Before we begin, I must say this.
BE SMART. THIS IS AN INTELLIGENT THREAD. IF I SEE CHATSPEAK, RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS, OR ANYTHING STUPID LIKE THAT, I WILL RIP YOUR FACE OFF.
Thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, this, as said by Pidegezero_One, sums up my opinion. READ IT ALL GOD DAMN IT. If you're here in the first place, you've got nothing better to do, right?
pidgezero_one
I recently gathered my thoughts and solidified what is essentially my entire stance on abortion in a post that I made on another forum, and I feel like sharing it here. It's really long, so I'm reducing the font size so as to not stretch the page.
Quote:
Abortion is probably the issue I feel the most strongly about out of everything I enjoy debating, so I could in theory prattle on about this for hours, but I tend to get a bit out of hand and will try to keep it short.
I am completely and thoroughly pro-choice, in all situations. All situations. Here is my justification.
From a compassionate standpoint: I honestly couldn't give a rat's rear end about how the woman got pregnant. I don't care if she used protection or not. I don't care if she was married. I don't care if it was a one-night's stand. I don't care if she was a hooker. I don't care if she was a loose teenager. I don't care if she was a deadbeat crack addict for goodness' sakes. I don't care if she was raped (except to the extent that I care for her well-being). The day I try to make illogical exceptions to a blanket statement is the day I ignore that every woman's situation is a unique one, and I don't think highly enough of myself to assume that I'm in any place to judge every woman who has ever been pregnant or considered abortion.
Abortion should only be a question of whether or not a fetus intrinsically has a right to live at the expense of its mother, and that question should not consider how the fetus came into existence. One fetus doesn't deserve life more than any other just because of how its mother's sex life is going. I can't stand "only if she was raped!" pro-lifers, sorry if this applies to anybody here. On the same coin, I shake my head every time somebody brings up the pregnant woman's age, especially if "she should be forced to have the baby if she's just a stupid teenager!", because it's an unrealistic stance based on an arbitrary measurement... not to mention it blatantly ignores how teenage pregnancy is, more often than not, a result of the woman being in an abusive relationship.
If a woman wants to get an abortion, carry to term and raise the child, or give their child to somebody else after it's born, I'll completely support her any which way so long as the choice is hers, and not a choice she doesn't want but has been pressured or forced into.
From a religious standpoint: Although embryology is not my strongest science, I know enough about it that if souls do exist, I'm about 99% confident that an embryo does not have one at conception. Two weeks following conception, the zygote splits up into 16 totipotent cells (meaning, each cell is capable of becoming a separate being). Sometimes, these 16 cells do split off into being different beings. Some are sometimes miscarried, other sometimes develop, meaning the woman is pregnant with 2 of more children. If the soul entered the body at conception, do these children each have a fraction of a soul? If not, where did the other souls come from, if they did not enter at conception? How do you decide which child gets the soul that apparently entered at conception? It's not a question I've ever gotten an answer to, and if anybody has an answer to it I would very much like to hear it.
From a comparative standpoint: I cannot view abortion as tantamount to infanticide for the same reason that I cannot view myself as eligible for senior's discounts on bus tickets. Early childhood stages and fetal stages are separate and very different points of development and need to be viewed objectively, rather than viewed in terms of what they would be in the future under a set of assumed conditions.
From a legal standpoint: For reasons listed above, making abortions unavailable with circumstantial exceptions just doesn't make a lick of sense. It's not enforceable, and it's not realistic, and it's passing judgment where it doesn't need to be passed. It's an invasion of privacy for a question that can't even be answered with confidence anywhere even close to perfect.
As it stands, no person has any right to any part of my body that I do not wish for them to be using, regardless if the only way to stop that person is for them to die. This is incredibly important to abortion because there is literally no way to keep a fetus alive when it is removed from the parent. If there was a way, then perhaps I'd lean more toward an alternative that could retain the mother's right to bodily domain and keep the fetus alive where killing it would be rendered unnecessary.
In addition, I do not buy into the idea that the mother is responsible to carry the fetus to term because it's her "fault" (and I use that word very, very loosely) that it exists in the first place. On the same coin, I'm not under legal obligation to donate matching organs or blood or bone marrow to a child of mine who might have inherited a disease from any of my recessive genes, despite it being my fault that the child exists and needs such a donation to begin with. I probably would go through with it anyway, but the fact that I'm not obligated is an important implication to every single person's right to domain over their own body -- it's yours, you get to decide who uses it and who doesn't use it, and a fetus does not have special rights, even if it WAS considered a person.
Keep in mind that all of the above applies even if the person in need will die without your contribution. This opens to door to letting people educate themselves on the issue of murder vs. other types of homicide.
