to get back up, they're not exactly going to be charged with assault because you put them in the situation where they needed to grab on to you to survive. Because of this, you cannot say stab at their hand or arm until they let go, and claim self defense. If you could it would be absurd, because the only reason you had to defend yourself against them was because of a situation which you put them in that required them to use you to defend themselves. If you're claiming that you disagree with the law being as such, you might as well do away with self defense laws all together, because basically this nullifies them.

And back to the other part you said, the fetus is defending itself by using the force necessary to defend itself. The mother (and father, I know but unfortunitally we cannot yet hand off pregnancy to him =() has acted in such a way where she created a seperate living human. This human then attaches itself to her and uses her body in order to sustain its own life. This is the amount of force needed to preserve its own life. The problem with this is that because the fetus isn't a human it does not qualify under self defense laws.

The other problem with this is that pregnancy is extremely unique, so no law which we have today is fully going to encompass it because we can't really replicate it. There are no normal senarios which work as a senario for pregnancy. For instance with the self denfense thing, the self denfense arguement is really only one that would ever be used to argue with abortion, because really self defense implies the mother acted illegally, however we can't put every woman in jail after she's had a baby for risking the life of that child. That would be ridiculous.

Very long story, short, this is why you cannot claim self defense in terms of the mother. If you do you're qualifying the fetus as a person to defend yourself against, and if you do that you put it in jepordy so its actions were self defense therefore yours would just be attacking them.

Here's to hoping artificial uterureses... uteruri? What's the plural for uterus? XD

Never getting pregnant is a far cry from creating a life and then ending it. Non-existence vs. deliberate killing. How is that hard to understand?

I don't think they are the same, I think they are morally equivalent. Kind of like how stabbing someone in the heart and shooting them in the heart are very different actions, yet I would say that they have the same moral value. Deliberate killing does cause non-existence. I just don't see the moral difference between deciding I don't want to be pregnant and abstaining and deciding I don't want to be pregnant and having an abortion. Both lead to no baby being born. I understand that you see things differently, but this is how I feel.

Furthermore, not all abortions are deliberate killings, but are rather deliberate attempts to not be pregnant when there is no way to not be pregnant except via killing.


I'm not exactly sure why you included this question, as I'm pretty sure that you don't actually want me to answer it. neutral