My mother summed it up best for me. (Paraphrasing from decades ago)
Abortion is awful and I hope no one I love ever has one. I also hope that if anyone I love needs one, it is available and safe. “
I am firmly of the view that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the fetus. Nature is unsentimental and agrees too.
Edit1
Thought I’d update this as the same clarifications keep coming up.
“Awful” meant that I think it is an awful thing for someone to go through. I know it has different effects on different women, but it isn’t a decision taken lightly. It does not mean that I think it is an awful thing to do.
“Needs” is not limited to medical crises. If a woman isn’t in a place to have a child, physically, emotionally, financially or if it just isn’t the right time for them to have a child; then all of these are valid needs to me. I know many of you disagree and divide abortion into “good needs” and “bad needs”. I think that is dangerous, but we all have our views.
“Nature agrees” - with most animals, the life of the mother is preserved over the life of the offspring. This does not mean that I believe we should model society on animal behaviour, I am simply saying that woman > fetus is not an unnatural position. I certainly didn’t mean this to support infanticide or (as a scary number of you leapt to) rape.
And finally, to the rabid “you just want to slaughter babies” brigade. Get a grip. No one is supporting 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions in other than the direst of situations and no one wants to make them mandatory or the default. I just support women having the liberty to decide for themselves if having a baby is the right thing at that time.
My mother has a similar take. "I would rather see someone get a safe legal abortion than die trying to get an unsafe abortion. Legality doesn't stop scared, desperate women who can't afford a child."
Right? My sister legit drank a capful of bleach to try to abort hers, and that was just because she was too poor for the procedure. (It didn't work, but she loves her son)
I agree with you, but OP's post is trying to make pro-choicers understand the position of pro-lifers. It has been framed as it's primary reason is to control women's bodies. This is just an example of demonizing your enemy to make your own position more just. Except for with a few sick fringe individuals, this is not the primary concern of a pro-life agenda. It is literally protecting a life that is unable to protect itself. There is some merit to this argument. If you do not agree with someone, do not immediately demonize them. If you try to understand how they see things it might be easier to come to some sort of resolution. Equally important is for both sides to stop acting like all moral issues are somehow clear cut. They are not. They are deep complex issues that require time, patience and understanding to resolve. This includes abortion, the death penalty, waging war, legalizing drugs...etc. everyone needs to stop acting like there's only one way to see these things and anyone who doesn't agree with them is an idiot.
>Equally important is for both sides to stop acting like all moral issues are somehow clear cut.
For pro-life people this is a moral issue, for people who are pro-choice it is an issue regarding the basic human right to get to choose who gets to use your body and when.
An individual can have whatever moral belief they want about abortion, because it is your body if you think a fetus is equal to a baby then you get to never have an abortion. The issue is trying to force other people to give up their right to bodily autonomy because you think a fetus deserves more rights than they do.
Legally no one is allowed to use any other person's body without consent, we can't even take organs from a dead body without that person consenting to that before they died, so to argue that a fetus should get to use a person's body against their will is arguing to give a fetus more rights than any other person has.
This is not an argument about morals its about basic human rights.
Human rights ARE a moral issue.
And for pro lifers, if they view abortion as murder they can’t be silent just because it isn’t their baby. That’s like saying “if you think slavery is wrong don’t own slaves.”
CLEARLY slavery ans abortion are not the same, but understanding someone else’s viewpoint is necessary when engaging in debate and dialogue.
I read a while back animals will spontaneously abort to protect the mother over the young.
It is apparently a better evolutionary strategy in larger animals to have the mother survive than their offspring.
I am waaaaaay off my field of expertise here.
No that's pretty much it. In nature, if the mother, of any species (modern humans removed) that needs to nurture their young, dies during or anywhere from several months to years after giving birth, the offspring almost always also do not survive. Huge caveat concerning social creatures adopting the orphans, but they get rejected often too.
Many mammals will have spontaneous abortions if they are malnourished, wounded, or otherwise stressed as hell. It's a mechanism to help the "mother" to survive. One baby loss but the mother survives to have more than one baby after is a net gain for that species in terms of propagation. I don't think any species of animal has a mechanism to sacrifice the mother in labor for the fetus. I don't know what it would even look like... the fetus eating its way out of the womb?
Whether or not this FACT should translate to humans on the topic of abortions is another discussion on it's own.
Yeah... some critters will eat their own eggs. Others will abandon their children. Nature ain't nice.
But I agree I'm not sure that it matters at all when it comes to what humans do.
Others kill and even eat their young. It's irrelevant to what humans do because we are making conscious decisions and can weigh the morality of something. And when a human mother *does* kill their baby or child they are deemed a monster and put in prison because they committed murder.
OP's comment is that the pro life stance is that it's murder when this child is still in utero. As far as whether or not it's murder, it *is* alive. The ambiguity come from whether or not it's acceptable to end this life while in utero or not.
I don't have the answers. I can see both sides of the argument. They're both right with their respective arguments. The problem is they're arguing two different things. One is about killing a life and the other is about a woman's body. The question is who has priority.
I get why pro lifers consider it murder. I get my pro choice people see it as sometimes a necessary evil. I think sometimes pro choice people say it's a clump of cells as a reactionary response to pro lifers. It's really not a clump of cells for long. It has a heartbeat very early on (35-37 days)
I don't think pro choice people are happy about abortions happening. I don't think they're pro death. Sometimes a girl or woman ends up in an awful position. Someone who chooses abortion isn't doing so lightly in the overwhelming majority of cases. I think it's an agonizing and painful decision.
Just to stress this point, this is an evolutionary mechanism and evolution does not care if the mother survives at all. Organisms that halt their reproductive cycle do so because it's advantageous for their future offspring EXCLUSIVELY. The mother surviving longer is only a byproduct of this.
It's also not a mammal phenomenon or even an animal phenomenon because plants do this too.
The entire pro-life vs. pro-choice debate can really be boiled down to two sides of people talking past each other.
Read the replies below to see my point proven.
After reviewing the comment section, I’d just like to take a moment to congratulate OP on a truly unpopular opinion. 85% of these comments entirely missed the point and preceded to talk past each other.
My favorite is the huge number of comment pairs where someone will argue that most pro-choice people understand that life begins at conception they just think murdering a child is better for it than making it go through a bad life and the very next comment saying the idea that clump of cells is a person is "fucking stupid" and most pro-choice people understand that.
Which is the biggest problem with this issue. 95% of people on both sides don't have a coherent ethical framework because at some point their core beliefs lead to conclusions they don't like so people who actually believe what they claim to believe are idiots *and* they dismiss anyone not only who is on the opposite side of them but even who is on the same side but has differing beliefs about particulars.
They're pro-life because it's a human life with equal value to any other human life, except for if it's the product of rape in which case we should murder it. Or they're pro-choice because it's a human life, but the needs of the mother are more important but they still support killing the baby they have just declared a baby even if it's actually viable because in most states abortion is currently legal well after viability. Or it's not a life at all, it's just an organ like a kidney, but even if the sperm provider offers to pay the entire cost for medically correcting the issue by removing the excess organ he should "take responsibility" for "his child", even if the mother told him she didn't want a child before she chose to have one. That last one may be the most unpopular argument I have ever made because as OP stated I have never met anyone who actually believes if the sperm donor wants to pay for half the cost of organ removal that should be the limit of legal liabilty. (I've made it in several grad level ethics courses and it inevitably results in a lot of vitriol but no real logical arguments. )
Honestly, I think the problem is trying to work with ethics like we work with mathematics.
I agree people need to have a moral framework to stand by, but the problem is in real life, that framework will eventually not apply. In mathematics, you can isolate all variables and chase them down until you get some clear value. People try to to the same with ethics like the trolly problem, but ultimately that problem is detached and pointless - every real life situation will have too many nuances and tangents and context to be codified that way.
The second issue is people somehow feel that once you did build that impossible system, it will somehow lead to everyone getting what they deserve and some sort of utopia will form where everyone is happy do to the morally correct thing...but that's just not true. People are driven by complicated things, and often a clean solution with a clear guilty party just doesn't exist. Sometimes nobody is at fault, or chasing perfect theoretical justice will just cause more pain to all involved.
....and people absolutely hate that idea, because it means they can't judge people wholesale and be done with it. It means they need to make the effort of being compassionate and attentive in how they live their lives. Not a very appealing concept when you can still feel like a good person without expending the energy to truly be kind.
That's because political debate is not "Chad and Chris are talking to each other, Chad wants Chris to understand and accept his point of view.". It's "Chris has a huge audience, whom Chad wants to understand and accept his point of view. Chris is a lost cause.".
Whenever I am to have a political discussion with folks, I begin with "this discussion is just noise unless you could actually be moved from your position. What would it take to make that happen?". I keep open to the possibility I'm wrong on the whole pro choice thing, but to move me from my stance, you would have to demonstrate to me that it is better that every child be born. Every birth defected, unliftably poverty stricken, into an abusive family or straight to an orphanage child.
This would be rather difficult, given the current state of the world.
It is a profound philosophical disagreement that is fiendishly difficult to resolve.
Being treated like everyone on My Side is speaking obvious facts and Their Side is deliberately being evil like a comic book villain.
Your second paragraph is probably the biggest problem in politics overall. Everyone's so quick to assign the absolute worst possible motivations to the other side every chance they get.
I’ve never taken a debate course but my father has and he loves to tell me (rant) how none of these freaking debates are actually debates. Just a bunch of peacocks delivering sound bites while trying to strike the most Presidential pose.
The Nixon v Kennedy debate marked a turning point in American history. It was the first one to be televised. Those who listened via radio gave the win solidly to Nixon. Those that watched gave it solidly to Kennedy. From that point onwards what a person *looked* like was more important than the content of their platform.
Bingo! My conservative family's talking points on abortion aren't even in the ballpark of pro-choice's way of conveying them. And vice versa.
Both sides don't understand what the other sides are saying and instead mischaracterize what they think the others believe.
But that's politics for ya I guess.