I suppose some might like to counter this with "just don't have sex!", but in the real world, people are going to have sex. People having sex is as much a guarantee as eventual death, the speed of light, and paying taxes, and that's just the way it is. Trying to punish them for it because they don't want an outcome which has always been optional by random chance in the first place (even before birth control, you were never guaranteed to get pregnant by having sex) is stupid, there's no other way to put it. Sex is important to people, especially to those in long-term adult relationships. Let's be real here, it's not like women take birth control pills "in case I get raped".
I support late-term abortion, because I know that most women wouldn't get an abortion that late into the pregnancy anyway unless there was a severe problem with the pregnancy itself. Even if some women would, I firmly believe that abortion is an issue where a few that I guess some would call "bad apples", who are unrelated to the rest of the candidates, shouldn't have to ruin it for the whole bunch.
The woman should be made aware of when it is ultimately safer for her to deliver the baby (whether by induced labour, caesarian, etc) instead of abort it, which actually is often the case with late-term abortion. I believe that women should decide to carry to term when this is the case, as it would be avoiding unnecessary killing as well as ensuring that the woman's body doesn't arbitrarily stop belonging to her, but it's not my call to make for them if they do not want to undergo a delivery procedure.
Late-term abortion is legal with no restrictions in Canada, and we don't get women just aborting left-and-right just because they can, like opponents of "partial birth abortion" (what a stupid term) seemed to think they did when the ban was passed in the U.S.. Did you guys know that that form of abortion accounts for less than a percent of all abortions, and is normally performed when there is something irreparably wrong with the fetus, such as it already being dead? It's also the safest way of extracting the fetus in such a situation, as it causes the least scarring and bleeding for a procedure which has to be done anyway.
As a final point, I'm incredibly wary of opinions along the lines of "just have the baby and give it up for adoption!" as if it's as simple as saying the sentence is. While opponents of abortion are willing to make anything up to directly oppose the APA in saying things about how abortion harms women psychologically, is anybody willing to put their foot forward and find out what birthmothers go through? Here's a hint, if you've watched the movie Juno, don't think that every pregnancy in the world ends up like that one. Proponents of "adoption not abortion" typically seem to view pregnancy as a passive act that barely affects the woman, and I could go on into how this viewpoint is completely wrong, but a person who is far more educated than I am has written an extensive and enlightening essay about this very topic here.
As a side-note to the adoption issue, I'm firmly against the idea that women should have to have their children as if they owe something to people who can't have children. Apparently, there are so many loving infertile couples who would love to have your baby, but not any of the hundreds of thousands of kids who are already looking for parents!
I'm sure there's more stuff that I'm forgetting to mention, but if you've read up to this point you're probably tired of reading it anyway.
I am completely and thoroughly pro-choice, in all situations. All situations. Here is my justification.
From a compassionate standpoint: I honestly couldn't give a rat's rear end about how the woman got pregnant. I don't care if she used protection or not. I don't care if she was married. I don't care if it was a one-night's stand. I don't care if she was a hooker. I don't care if she was a loose teenager. I don't care if she was a deadbeat crack addict for goodness' sakes. I don't care if she was raped (except to the extent that I care for her well-being). The day I try to make illogical exceptions to a blanket statement is the day I ignore that every woman's situation is a unique one, and I don't think highly enough of myself to assume that I'm in any place to judge every woman who has ever been pregnant or considered abortion.
Abortion should only be a question of whether or not a fetus intrinsically has a right to live at the expense of its mother, and that question should not consider how the fetus came into existence. One fetus doesn't deserve life more than any other just because of how its mother's sex life is going. I can't stand "only if she was raped!" pro-lifers, sorry if this applies to anybody here. On the same coin, I shake my head every time somebody brings up the pregnant woman's age, especially if "she should be forced to have the baby if she's just a stupid teenager!", because it's an unrealistic stance based on an arbitrary measurement... not to mention it blatantly ignores how teenage pregnancy is, more often than not, a result of the woman being in an abusive relationship.
If a woman wants to get an abortion, carry to term and raise the child, or give their child to somebody else after it's born, I'll completely support her any which way so long as the choice is hers, and not a choice she doesn't want but has been pressured or forced into.
From a religious standpoint: Although embryology is not my strongest science, I know enough about it that if souls do exist, I'm about 99% confident that an embryo does not have one at conception. Two weeks following conception, the zygote splits up into 16 totipotent cells (meaning, each cell is capable of becoming a separate being). Sometimes, these 16 cells do split off into being different beings. Some are sometimes miscarried, other sometimes develop, meaning the woman is pregnant with 2 of more children. If the soul entered the body at conception, do these children each have a fraction of a soul? If not, where did the other souls come from, if they did not enter at conception? How do you decide which child gets the soul that apparently entered at conception? It's not a question I've ever gotten an answer to, and if anybody has an answer to it I would very much like to hear it.