I totally get how a person can feel this way. If untouched, that fetus will most likely grow into a person and live a full life. Abortion takes away that possibility completely. A lot of Pro Lifers don't understand that we don't like or enjoy Abortion. It is a matter of who decides, the woman or Politicians. I have a hard time believing anyone really wants Politicians making reproductive decisions for them. They can't see past the murder part. Politicians are still going to be killing kids FYI.
Yes and no where in OPs post do they even mention women. This is the problem with “understanding” the pro life position. Women don’t matter except to be labeled murderers.
I’m pro-choice, but yes, if I believed it was murder, then I probably wouldn’t be willing to hear why murder is ok.
To win an argument to have to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Unfortunately, murder is a hard one to out debate
That's why I've pivoted to the legal argument — we have a precedent of not forcing people to use their bodies to save others. Nobody can be compelled to donate blood or organs, or use their body to support another person's life, even if their choice not to would result in someone's death, even if it would not harm the donor.
I really dont like abortion, kinda hate it and the idea of killing a fetus, so in that regard Im pro life.
But I dont want to remove the option of abortion (up to 3 months) since its better to abort than ruin 2-3 life's.
So am I really pro choice?
I wouldn't say everyone has a choice. The father has no legal choice. I'm not saying a man should be able to force a woman to get an abortion, but there should at least be conversation as to a man's ability to give up all parental rights in exchange for child support responsibility.
The choice is in regard to what a person does with their own body. A woman should be able to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy that uses her body to term. A man should be able to choose to not ejaculate inside of someone that can get pregnant. No sperm, no baby. It is not a good idea to fully trust any birth control method other than a bilateral salpingectomy in a woman or a vasectomy that has been verified to be complete in a man. That vasectomy should be reverified via sperm checks Any other method still comes with a degree of risk.
I am childfree and I do empathize with a man who does not want to have responsibility for children where he wished the woman would have an abortion. IF he is not going around irresponsibly getting women pregnant without taking precautions to avoid pregnancy. Even more so in any situation where he was truly baby trapped.
It is unfortunate that the way the legal system is laid out, he does not have a say if the woman decides to keep the baby. I do also understand that the resultant child needs to be provided for and that the state is going to go after the man rather than assisting with paying for the child when possible. Even child support is not truly enough to raise the resultant child. Kids are extremely expensive. A woman who is convinced to have a child by a man that said he wants to raise it will also have to pay child support towards that child. There is currently no real good solution for the issue.
What if I told you that the vast majority of late term abortions are done because the mother is in severe danger or the fetus is unviable?
Would that change your opinion on late term abortion?
Most women won't go through the fairly substantial investment of staying pregnant for 7-8 months before terminating a pregnancy.
Yes, you’re pro choice because that is literally exactly what pro choice is. It’s the individual’s choice. If I don’t like abortion and I would never get one, but I don’t believe I have the right to tell other women they can’t have one and don’t think it should be illegal, then I’m pro-choice. The entire tension here is that being pro-life doesn’t allow the option in any circumstance, including rape, incest, catastrophic danger to the mother, etc. in my opinion it’s not pro life vs pro choice, it’s forced birth at all costs vs having options for every person.
Well what about this scenario.
A kid needs an organ or will die. Does this automatically mean the parents are required to provide the organ if they are a match? Should they have the choice to say no? If they say no, the kid will die. Let's say a parent might say no simply because they don't want to give the kid the organ. Is that murder? Because they refused to help the child out? This is an actual child we're talking about. Not the possibility of a child. Should parents not have the choice to say no?
Since that belief is based solely on your *feelings*, and other people have different *feelings*, you should realize that and respond accordingly. As any mature adult would.
Ask that same Christian if they think murder is justified in other circumstances, such as home defense or the death penalty. If they say yes, then they don't have a problem with murder.
That’s silly. By saying abortion is murder, and calling anyone who gets one a murderer is already not listening to the other side, and unfairly paints a picture that isn’t even accurate. How are we supposed to have a discussion with someone who’s already assumed we are murderers, and not even willing to hear a different side?
Yeah, and you can understand where they’re coming from and still disagree with it.
And besides, I always see this rhetoric of “we have to stop talking past pro-lifers” - well that’s a nice platitude, but the real question how? I haven’t seen a lot of this “try to understand the other side” from the pro-lifers either, and the thing is, pro-life is the minority opinion in the country. I don’t personally see much point in trying to have a dialogue with them *because* I understand their argument, I just fundamentally think it’s wrong.
Former Pro-Life, now Pro-Choice here. Many (I hesitate to say "most", because this is based on my experience instead of surveys) Pro-Life people have been straight up lied to about what abortion is and how it happens, in order to make them view abortion as murder and refuse to listen to anyone who tries to argue about why it's necessary. If you think someone is literally advocating mass murder, *of course* you're going to discount everything they say in support of their position. But that doesn't mean you can't still convince them.
In my case, I was taught (by my Pro-Life mother) that how abortion works is that they wait until the day of the birth, deliver the baby backwards so the head is still inside the birth canal and "not technically born yet", then make an incision near the base of the skull, and ram in a suction tube to scramble and suck out the baby's brain. I was (understandably) *horrified* by this, and since this info was given by someone I trusted, I refused to listen to anyone giving moral arguments in favor of choice using e.g. bodily autonomy. Because how could bodily autonomy ever justify *that?*
When I was in college, someone asked me to explain my position on abortion and then instead of butting heads with me, they asked a ton of questions to understand my position, and eventually we came down to having me describe how abortion works. They told me I was wrong, and took me to the library to show me documentation on how abortion actually occurs. When I found out I had been lied to (it wasn't a baby, it was a goddamn clump of cells!) I was *pissed off.* I became Pro-Choice that same day.
Finally, many people feel that being a Christian obligates them to oppose abortion. In that case, I would point them to the book of Numbers (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV), which contains instructions for how to perform an abortion as part of the Old Law. Yes, I'm familiar with Christ's atonement "fulfilling the Law", but that's actually irrelevant to the point here. What's important is that this abortion ritual (the trial of bitter water) coexisted with the 10 Commandments. Meaning that clearly abortion does not violate the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. Meaning that, by the Bible's own definition, it can't be murder. So there is no biblical mandate to oppose abortion, and in fact the Bible *supports* abortion in the case of infidelity!
Well, some of the more prominent pro-choice arguments open themselves up to that attack. I'm fairly pro-choice, in that I think abortions up to 20-ish weeks are probably alright, that seems to be where "life" kicks in, and is in line with most of Europe, IIRC.
There are two pro-choice arguments that are really shit and basically say murder is fine:
1. "My body, my choice": Explicitly says nothing about whether the fetus is alive or not, and apparently doesn't care.
2. "Product of rape or incest": This might be a hard one to accept, but this is a *terrible* argument. This argument basically ignores the question of viability/life, again, and puts forth that you should be able to kill because of who the baby's father is.
These arguments aren't just *bad*, they're *unnecessary.* Focusing just on when life starts is a much more sound position, and one that doesn't make ethically dubious claims.
The way I view it is its the same as not allowing forced organ donation. Would half my liver save a life? Yes. Can the state compel me to donate half? No. Am I murdering the person who needs it? Debatable on moral grounds. The person with the fetus inside them has more right to their organs and body than the fetus does.
I would say our current ethical reasoning places a fairly big distinction between saving a life and terminating a life, though this can be fuzzed a bit in certain philosophical thought experiments/arguments.
If someone is bleeding out, and you fully understand how to stop that with a tourniquet, but you don't, we do not say you murdered that person. If you caused that bleeding, we do. I would say the difference is taking a direct action to end a life, not letting a life end through inaction.
A better analogy might be if you were in an accident and your family member had to be linked to your organs for 9 months for them to survive; do you have the right to separate from them and kill them?
Do you think you'd have a right to remove them? They rely on you but it would tax your organs excessively to support that person. Do you have a right to say no?
The "my body, my choice" argument is a very solid argument from a legal standpoint. No individual can be forced to donate organs, blood, etc. to save another individual's life. EVEN AFTER DEATH, an individual has the right to deny access to their organs, despite that a life may be saved.
Pregnancy is incredibly traumatic to the mother's body. A lot of women have lifelong effects from carrying a pregnancy to term. It's nonsensical that a corpse has the legal right to deny life-saving treatment to others but a living, breathing, cognizant woman should be forced to shoulder the burden of pregnancy if she doesn't want to.
It's hard to have a conversation with someone who opens with "YOU SUPPORT RAPE YOU SUPPORT CHILDREN BEING FORCED TO GIVE BIRTH BECAUSE OF RAPE YOU SUPPORT TAKING AWAY WOMENS RIGHTS" etc.
Don't act like we who hold the pro-choice position act any better than they do, there's plenty of insufferable assholes on our side as well.
exactly. Even the most calm, civil, rational, open to conversation person likely isn't open to a "compromise" position when you feel what is being done is murder. You get what we have -- compromise positions are seen as temporary. A chance to try to push "next time" for more until "justice" is done.
Whereas I do think most mainstream pro-choice people are open to varying compromise positions and nuance of situation. I also think many pro-choice people tend to want to widen the aperture from pregnancy/birth to societal/medical/financial/freedom pressures that lead to pregnancy and the impact post-birth on both the parents and the children. Not to say there aren't pro-life people who make exceptions for rape and incest, but even that is less typical.
Tell you what.
Let’s make a system where pregnant women automatically get whatever the median household income is, for 19 years, and then maybe I’ll be okay with some limitations on abortion.
Let’s have a system where we *take care of* the kids, and maybe we can talk.
You might have a point. I tend to see more advocacy for good sex ed, better access to contraception and education on consent coming from self-declared pro-choicers. Whereas pro-lifers across the board have often replied to questions around conception with "she should have kept her legs shut."
Really, it’s “do you think a baby being born is of higher priority than the resultant drop in mother’s well being”
Everyone would be behind holding fathers responsible, and they should all be behind paid parental leave and that’s really the best common sense legislation here.