From a comparative standpoint: I cannot view abortion as tantamount to infanticide for the same reason that I cannot view myself as eligible for senior's discounts on bus tickets. Early childhood stages and fetal stages are separate and very different points of development and need to be viewed objectively, rather than viewed in terms of what they would be in the future under a set of assumed conditions.
From a legal standpoint: For reasons listed above, making abortions unavailable with circumstantial exceptions just doesn't make a lick of sense. It's not enforceable, and it's not realistic, and it's passing judgment where it doesn't need to be passed. It's an invasion of privacy for a question that can't even be answered with confidence anywhere even close to perfect.
As it stands, no person has any right to any part of my body that I do not wish for them to be using, regardless if the only way to stop that person is for them to die. This is incredibly important to abortion because there is literally no way to keep a fetus alive when it is removed from the parent. If there was a way, then perhaps I'd lean more toward an alternative that could retain the mother's right to bodily domain and keep the fetus alive where killing it would be rendered unnecessary.
In addition, I do not buy into the idea that the mother is responsible to carry the fetus to term because it's her "fault" (and I use that word very, very loosely) that it exists in the first place. On the same coin, I'm not under legal obligation to donate matching organs or blood or bone marrow to a child of mine who might have inherited a disease from any of my recessive genes, despite it being my fault that the child exists and needs such a donation to begin with. I probably would go through with it anyway, but the fact that I'm not obligated is an important implication to every single person's right to domain over their own body -- it's yours, you get to decide who uses it and who doesn't use it, and a fetus does not have special rights, even if it WAS considered a person.
Keep in mind that all of the above applies even if the person in need will die without your contribution. This opens to door to letting people educate themselves on the issue of murder vs. other types of homicide.
I suppose some might like to counter this with "just don't have sex!", but in the real world, people are going to have sex. People having sex is as much a guarantee as eventual death, the speed of light, and paying taxes, and that's just the way it is. Trying to punish them for it because they don't want an outcome which has always been optional by random chance in the first place (even before birth control, you were never guaranteed to get pregnant by having sex) is stupid, there's no other way to put it. Sex is important to people, especially to those in long-term adult relationships. Let's be real here, it's not like women take birth control pills "in case I get raped".
I support late-term abortion, because I know that most women wouldn't get an abortion that late into the pregnancy anyway unless there was a severe problem with the pregnancy itself. Even if some women would, I firmly believe that abortion is an issue where a few that I guess some would call "bad apples", who are unrelated to the rest of the candidates, shouldn't have to ruin it for the whole bunch.
The woman should be made aware of when it is ultimately safer for her to deliver the baby (whether by induced labour, caesarian, etc) instead of abort it, which actually is often the case with late-term abortion. I believe that women should decide to carry to term when this is the case, as it would be avoiding unnecessary killing as well as ensuring that the woman's body doesn't arbitrarily stop belonging to her, but it's not my call to make for them if they do not want to undergo a delivery procedure.
Late-term abortion is legal with no restrictions in Canada, and we don't get women just aborting left-and-right just because they can, like opponents of "partial birth abortion" (what a stupid term) seemed to think they did when the ban was passed in the U.S.. Did you guys know that that form of abortion accounts for less than a percent of all abortions, and is normally performed when there is something irreparably wrong with the fetus, such as it already being dead? It's also the safest way of extracting the fetus in such a situation, as it causes the least scarring and bleeding for a procedure which has to be done anyway.
As a final point, I'm incredibly wary of opinions along the lines of "just have the baby and give it up for adoption!" as if it's as simple as saying the sentence is. While opponents of abortion are willing to make anything up to directly oppose the APA in saying things about how abortion harms women psychologically, is anybody willing to put their foot forward and find out what birthmothers go through? Here's a hint, if you've watched the movie Juno, don't think that every pregnancy in the world ends up like that one. Proponents of "adoption not abortion" typically seem to view pregnancy as a passive act that barely affects the woman, and I could go on into how this viewpoint is completely wrong, but a person who is far more educated than I am has written an extensive and enlightening essay about this very topic here.
As a side-note to the adoption issue, I'm firmly against the idea that women should have to have their children as if they owe something to people who can't have children. Apparently, there are so many loving infertile couples who would love to have your baby, but not any of the hundreds of thousands of kids who are already looking for parents!
I'm sure there's more stuff that I'm forgetting to mention, but if you've read up to this point you're probably tired of reading it anyway.