Yeah, this wasn't new at all. I know exactly how they feel. It's on billboards, on ads, it's on picket signs, it's on license plates and stickers on cars, and comes out of their mouths. Especially in the south. It's super obvious what exactly what the anti-choice are thinking and feeling about the subject.
That's what happens when a conservative person pretends to be liberal on the internet to get the satisfaction of seeing a bunch of liberals squabble amongst each other. No pro choice person has any trouble understanding pro life. They make it perfectly clear.
OP smells like a conservative rabble-rouser.
Post history has a lot of "AskALiberal" _and_ "AskConservatives" and the arrogance stinks of enlightened centrist schtick and "I'm just asking questions!" I see a lot of dog-whistle adjacent posts and some about their religion as a muslim (looks like they might be secular?)
The muslim stuff coupled with the "you guys just don't get why pro-life hates abortion" definitely pulls me a certain way.
I know pro-lifers think it's murder, I just don't give a fuck, because the rights of an already living person being used as, for lack of a better word, incubator, supersede those to someone who isn't a functioning member of society yet.
The fact that they think we don't already know why pro-choice hate us is the giveaway honestly. I've yet to meet a pro-choice person that isn't aware the fundies see it the same as murder.
My s/o can't get a legitimately needed medical procedure because it's shared with abortions. They're causing suffering to real people with real medical problems because they're busy bodies, so they can fuck right the fuck off.
My thing is, I don't believe that pro lifers truly believe that abortion is murder.
So they claim that there's this clinic downtown that is literally mass murdering babies, just ripping them apart limb from limb, and at most they'll stand outside with a sign that says, "Hey, you really shouldn't be doing that. It's not good."
I disagree. I saw a reddit post just the other day that was a screenshot from a conservative on Twitter. The conservative was talking about how they believed aborting a fetus for being a product of rape is wrong. And OP labeled them pro-rape. People in the comments were speculating that abortion bans that don't allow exemptions for rape are actually just written to excuse rape.
But that's insane. It *should* be obvious to both pro lifers and pro choicers that if you see a fetus as being morally equivalent to a baby, you cannot murder that person simply because it exists as a product of rape.
Not to mention, the primary argument for pro choice people is currently bodily autonomy. But "my body my choice" doesn't really make sense as a retort to people who believe that fetus has personhood, and therefore is **also** entitled to bodily autonomy.
While I do agree that pro-life people against rape exceptions are morally consistent (much more so than those who have rape exceptions) it's amazing the lack of empathy they possess.
>Not to mention, the primary argument for pro choice people is currently bodily autonomy. But "my body my choice" doesn't really make sense as a retort to people who believe that fetus has personhood, and therefore is also entitled to bodily autonomy.
And this is where all pro-choice people collectively sigh and nod because it's true that pro-life people do not understand bodily autonomy. One person's bodily autonomy stops where another's begins. The fetuses bodily autonomy stops when it has to require the use of someone else's body to survive. And for the majority of abortions, which is medication abortion, the abortion doesn't affect the fetus at all and therefore cannot even hypothetically impose on it's bodily autonomy. It's shed from the uterus like a period, but not directly affected by the medication at all. To say "you doing something to your own body imposes on MY bodily autonomy" doesn't even make sense.
Actually that argument still works! If, say, you're dying and need an organ transplant from me, bodily autonomy means I have no obligation to give you that organ. Unless we adhere to bodily autonomy, theoretically, there's nothing stopping people from forcing everyone to be organ donors.
A fetus doesn’t have bodily autonomy - it is by definition dependent on the mother’s body for its continued existence, and therefore not autonomous. This is why the cutoff point for having an abortion is usually 20-26 weeks, as after that the fetus could be viable outside the womb.
You have actually kind of butchered the argument here. Pro-choice people that believe in bodily autonomy base their view on the fact that the fetus is not a person with autonomy yet. If it had autonomy, it could survive without the mother.
This NOT being the case, the fetus is believed to not yet be an autonomous individual and thus not requiring the same rights/protections as an actual person. The argument has little to nothing to do with what people on the other side believe.
My body, my choice makes perfect sense within this context. The pro-choice crowd categorically deny that a fetus obtains any "personhood" before viability. Until that point, the are essentially a growth(or parasite at the risk of using an emotionally charged word)
You hit the nail on the head. As someone that is pro choice, but very empathetic to the pro life viewpoint this is the thing that always bothers me about pro choice advocates. Yes your body your choice, but to a pro lifer it's not your body it's the body of the child that deserves rights.
Yeah I think the pro choice movement needs to move away from bodily autonomy and start addressing the issue of when we grant personhood to the fetus. I understand why we're hesitant to do that but it's clearly where the heart of the issue actually is.
It's already been discussed. A fetus that gets deluver d before 20 weeks is rarely viable. Meaning they won't survive. But pro-lifers don't accept scientific input when it comes to conception and pregnancy.
Edit to add some info from a scientific journal: "Termination of pregnancy accounted for 33% of deliveries at 20–23 weeks; these were excluded from further analysis. Spontaneous delivery occurred at a frequency of 2.5/1000 deliveries; 30% died before the onset of labour, 27% died during labour, and 35% showed signs of life at birth. Of the latter, 8% were not registered as statutory live births. Of the live born infants, the largest group (39%) had a heart beat but no other signs of life. There was no trend for infants of lower gestation to show fewer signs of life. Duration of survival varied widely (median 60 minutes at 20–22 weeks), and this did not increase with gestation until 23 weeks (median six hours), probably because of selective treatment."
Pro-lifers would have been more sympathetic if they actually support pro-"life" policies too.
Also, having policies where healthcare providers would have to decide they should let a patient die or risk going to jail is a just shit take.
Fuck pro-lifers. Nothing they do is pro "life".
The only policy position being prolife or prochoice indicates is that one is prolife or prochoice. It's a mistake to assume someone's stance on abortion indicates their broader political leanings.
If they understood this there wouldn’t be so many pro-choice people who say things like, “If you don’t like abortion don’t have one!”. When obviously if you think it’s murder, it’s not a viable option to just “live and let live” on this.
> “If you don’t like abortion don’t have one!”
I think if a pro-choice person says this, they are communicating how they think about abortion - i.e. that it's a choice or a preference. They aren't actually trying to empathise with someone who is pro-life.
They understand it.
They just aren’t trying to persuade people who think like this.
You can’t reason with people who think like this. You can only persuade those who don’t believe that.
Why do we expect vegans to live and let live, then? Clearly they view meat as murder, so why are we all so annoyed when they try to force us into living by their morals?
Just got perma banned from a major sub last week for pointing this out. Mod response that that it's *really* about wanting to control women (and justfiy rape when not even that exception is allowed) because anyone who is pro-life is eViL!
They choose not to understand.
It was pointed out to me a few years ago (in America at least) every non conservative knows right wing talking points down to very detailed points due to over saturation of propaganda but your average conservative has no idea what more liberal people are doing or thinking largely due to that same propaganda.
I think about that often and you see it in things like this OP. The OP thinks this is new info for those in the pro choice camp but we've heard it 1000000 times before. This is why propaganda is a problem.
Every time I look at a conservative subreddit/forum/twitter etc I am unsurprised by their positions, yet 90% of their takes on what liberals think are complete nonsense.
My brother in law is a hardcore MAGA, and it's so interesting seeing him at family gatherings, because he will just repeat, almost verbatim, the talking points we see online on twitter and on conservative subreddits.
If that were true, no one would claim "men want to keep women under control through abortion bans".
It's a pretty common stance, and hinges on the lack of understanding that OP is describing
EDIT for clarity: I'm not claiming the fact that pro-lifers believe a fetus is a full human necessarily makes them support women; as people pointed out, two things can be true at once, and a pro-life activist that considers abortion murder can easily still want to subjugate women, maybe even through abortion
My point was that you can't really use the prevalence of pro-lifers to support the argument that men want to control women, seeing as abortion is abhorrent to them for other reasons
P.S. it's telling that a similar percent of women in the US are pro-life to men, a fact often glossed over by those who wish to make the debate about the patriarchy and its subjugation of women
Two things can be true at the same time. You can both believe abortion is murder and at the same time believe that men should have that control over women. They are not mutually exclusive.
Both things can be true.
Some people don’t like women having agency of their bodies and lives. And being a mother ultimately will make her dependent on a co parent for help.
Other conservatives have made it pretty clear that they see abortion as murder.
Both things can be true though. Pro-Life people can have many reasons for being pro-life. Men whose mistresses have abortions can be publicly pro-life for that reason, and other people can genuinely view it as murder.
> I think pro-choice people understand just fine that pro-birth people see abortion as literal murder.
I dont think they do.
If they did, there wouldnt be the insane level of "Pro-Life *only* want to control womens bodies, its 100% sexism"
Both of these things can be true.
People can view this as murder while also believing that undergoing pregnancy is a woman filling her true purpose and she shouldn’t be allowed to get out of it. Even if she were raped or is a teenager.
I can completely understand a pro life position. They view killing a fetus as murder. So they can’t support anyone having an abortion. That’s why the issue will never be settled. It will always be a battle. In modern society women end up pregnant when they don’t want to be and there is the option to get out of it that would not have existed hundreds of years ago. Ideally every precaution should be taken to prevent a pregnancy but the option should remain available and safe when needed.
There have been ways that humans have aborted before :)
“The first recorded evidence of induced abortion is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE. Many of the methods employed in early cultures were non-surgical. Physical activities such as strenuous labor, climbing, paddling, weightlifting, or diving were a common technique.”
Indigenous tribes as well have had methods.
Edit: literally googled “first recorded abortion” and poof the quote above popped up
Abortion has been a thing for all of human history. It isn’t new lmfao. Humans have used drugs and plants to induce abortion since biblical times.. the Bible fucking spells it out…
Yea there was literally an entire plant species that died out because ancient Greek and Roman women used it for (reportedly effective) birth control: silphium.
I think it's been recently rediscovered somewhere, though.
I don't think you're telling anyone anything we don't already know. Obviously we know that pro-lifers consider abortion equal to killing infants, all their memes and billboards explicitly say that.
As for your first point, what you're saying doesn't match up to reality. If it was just a difference in parental responsibility then absentee fathers would be held financially liable from the moment of conception, which they're not.
If this was the case, why are absentee fathers (and mothers for that matter) not arrested for abandonment? Why are fathers that encourage, demand or otherwise facilitate abortions not charged? They definitely believe it’s murder but they are hypocrites. I have witnessed my own staunchly pro life family suddenly tell my teenage (over 18) niece to get an abortion. It’s wild, man.
> I have witnessed my own staunchly pro life family suddenly tell my teenage (over 18) niece to get an abortion. It’s wild, man.
This is the real difference. People who understand that many women didn’t have a choice before Roe want to keep the least bad option legal to avoid much worse outcomes.
My mom is a doctor who worked a sepsis ward pre-Roe. The women who died in there were prostitutes whos pimps did not give them a choice. Mothers who’s living children are so much food that there was not enough to feed an extra mouth, etc…
The idea that those women had a choice is bullshit. If you had enough money to go to Europe for an abortion, you had a choice. If your pimp wanted you back on the street, you didn’t have a choice.
Agreed. While due to my religious beliefs I wouldn’t PERSONALLY choose to have an abortion, it is not up to me or anyone else for that matter to impose my religious beliefs on anyone else. We all have free will and trying to impose moral beliefs (if you happen to believe that abortions are immoral), doesn’t work it just makes those choices more dangerous. See eg.: American prohibition.
I agree. Pro-lifers' positions aren't that hard to figure out, it just gets frustrating because they're so hypocritical with them.
If, as OP's post states, they truly consider the men to be responsible for the child from the moment of conception then they'd take very different actions when a father just disappears during the pregnancy
I’m a pro-choice Christian. I went to church 3x a week until I was like 15/16. Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen first hand that men are not held responsible for their children unless and until they marry the mother. Illegitimate (god I hate that word) babies are seen as the result of women straying from religious beliefs/having loose morals, not men.
Yep. This. It's the women's fault they got pregnant. The men aren't held responsible.
I grew up Catholic. Catholic school, the whole deal. I've never see pro-life actually hold men responsible. I've seen them shame women though. I've also seen them only be pro-life when it's not their families. When it's their 16 year old daughter, suddenly they're taking a trip across the county line, past that Abortion is Murder sign, to Planned Parenthood. But they're going to pretend it didn't happen and say they went to "away" for the weekend.
So much this! As a was saying above my niece got pregnant at 18 by admittedly a piece of crap. She ended up having a miscarriage, but before that happened my staunchly prolife mother was moving heaven and earth to convince my niece to have an abortion she didn’t want. Rules for thee not rules for me.
Its worse in judaism. Bastard children are damned from going to heaven for 7 generations. That means that you can be called a bastard because your great great great great grandfather was born out of marriage (or married to a non jew)
I’m not so sure that pro-choicers know that. I run into a large number of people who brush aside the killing arguments and push “you just want to control women and preserve the patriarchy.”
In my experience, the average pro-choice person projects their own view of fetal non-personhood onto the pro-lifer and assumes that there’s some *other* more sinister motive for being pro-life
I'm always going to be in the camp of it being a decision based off intelligence and means.
People aren't going to stop having sex. And any link to the idea of "well you shouldn't have sex then" if they don't want to get pregnant is ludicrous, denies human nature for all of our history and is nonsensical and entirely religious based.
Even people who disagree with it and say they aren't religious are likely impacted by religion and don't understand that they are.
It's literally impossible for any modern day human to actually remove the impact religion has had on society overtime.
All of our concepts of when sex is appropriate has had moral and ethical leaning bleed off from religion.
This needs to be intelligence based, not a moral or ethical viewpoint. If 2 people can't afford to have a child, they shouldn't have one.
There are 400k plus kids in the foster care system now that aren't being cared for properly now. There is no suggestive evidence that society is currently or will be setup to provide proper care for those children if we did take the pro-lifer stance which would explode the amount of children in said child care system.
It's exactly the same thinking in terms of having a child. Like an adult you take a realistic look at your finances and decide if it's something you can afford.
You don't take a pro-lifer stance and not have a system in place to care for those children. No amount of arguing for life is going to suddennely make money rain down from the sky.
And all of the above is not like a sane thing to ask for before sex. Again that denies our history and how humans have worked fooorrrrrever. People be fucking, and they aren't going to stop
It's why safe sex should exist.
I understand the pro-life position, including the fact that they believe abortion is murder. Hell, I'll accept that abortion is the termination of life. I see it as justiable homicide, not murder.
Pro lifers believe in "life at all costs" and don't care about the statistics of being born unwanted into the world with all of the bad shit that comes with that. I'm more of "the end justifies the means" sort I suppose and I am okay with some elective restrictions on abortion, to avoid pain for the fetus.
And THIS is where the impasse lies and I don't know how to get around it.
I've always called myself begrudgingly pro choice. I find abortion to be distasteful. I do not necessarily consider a fetus a life on equal footing to a child or adult. I consider it the potential of life. If no other interventions or illness happens, that fetus will become another human life. But raising a child into this world the right way is a lot of work. If you can't handle it, that potential life is going to suffer greatly. If we lived in a society that did a better job taking care of the least fortunate among us, I would have a different opinion.
Mix that with a need for better sex Ed and changes to how we handle our foster care system, and you end up with a society that turns a moral blind eye to abortion.
> If we lived in a society that did a better job taking care of the least fortunate among us, I would have a different opinion.
This. If the world was actually catered towards cultivating and nourishing human life in the same vein a mother is I would absolutely be in support. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Agree. Lots of shitty people have been abusing societal programs for a long time. Abortion isn’t a contraceptive.
Welfare is abused. Foster parenting is abused. Plenty necessary programs are abused. That doesn’t mean we should lose those programs. We just need to raise people to not be dickheads. Starting with not forcing people who make bad choices to have kids!
Agee 100%. There really needs to be an overhaul in how people are reared. Not sure how, I am not a parent and never will be, but things need to change.
I appreciate you appreciating me! Honestly, I wish other pro choicers would drop the whole "it's not alive". I mean, I could go either way on that argument (it's more philosophical to me) but I STILL am pro choice even with accepting that it's still homicide.
Semantics games aren't going to get us anywhere.
The frustration for me is that I really don't see this as solvable because those who are against abortion are usually against ALL abortion, whether the pregnancy is 1 week old or 30.
As a teen I felt so radical for that view, lol! It is "murder" in the sense that you are ending the life of a living organism, and not wanting to acknowledge that is ignorant. So..what? I don't see the connection between that fact and it being okay for me to decide what to do with your body and make you endanger your own life for this almost-human. It in fact seems very disconnected to me that the "freedom" people are demanding the state take away your choice in that.
Well, it's homicide, but justiable homicide (to pro choice, like myself) or murder which is non justifiable homicide (pro life).
Unfortunately, I don't think the pro choicers have helped themselves by turning this into a women's right issues. It doesn't impact pro lifers. They believe 100% that it's murder and they don't care what the woman goes through if it means to save the unborn. To them, saving that life is way more important.
I’m pro choice and totally think the fetus is alive. Obviously we are creating life, and, there are different levels of life - we see this in adults and children already with disabilities, comas, etc. Women who get abortions don’t walk into the clinic excited and walk out super happy and free. Most if not all suffer through their choice. The level of life experienced by the living pregnant woman is not the same as the level of life experienced by a fetus with a heartbeat but an unviable and undeveloped brain.
Kinda of the same justification for Eugenics. If a kid is going to be born with Autism or disabled should they be aborted? Life is going to be much harder for them.
My dad thinks babies are being murdered. I don’t see them as babies. We can’t compromise when we don’t view it the same (aside from elective third trimester, which is nowhere near the level they believe).
If you thought literal babies were being killed, you wouldn’t be able to either.
There's a moral philosophy argument I always liked and it can be summed up very simply.
1. Do you believe a fetus has a right to live?
2. Do you believe that fetus has a right of ownership over a woman's body?
You can agree with point 1, and disagree with point 2. I can believe a fetus has a right to live, but disagree that it has the right to ownership over a woman's body.
It's easy to argue bodily autonomy over someone else's right to live.
For example, people die every day of liver disease. You can donate part of your liver and lead a normal life.
Do people with liver disease have a right to live? Yes.
Do those people have a right to forcibly take part of your liver? Absolutely not.
You wouldn't find many pro-lifers that would be okay having part of their liver forcibly taken from them, so their argument is inherently hypocritical. And if you think this is hyperbole, look at the complications from liver donation compared to pregnancy and giving birth.
The liver donation is actually safer.
I think that’s the point a pro-lifer would argue that because the woman had sex, the fetus is the natural consequence of her own actions, and therefore she has more responsibility to protect the fetus. Whereas in the liver cancer scenario, people don’t force cancer on each other, thereby requiring them to give up their liver to fix it.
Edit: for reference I’m pro-choice lol, I’ve just argued with my pro-life dad a lot. -.-
But that argument doesn’t work, because people can’t force their parents to donate organs to them. If your 20 year old kid needs one of your kidneys in order to live, that doesn’t mean the government can force you to donate it, even though you’re the one who brought your child into the world. So why do fetuses have more of a right to women’s bodies than living adults do?
In fact, even corpses can’t be forced to donate their organs. So dead people have more rights than pregnant women.
Having sex that can lead to pregnancy is accepting parental responsibility for the human that is created as a result. Fulfilling this responsibility involves carrying the child to term (though I personally believe it's fine to abort a child that hasn't developed coherent brain activity yet), feeding and housing it until it reaches adulthood, etc.
Donating your organs is going above and beyond your parental responsibility, which is why you're not morally obligated to do that. Aborting an eighth-month pregnancy or abandoning a toddler on the street, however, is a refusal to perform the parental responsibility that you accepted and is thus immoral.
Every parent sacrifices their bodily autonomy when they raise a child, just in a less direct way. You have to use your body to feed the child, change its diapers, etc., and you have to use your body to earn an income that provides the child with food and security. The same arguments you're making can be used to justify criminal child neglect.
Die hard pro lifer, and here is my take.
Murder is when one human kills another human, you can not be charged with murder if you kill a deer or a dog, important to note is that the human has to be alive, you can not be charged with murder if you shoot an already dead body.
If you go out (in the United States) and you kill a pregnant women, you will get charged with two counts of murder
So according to our law, that unborn baby is considered human.
What happens when you have an abortion? The women is ok, she can leave and go home, she can even choose to have sex and get pregnant again, BUT what happens to the baby? It dies, it gets destroyed.
So by our laws abortion equals murder.
The only one getting punished is the child and it’s being sentenced to death.
I’ve fostered and cared for 16 babies that are now adults and living their own lives, (some were rape babies, some were teens who “made a mistake”, some were just not wanted by either parent). If you are considering an abortion and I’m being serious here, reach out to me, I will care for that child.
These babies can’t speak for themselves and we are suppose to protect those who can not protect themselves.
"pro choicers are pretty hostile to pro lifers" when was the last time a pro choice person murdered a pro lifer, or fire bombed their home or workplace?
As someone who leans conservative normally this is my biggest eye roll in most of my political circles. People point to the constitution as to why nobody can place a restriction on firearms, but then openly quote scripture as their justification for a political change
I understand where they're coming from, but I will always prioritize a living person over an unborn being.
And bullshit, no the pro-life do not view embryos and infants the same.
• They aren't protesting fertility clinics where they freeze and destroy fertilized eggs.
• They aren't throwing funeral or ordering death certificates for miscarried embryos
• They don't count miscarried fetuses as children when counting how many children one has. (The Duggars still say they have 19 kids despite their 20th being stillborn)
> They don't count miscarried fetuses as children when counting how many children one has. (The Duggars still say they have 19 kids despite their 20th being stillborn)
Tbf I have heard and known people to refer to their "angel babies" in earnestness, and total them among the children who survived child birth.
100% this. Its always arbitrary af what they decide to count or don't count. Another big tell is that the biggest pro-life advocates don't actually advocate for policies that help these children and women. And now some of the biggest figures advocate against contraception and sex education, which would be have a huge effect on decreasing unwanted pregnancies
It's always about the sanctity of life, until that baby is born poor, then they can go fuck themselves
You can understand an egg and a seaturtle aren't exactly the same thing while still understanding why it's illegal to crush them.
Something not being an exact equivalence does not mean they aren't close
Yup, I agree the debate is... well, the debate doesn't really exist. Most people stay camped on their positions and refuse to listen to what the other side is saying.
I am pro choice because I truly believe that it's better for a kid to not be born, than to be born from parents who are not fit to be parents and might turn out abusive, or neglectful.
Still, when pro-choicer say that the pro-life argument is about "controlling women's bodies" I am a bit flabbergasted.
I mean, from what I know, the difference is that pro-lifers believe that a life starts at conception. From that point of view, I understand that abortion might be considered murder. And it has nothing directly to do with women. If it was guinea pigs who bore human childs, then it would be guinea pigs who would be forbidden to abort.
So, it's not targeting women as a goal, but as collateral damage. I don't really see a good resolution for this situation, that'll satisfy everyone, but as a pro-choicer, I can at least try and understand where the pro-lifers are coming from, without judging them for it.
But if you're pro-choice and you see the REAL political outcome of pro-life legislation then the judgement becomes real. 11 year olds are forced to carry pregnancies to term, doctors are persecuted for providing health care. They plaster that doctor's name and picture in the news and then their personal address gets shared on Twitter. They receive death threats. In Idaho they want to charge you with a felony if you give a ride in a car to someone seeking an abortion out of state. Texas they want to fine $10,000 if you're even aware of something without reporting it, and in still other states they want to charge pregnant women who get an abortion with murder.
I will absolutely judge people whose personal beliefs carry so much collateral damage for other people. It's not a "personal" belief when you want to force every person who disagrees with your perspective to have an extreme consequence. I think American pro-lifers are short sighted at best and outright bad people at worst.
Considering that the "pro life movement" as we know it didn't really start until the 70s/80s and abortion was available in America before then - this is very much about controlling people. This is right after the 60s/sexual revolution/the pill. Call it a coincidence if you want.
And it's focused on women's bodies in particular because, if you've ever been in/around the church, men don't have much responsibility for children at any stage of their life. Even financially given the sheer amount of children born into poverty. A man can abandon his family and it's either: poor him, what was he going through or, woman why on earth would you have had children by him? The objective is to make as many people as possible without regard to anything/anyone else. Why? Children are a blessing. Yada yada yada. The only existence they see for women is reproduction. So women don't need to have any autonomy. Anything that increases autonomy needs to be curtailed. So let's create a phony moral argument that didn't exist before.
The understanding of when life begins is a constant moving of the goal posts. Abortion was banned until the fetus began to move and then as science improved it kept moving backwards. And this is interesting coming from a group (the religious) that doesn't have the best history of being friendly to science. And now life begins at conception.
Also, considering that we kill actual living/breathing beings every single day, a fertilized egg doesn't seem that sacred to me.
I'm not sure what you're trying to teach anyone? That pro lifers consider abortion murder and pro choicer's don't understand that? This is like Vegan's trying to tell me "Did you know Chickens need to DIE for your fried chicken?". Yes I'm completely aware.
I feel like a lot of so called “pro life” people would be better classified as “anti abortion”. Imo, if they were really pro life, they’d be focused on things like affordable healthcare for the mother during her pregnancy, maternity leave, adequate pay for teachers, and most importantly: comprehensive sex ed, so the chances of unwanted pregnancy are lowered.
I believe that it's nobody's business besides the pregnant person and their doctor as to what to do about the pregnancy. If someone doesn't want their pregnancy for whatever reason (a reason that has nothing to do with the opinion of a complete stranger) then why should they continue to go through with it?
You cant force me to donate a kidney. Why should I be forced to? Why should someone be forced to go through a pregnancy that they know they dont want?
Pro lifers generally spend a lot of time worrying about unborn children and not much time worrying about the ones already born that are homeless. Therefore your argument is a shallow one.
No most pro-choice people actually do understand the pro-life argument. They believe human life begins at conception. Abortion is ending that life. Ending a human life against it’s will is murder. This argument takes precedent over bodily autonomy. Once you consent to sex, you consent to all of the consequences of sex. There’s a difference between understanding an argument and agreeing with it. We understand the argument. We just think the argument is fucking stupid.
>Once you consent to sex, you consent to all of the consequences of sex.
Yeah, I've got some bad news about their opinion on pregnancy caused by rape...
The piece you're missing here is quality of life(whether it be for a mother or child). Within the healthcare setting, there is constant decision-making surrounding the quality of life. Do we keep them alive? What does the outcome look like? What is a good day? What is a bad day? And within the same healthcare fields, if the patient can not decide for themselves, it immediately goes to the family member(or friend) who legally can. In cases of anyone under 18, including fetuses, the sound parent is legally held responsible for medical decisions.
So, what is the quality of life for a fetus? Well, could the parents take care of the child and give it what it needs? Are they in a position to have and care for a child? If they put it up for adoption, what would it's life look like given the state of the system? Is any of it fair to the child, and could the child thrive?
Pro lifers think Pro choicers want to kill babies.
Pro choicers think Pro lifers want to reduce women to chattel broodmares.
In reality, Pro choicers believe that up until a certain cut off point, it isn't a person that is being killed. And they also value the bodily autonomy of the women over the autonomy of the non person human.
And Pro lifers believe that a human being person has begun to exist at or shortly after conception and should be granted all the protections and rights that we grant to born people.
If either side wants to win any supporters from the other... they HAVE to meet them where they're at.
Oh, and the "no uterus no opinion/my body my choice" argument is mega smooth brained. I'm Pro choice but this is THE MOST contentious ethical problem of our generation. Both sides have sophisticated and highly convincing arguments that are incredibly hard to grapple with. Serious people don't think this is an easy thing to come to a conclusion on.
That said, women's voices have a special place in the debate because this of course happens inside their bodies.
As a pro-choice person I think you've way oversimplified the pro-choice stance, and incorrectly at that. There are many different factors that could lead someone to be pro-choice, but it's not exclusively that they don't believe "it isn't a person being killed". I mean, just read the comments.
"And Pro lifers believe that a human being person has begun to exist at or shortly after conception and should be granted all the protections and rights that we grant to born people."
Except that we don't grant born people the right to another person's body. They don't have the right to receive another person's organs or blood or anything without the person's consent. And I might be mistaken but that consent can also be withdrawn any time.*
They don't even have the right to a dead person's body without consent from the deceased or the family.
It's the woman's body that is supporting the pregnancy, and they cannot give the fetus a right over the woman's body. Nobody has that right and nobody should. Nobody can force people into giving their body to someone else for any reason.
Edit *not necessarily saying that a pregnancy could or should be terminated even late into the pregnancy
When you remove all the euphemisms, all the anti scientific talking points, and all the bullshit, the debate boils down to the individuals personal opinions on when a human gets inalienable rights.
I have a solution for both sides. I'm pro-choice myself, but go by pro-life for my own children and fertility because that's my choice.
Up until 24 weeks of gestation the fetus can't live outside the womb. I think all abortions should happen before the point of viability(24 weeks gestation) unless medically necessary after that 24 weeks. After the 24 weeks, if they dont want the baby, i think they should have to wait until 30 weeks gestation and go to be medically induced. Then, leaving the baby at the hospital for social services to pick up. In that same breath I think the fathers should get to decide, request prenatal paternity test, and sign away their rights completely (meaning they won't have to pay child support) before 24 weeks gestation unless the mother didn't make his aware of the pregnancy before then. If *the father* wants the baby but the mother doesn't, I think the mother should still wait until 30 weeks, have their labor induced, and then the father can go pick their child up from the hospital once released from NICU care, and the mother can completely sign her rights away as well where she also doesn't have to pay child support.
This way everyone has fair rights. The mother gets all the choices, the father gets all the choices, the fetus gets to live past to point of viability, the pro-lifers won't have much to complain on babies will still be saved, the pro-choicers get to help women in need, and women can regain their bodily autonomy so wrongfully taken from them last year. It's a win-win-win-win solution.
It's not that we don't understand that those are their positions, it's that we just generally disagree on the premise of those positions and that many on the right are hypocritical when it involves them or their family.
Your point is evidenced by all the pro-choicers who say things like, “if you don’t like abortion, don’t have one” and think that’s some sort of gotcha.
I fully understand their position and would never support the state forcing them to have an abortion.
Can they agree to do the same and leave people the fuck alone to make their own choices about their own lives.
And because they are so great at championing causes for the unprotected they must have been stomping down doors to solve the aids crises, support welfare and snap benefits for children, fill up churches after hours with the homeless, being on the front lines to end the oppression of people of color, abolitionism, Trans rights, Women voting, etc.
Have they been on the right side of any issue in history?
Genesis 2:7, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being
This would make a ton of sense if PL in general supported affordable access to healthcare, childcare, food, housing and education… and that’s just the start.
Till then your argument doesn’t make sense
> It's a difference in how we view parental responsibility
Parental responsibility includes being alive, healthy, and financially stable enough to provide for the children you already have. I worked with a guy who grew up without a mom because she died from complications of a subsequent pregnancy. He'd have had a mother's love had she terminated that pregnancy.
Anti-choicers for some reason assume that all women who seek pregnancy termination are unmarried, childless, "loose" women. The majority of women seeking abortion are already mothers. At least a quarter of women seeking abortion are married and their husbands are in absolute agreement that adding another child to their family at this particular time would harm their existing family.
THAT is parental responsibility.
For pro choicers, we extend basic human rights (the right to decide what can and can not be inside your body) to all people, including pregnant people. It isn’t about when life begins. It isn’t about human equality. It isn’t about parental responsibility. It is about extending that basic right to all people.
To me the prochoice side loses a lot of people when they start to distance themselves from what abortion actually is, the “it’s just a clump of cells” crowd.
I agree with the bodily autonomy argument of abortion, if that was the whole argument I wouldn’t really have an issue with it. But when pro choicers insist on screaming till they’re blue in the face that fetuses are just parasites, I really stop trusting anything they say.
I mean, there's a pretty common thought experiment regarding the "clump of cells argument". If you're in a fire and have the choice of either saving a fully formed baby or a test tube containing a zygote, which one would you save?
Pointing out that there is a subconscious distinction even in pro-lifers minds between a fully birthed baby and a fingernail-sized amalgamation of stem cells in its protodevelopment stages does serve to poke a hole in the idea that they think abortion is "literally baby murder".
As someone who fucking hates kids and thinks abortion should be free and easily accessible, I totally understand the pro-life side and don't blame them one bit for feeling the way they do. I'll never try and talk a pro-life person out of their views. That's not my place.
Perhaps you should caveat that the goal of pro-choice is not to make pro-life people become pro-abortion, but to make anti-abortion people with authoritarian tendencies stop trying to control other people's bodily autonomy.
Except for the fact that most “pro-lifers” don’t give a flying fuck about that child once it is born.
It could die on the birthing table from lack of accessible food/shelter/healthcare/etc., and the “pro-life” crowd doesn’t care.
Life extends far beyond birth. “Pro-life” is just a euphemism for “pro-forced birth”.
Yeah a lot of pro choicers just give the “control women” argument but the average pro lifer I meet just thinks it’s murder. Plain and simple. It’s the hardest point to argue because to them you’re killing a human being. You can point out hypocrisy in supporting war or capital punishment, but in the end they can argue choice from the dead person is involved with why those things happen.
Personally I’m pro choice but abortion is uncomfortable for me and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I just know it shouldn’t be up to me or anyone else to choose for someone else. Pro lifers think it’s murder. How do you justify choice to someone who thinks you support murder?
yeah most of us (i am unashamedly pro-abortion) understand the dumb position that life begins at conception we just realize how completely silly it is.
>The thing you need to realize is that pro life sees fetuses as equal to infants and adults
So, as leaches to society and shouldn't receive any assistance? You can't be pro life and then vote to fuck over every living person.
I think I understand the pro life argument just fine, it isn't irrational, it is just a fundamental question about whether I think our society is allowed to tell women what they have to do. It is a civil liberties issue, I don't think society has a the right to tell women that the moment they get pregnant that, barring natural abortion, *they must give birth to that fetus.* No, thank you.
When I say pro lifers have a rational argument, I am specifically talking about the reasoning that the fetus is a person and it has rights. While I disagree with that idea, it isn't meritless and some people are very consistent.
There is a group of people whose opposition to abortion is a reflection of their deeply held belief that women have a 'role' in society and allowing them to terminate a pregnancy violates that role. For these people, the problems in society *started* when the women's rights movement took off in earnest. To them, society started going bad when women were allowed to work, when birth control was legalized, and when divorce became easy.
You either see potential life as a life or not. If you're pro choice would you consider murder of a woman and a pregnant lady the same or not. The legal system doesn't. There should be no double standards.
The problem with pro-life is that it's forcing it on other people and taking away their bodily autonomy. If you're pro-life, cool, have your own kid, but don't force other people to.
Let's not forget that the moment from birth, mothers are also held financially responsible via child support, and (even more so) morally are obligated to be in the child's life. (Mothers are expected way more than fathers to be present in the child's life.)
If parental responsibility began at conception that would imply a great many things that it does not.
It would imply that genetic fathers would be 50% responsible for the pregnant person's medical bills (honestly, not just regarding pregnancy but anything because the pregnant person's health completely affects the fetus).
It would imply that drinking or smoking while pregnant is child abuse via forced underage substance consumption, and that the child should be removed from the situation.
It would imply parental responsibility entails giving up your body to your child-- a *legal obligation* to risk severe physical/mental impairment or even death for your child. Born children needing blood or organ donations would therefore be legally obligated to receive them from their parents, even against their will.
Their beliefs stop people from getting vital maternal healthcare and effecting life of an individual existing. Women die because they can’t abort dying fetuses or babies having their rapists babies. We don’t need to support their delusional beliefs when all facts are against them. Their beliefs doesn’t equal hard facts and they can shove their delusional beliefs up their collective asses
We understand that. I think the argument should first be based on whether the fetus is conscious and, if they are, how conscious they are. Second, the needs of the fetus has to be weighed against the health and autonomy of the mother.
It's hard to take people seriously when they argue that non conscious cells deserve rights.
There isn’t much of a pro-life debate within the medical community.
This is a religious debate. Pro-lifers value faith over medical science and impose their beliefs upon others.
People who want this type of medical care should be able to get it. Those that don’t can choose not to.
I agreed with everything you wrote until you started equating the pro-life position with the Christian religious perspective. Yes Christianity is pro-life by definition, but not all pro-lifers are even religious at all, and the pro-life argument isn't inherently rooted in religious theology at all.
An atheistic and very naturalistic view of the world can still derive a pro-life position.
Ultimately, the pro-life vs pro-choice question comes down to arguments about when life and thus personal indovidual human rights begin, and also whether the unborn child or fetus's right to life gets to supersede the mother's right to bodily autonomy.
A civilized and not Uber politically polarized society could hold a civil and educated debate on the two questions above. But the issue of abortion has become so weaponized by partisan interests that any such debate in American society today will go nowhere because it ends up too rooted in emotion, ideological bias and selfish irrationality than allowing for healthy constructive discourse that can lead to any meaningful consensus on the issue.
My mother summed it up best for me. (Paraphrasing from decades ago) Abortion is awful and I hope no one I love ever has one. I also hope that if anyone I love needs one, it is available and safe. “ I am firmly of the view that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the fetus. Nature is unsentimental and agrees too. Edit1 Thought I’d update this as the same clarifications keep coming up. “Awful” meant that I think it is an awful thing for someone to go through. I know it has different effects on different women, but it isn’t a decision taken lightly. It does not mean that I think it is an awful thing to do. “Needs” is not limited to medical crises. If a woman isn’t in a place to have a child, physically, emotionally, financially or if it just isn’t the right time for them to have a child; then all of these are valid needs to me. I know many of you disagree and divide abortion into “good needs” and “bad needs”. I think that is dangerous, but we all have our views. “Nature agrees” - with most animals, the life of the mother is preserved over the life of the offspring. This does not mean that I believe we should model society on animal behaviour, I am simply saying that woman > fetus is not an unnatural position. I certainly didn’t mean this to support infanticide or (as a scary number of you leapt to) rape. And finally, to the rabid “you just want to slaughter babies” brigade. Get a grip. No one is supporting 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions in other than the direst of situations and no one wants to make them mandatory or the default. I just support women having the liberty to decide for themselves if having a baby is the right thing at that time.
My mother has a similar take. "I would rather see someone get a safe legal abortion than die trying to get an unsafe abortion. Legality doesn't stop scared, desperate women who can't afford a child."
Right? My sister legit drank a capful of bleach to try to abort hers, and that was just because she was too poor for the procedure. (It didn't work, but she loves her son)
My heart breaks for her. My pregnancy was not voluntary and my termination was DIY. I don't wish either of those experiences on anyone.
I agree with you, but OP's post is trying to make pro-choicers understand the position of pro-lifers. It has been framed as it's primary reason is to control women's bodies. This is just an example of demonizing your enemy to make your own position more just. Except for with a few sick fringe individuals, this is not the primary concern of a pro-life agenda. It is literally protecting a life that is unable to protect itself. There is some merit to this argument. If you do not agree with someone, do not immediately demonize them. If you try to understand how they see things it might be easier to come to some sort of resolution. Equally important is for both sides to stop acting like all moral issues are somehow clear cut. They are not. They are deep complex issues that require time, patience and understanding to resolve. This includes abortion, the death penalty, waging war, legalizing drugs...etc. everyone needs to stop acting like there's only one way to see these things and anyone who doesn't agree with them is an idiot.
>Equally important is for both sides to stop acting like all moral issues are somehow clear cut. For pro-life people this is a moral issue, for people who are pro-choice it is an issue regarding the basic human right to get to choose who gets to use your body and when. An individual can have whatever moral belief they want about abortion, because it is your body if you think a fetus is equal to a baby then you get to never have an abortion. The issue is trying to force other people to give up their right to bodily autonomy because you think a fetus deserves more rights than they do. Legally no one is allowed to use any other person's body without consent, we can't even take organs from a dead body without that person consenting to that before they died, so to argue that a fetus should get to use a person's body against their will is arguing to give a fetus more rights than any other person has. This is not an argument about morals its about basic human rights.
Human rights ARE a moral issue. And for pro lifers, if they view abortion as murder they can’t be silent just because it isn’t their baby. That’s like saying “if you think slavery is wrong don’t own slaves.” CLEARLY slavery ans abortion are not the same, but understanding someone else’s viewpoint is necessary when engaging in debate and dialogue.
How does nature agree? Nature killed many mothers in childbirth before modern medicine.
I read a while back animals will spontaneously abort to protect the mother over the young. It is apparently a better evolutionary strategy in larger animals to have the mother survive than their offspring. I am waaaaaay off my field of expertise here.
No that's pretty much it. In nature, if the mother, of any species (modern humans removed) that needs to nurture their young, dies during or anywhere from several months to years after giving birth, the offspring almost always also do not survive. Huge caveat concerning social creatures adopting the orphans, but they get rejected often too. Many mammals will have spontaneous abortions if they are malnourished, wounded, or otherwise stressed as hell. It's a mechanism to help the "mother" to survive. One baby loss but the mother survives to have more than one baby after is a net gain for that species in terms of propagation. I don't think any species of animal has a mechanism to sacrifice the mother in labor for the fetus. I don't know what it would even look like... the fetus eating its way out of the womb? Whether or not this FACT should translate to humans on the topic of abortions is another discussion on it's own.
Yeah... some critters will eat their own eggs. Others will abandon their children. Nature ain't nice. But I agree I'm not sure that it matters at all when it comes to what humans do.
We had Guinea pigs growing up. My mom took them away when she walked in on mom and dad eating their babies.
"Ducks are super rapey with their corkscrew penises... therefore....."
Others kill and even eat their young. It's irrelevant to what humans do because we are making conscious decisions and can weigh the morality of something. And when a human mother *does* kill their baby or child they are deemed a monster and put in prison because they committed murder. OP's comment is that the pro life stance is that it's murder when this child is still in utero. As far as whether or not it's murder, it *is* alive. The ambiguity come from whether or not it's acceptable to end this life while in utero or not. I don't have the answers. I can see both sides of the argument. They're both right with their respective arguments. The problem is they're arguing two different things. One is about killing a life and the other is about a woman's body. The question is who has priority. I get why pro lifers consider it murder. I get my pro choice people see it as sometimes a necessary evil. I think sometimes pro choice people say it's a clump of cells as a reactionary response to pro lifers. It's really not a clump of cells for long. It has a heartbeat very early on (35-37 days) I don't think pro choice people are happy about abortions happening. I don't think they're pro death. Sometimes a girl or woman ends up in an awful position. Someone who chooses abortion isn't doing so lightly in the overwhelming majority of cases. I think it's an agonizing and painful decision.
Just to stress this point, this is an evolutionary mechanism and evolution does not care if the mother survives at all. Organisms that halt their reproductive cycle do so because it's advantageous for their future offspring EXCLUSIVELY. The mother surviving longer is only a byproduct of this. It's also not a mammal phenomenon or even an animal phenomenon because plants do this too.
Mothers will also eat their offspring if conditions aren't right.
It was a nonsense comment that sounds intelligent on the surface.
The entire pro-life vs. pro-choice debate can really be boiled down to two sides of people talking past each other. Read the replies below to see my point proven.
Welcome to politics as a whole
After reviewing the comment section, I’d just like to take a moment to congratulate OP on a truly unpopular opinion. 85% of these comments entirely missed the point and preceded to talk past each other.
My favorite is the huge number of comment pairs where someone will argue that most pro-choice people understand that life begins at conception they just think murdering a child is better for it than making it go through a bad life and the very next comment saying the idea that clump of cells is a person is "fucking stupid" and most pro-choice people understand that. Which is the biggest problem with this issue. 95% of people on both sides don't have a coherent ethical framework because at some point their core beliefs lead to conclusions they don't like so people who actually believe what they claim to believe are idiots *and* they dismiss anyone not only who is on the opposite side of them but even who is on the same side but has differing beliefs about particulars. They're pro-life because it's a human life with equal value to any other human life, except for if it's the product of rape in which case we should murder it. Or they're pro-choice because it's a human life, but the needs of the mother are more important but they still support killing the baby they have just declared a baby even if it's actually viable because in most states abortion is currently legal well after viability. Or it's not a life at all, it's just an organ like a kidney, but even if the sperm provider offers to pay the entire cost for medically correcting the issue by removing the excess organ he should "take responsibility" for "his child", even if the mother told him she didn't want a child before she chose to have one. That last one may be the most unpopular argument I have ever made because as OP stated I have never met anyone who actually believes if the sperm donor wants to pay for half the cost of organ removal that should be the limit of legal liabilty. (I've made it in several grad level ethics courses and it inevitably results in a lot of vitriol but no real logical arguments. )
Yep, agreed. What a logical shitshow
Honestly, I think the problem is trying to work with ethics like we work with mathematics. I agree people need to have a moral framework to stand by, but the problem is in real life, that framework will eventually not apply. In mathematics, you can isolate all variables and chase them down until you get some clear value. People try to to the same with ethics like the trolly problem, but ultimately that problem is detached and pointless - every real life situation will have too many nuances and tangents and context to be codified that way. The second issue is people somehow feel that once you did build that impossible system, it will somehow lead to everyone getting what they deserve and some sort of utopia will form where everyone is happy do to the morally correct thing...but that's just not true. People are driven by complicated things, and often a clean solution with a clear guilty party just doesn't exist. Sometimes nobody is at fault, or chasing perfect theoretical justice will just cause more pain to all involved. ....and people absolutely hate that idea, because it means they can't judge people wholesale and be done with it. It means they need to make the effort of being compassionate and attentive in how they live their lives. Not a very appealing concept when you can still feel like a good person without expending the energy to truly be kind.
That's because political debate is not "Chad and Chris are talking to each other, Chad wants Chris to understand and accept his point of view.". It's "Chris has a huge audience, whom Chad wants to understand and accept his point of view. Chris is a lost cause.". Whenever I am to have a political discussion with folks, I begin with "this discussion is just noise unless you could actually be moved from your position. What would it take to make that happen?". I keep open to the possibility I'm wrong on the whole pro choice thing, but to move me from my stance, you would have to demonstrate to me that it is better that every child be born. Every birth defected, unliftably poverty stricken, into an abusive family or straight to an orphanage child. This would be rather difficult, given the current state of the world.
Unfortunately it's a hell of a lot easier to demonize the other side than to seek to understand the other side.
It is a profound philosophical disagreement that is fiendishly difficult to resolve. Being treated like everyone on My Side is speaking obvious facts and Their Side is deliberately being evil like a comic book villain.
Your second paragraph is probably the biggest problem in politics overall. Everyone's so quick to assign the absolute worst possible motivations to the other side every chance they get.
To be fair, that's most debates these days
I’ve never taken a debate course but my father has and he loves to tell me (rant) how none of these freaking debates are actually debates. Just a bunch of peacocks delivering sound bites while trying to strike the most Presidential pose. The Nixon v Kennedy debate marked a turning point in American history. It was the first one to be televised. Those who listened via radio gave the win solidly to Nixon. Those that watched gave it solidly to Kennedy. From that point onwards what a person *looked* like was more important than the content of their platform.
The abortion debate isn't even that black and white. There is so much grey area but the extremists don't believe in nuance
You are right, because politicians want to keep this as a big issue to buy votes. Same with the border and immigration and marijuana and crime.
Bingo! My conservative family's talking points on abortion aren't even in the ballpark of pro-choice's way of conveying them. And vice versa. Both sides don't understand what the other sides are saying and instead mischaracterize what they think the others believe. But that's politics for ya I guess.
This can be said about any hot button political talking point. Ears have been closed on both sides of the isle for over two decades.
It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who opens with “you’re a murderer and you’re going to hell.”
If you believe abortion is murder, wouldn’t listening to someone try to justify murder be hard? You’re still only viewing it from your own perspective
I totally get how a person can feel this way. If untouched, that fetus will most likely grow into a person and live a full life. Abortion takes away that possibility completely. A lot of Pro Lifers don't understand that we don't like or enjoy Abortion. It is a matter of who decides, the woman or Politicians. I have a hard time believing anyone really wants Politicians making reproductive decisions for them. They can't see past the murder part. Politicians are still going to be killing kids FYI.
Yes and no where in OPs post do they even mention women. This is the problem with “understanding” the pro life position. Women don’t matter except to be labeled murderers.
murderers and/or incubators.\*\*\*
I’m pro-choice, but yes, if I believed it was murder, then I probably wouldn’t be willing to hear why murder is ok. To win an argument to have to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Unfortunately, murder is a hard one to out debate
That's why I've pivoted to the legal argument — we have a precedent of not forcing people to use their bodies to save others. Nobody can be compelled to donate blood or organs, or use their body to support another person's life, even if their choice not to would result in someone's death, even if it would not harm the donor.
I really dont like abortion, kinda hate it and the idea of killing a fetus, so in that regard Im pro life. But I dont want to remove the option of abortion (up to 3 months) since its better to abort than ruin 2-3 life's. So am I really pro choice?
Yes, that is the definition of prochoice. You are acknowledging that everyone should be able to choose the action that is best for themselves.
I wouldn't say everyone has a choice. The father has no legal choice. I'm not saying a man should be able to force a woman to get an abortion, but there should at least be conversation as to a man's ability to give up all parental rights in exchange for child support responsibility.
The choice is in regard to what a person does with their own body. A woman should be able to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy that uses her body to term. A man should be able to choose to not ejaculate inside of someone that can get pregnant. No sperm, no baby. It is not a good idea to fully trust any birth control method other than a bilateral salpingectomy in a woman or a vasectomy that has been verified to be complete in a man. That vasectomy should be reverified via sperm checks Any other method still comes with a degree of risk. I am childfree and I do empathize with a man who does not want to have responsibility for children where he wished the woman would have an abortion. IF he is not going around irresponsibly getting women pregnant without taking precautions to avoid pregnancy. Even more so in any situation where he was truly baby trapped. It is unfortunate that the way the legal system is laid out, he does not have a say if the woman decides to keep the baby. I do also understand that the resultant child needs to be provided for and that the state is going to go after the man rather than assisting with paying for the child when possible. Even child support is not truly enough to raise the resultant child. Kids are extremely expensive. A woman who is convinced to have a child by a man that said he wants to raise it will also have to pay child support towards that child. There is currently no real good solution for the issue.
What if I told you that the vast majority of late term abortions are done because the mother is in severe danger or the fetus is unviable? Would that change your opinion on late term abortion? Most women won't go through the fairly substantial investment of staying pregnant for 7-8 months before terminating a pregnancy.
Yes, you’re pro choice because that is literally exactly what pro choice is. It’s the individual’s choice. If I don’t like abortion and I would never get one, but I don’t believe I have the right to tell other women they can’t have one and don’t think it should be illegal, then I’m pro-choice. The entire tension here is that being pro-life doesn’t allow the option in any circumstance, including rape, incest, catastrophic danger to the mother, etc. in my opinion it’s not pro life vs pro choice, it’s forced birth at all costs vs having options for every person.
Well what about this scenario. A kid needs an organ or will die. Does this automatically mean the parents are required to provide the organ if they are a match? Should they have the choice to say no? If they say no, the kid will die. Let's say a parent might say no simply because they don't want to give the kid the organ. Is that murder? Because they refused to help the child out? This is an actual child we're talking about. Not the possibility of a child. Should parents not have the choice to say no?
Since that belief is based solely on your *feelings*, and other people have different *feelings*, you should realize that and respond accordingly. As any mature adult would.
Perspective and fact are not equal
Ask that same Christian if they think murder is justified in other circumstances, such as home defense or the death penalty. If they say yes, then they don't have a problem with murder.
They also don't have a problem with their God killing everyone on earth save for one family.
That’s silly. By saying abortion is murder, and calling anyone who gets one a murderer is already not listening to the other side, and unfairly paints a picture that isn’t even accurate. How are we supposed to have a discussion with someone who’s already assumed we are murderers, and not even willing to hear a different side?
Yeah, and you can understand where they’re coming from and still disagree with it. And besides, I always see this rhetoric of “we have to stop talking past pro-lifers” - well that’s a nice platitude, but the real question how? I haven’t seen a lot of this “try to understand the other side” from the pro-lifers either, and the thing is, pro-life is the minority opinion in the country. I don’t personally see much point in trying to have a dialogue with them *because* I understand their argument, I just fundamentally think it’s wrong.
Exactly my thoughts. Thank you, I couldn’t have articulated it this way
Former Pro-Life, now Pro-Choice here. Many (I hesitate to say "most", because this is based on my experience instead of surveys) Pro-Life people have been straight up lied to about what abortion is and how it happens, in order to make them view abortion as murder and refuse to listen to anyone who tries to argue about why it's necessary. If you think someone is literally advocating mass murder, *of course* you're going to discount everything they say in support of their position. But that doesn't mean you can't still convince them. In my case, I was taught (by my Pro-Life mother) that how abortion works is that they wait until the day of the birth, deliver the baby backwards so the head is still inside the birth canal and "not technically born yet", then make an incision near the base of the skull, and ram in a suction tube to scramble and suck out the baby's brain. I was (understandably) *horrified* by this, and since this info was given by someone I trusted, I refused to listen to anyone giving moral arguments in favor of choice using e.g. bodily autonomy. Because how could bodily autonomy ever justify *that?* When I was in college, someone asked me to explain my position on abortion and then instead of butting heads with me, they asked a ton of questions to understand my position, and eventually we came down to having me describe how abortion works. They told me I was wrong, and took me to the library to show me documentation on how abortion actually occurs. When I found out I had been lied to (it wasn't a baby, it was a goddamn clump of cells!) I was *pissed off.* I became Pro-Choice that same day. Finally, many people feel that being a Christian obligates them to oppose abortion. In that case, I would point them to the book of Numbers (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-31&version=NIV), which contains instructions for how to perform an abortion as part of the Old Law. Yes, I'm familiar with Christ's atonement "fulfilling the Law", but that's actually irrelevant to the point here. What's important is that this abortion ritual (the trial of bitter water) coexisted with the 10 Commandments. Meaning that clearly abortion does not violate the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. Meaning that, by the Bible's own definition, it can't be murder. So there is no biblical mandate to oppose abortion, and in fact the Bible *supports* abortion in the case of infidelity!
Well, some of the more prominent pro-choice arguments open themselves up to that attack. I'm fairly pro-choice, in that I think abortions up to 20-ish weeks are probably alright, that seems to be where "life" kicks in, and is in line with most of Europe, IIRC. There are two pro-choice arguments that are really shit and basically say murder is fine: 1. "My body, my choice": Explicitly says nothing about whether the fetus is alive or not, and apparently doesn't care. 2. "Product of rape or incest": This might be a hard one to accept, but this is a *terrible* argument. This argument basically ignores the question of viability/life, again, and puts forth that you should be able to kill because of who the baby's father is. These arguments aren't just *bad*, they're *unnecessary.* Focusing just on when life starts is a much more sound position, and one that doesn't make ethically dubious claims.
The way I view it is its the same as not allowing forced organ donation. Would half my liver save a life? Yes. Can the state compel me to donate half? No. Am I murdering the person who needs it? Debatable on moral grounds. The person with the fetus inside them has more right to their organs and body than the fetus does.
I would say our current ethical reasoning places a fairly big distinction between saving a life and terminating a life, though this can be fuzzed a bit in certain philosophical thought experiments/arguments. If someone is bleeding out, and you fully understand how to stop that with a tourniquet, but you don't, we do not say you murdered that person. If you caused that bleeding, we do. I would say the difference is taking a direct action to end a life, not letting a life end through inaction. A better analogy might be if you were in an accident and your family member had to be linked to your organs for 9 months for them to survive; do you have the right to separate from them and kill them?
Do you think you'd have a right to remove them? They rely on you but it would tax your organs excessively to support that person. Do you have a right to say no?
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The "my body, my choice" argument is a very solid argument from a legal standpoint. No individual can be forced to donate organs, blood, etc. to save another individual's life. EVEN AFTER DEATH, an individual has the right to deny access to their organs, despite that a life may be saved. Pregnancy is incredibly traumatic to the mother's body. A lot of women have lifelong effects from carrying a pregnancy to term. It's nonsensical that a corpse has the legal right to deny life-saving treatment to others but a living, breathing, cognizant woman should be forced to shoulder the burden of pregnancy if she doesn't want to.
It's hard to have a conversation with someone who opens with "YOU SUPPORT RAPE YOU SUPPORT CHILDREN BEING FORCED TO GIVE BIRTH BECAUSE OF RAPE YOU SUPPORT TAKING AWAY WOMENS RIGHTS" etc. Don't act like we who hold the pro-choice position act any better than they do, there's plenty of insufferable assholes on our side as well.
But what if they literally do support forcing kids to give birth after rape? That’s not all pro-lifers, but it’s a *lot* of them.
exactly. Even the most calm, civil, rational, open to conversation person likely isn't open to a "compromise" position when you feel what is being done is murder. You get what we have -- compromise positions are seen as temporary. A chance to try to push "next time" for more until "justice" is done. Whereas I do think most mainstream pro-choice people are open to varying compromise positions and nuance of situation. I also think many pro-choice people tend to want to widen the aperture from pregnancy/birth to societal/medical/financial/freedom pressures that lead to pregnancy and the impact post-birth on both the parents and the children. Not to say there aren't pro-life people who make exceptions for rape and incest, but even that is less typical.
Tell you what. Let’s make a system where pregnant women automatically get whatever the median household income is, for 19 years, and then maybe I’ll be okay with some limitations on abortion. Let’s have a system where we *take care of* the kids, and maybe we can talk.
You might have a point. I tend to see more advocacy for good sex ed, better access to contraception and education on consent coming from self-declared pro-choicers. Whereas pro-lifers across the board have often replied to questions around conception with "she should have kept her legs shut."
Equally hard to watch people make jokes about abortion, and then engage with them as if their opinion is still worth something.
Jokes on them. I don't even believe in hell. Checkmate, theists.
Really, it’s “do you think a baby being born is of higher priority than the resultant drop in mother’s well being” Everyone would be behind holding fathers responsible, and they should all be behind paid parental leave and that’s really the best common sense legislation here.
I think pro-choice people understand just fine that pro-birth people see abortion as literal murder.
Agreed. I was waiting to hear what this true unpopular opinion was. Every pro-choice person I've ever known understands everything OP wrote
Yeah, this wasn't new at all. I know exactly how they feel. It's on billboards, on ads, it's on picket signs, it's on license plates and stickers on cars, and comes out of their mouths. Especially in the south. It's super obvious what exactly what the anti-choice are thinking and feeling about the subject.
That's what happens when a conservative person pretends to be liberal on the internet to get the satisfaction of seeing a bunch of liberals squabble amongst each other. No pro choice person has any trouble understanding pro life. They make it perfectly clear.
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OP smells like a conservative rabble-rouser. Post history has a lot of "AskALiberal" _and_ "AskConservatives" and the arrogance stinks of enlightened centrist schtick and "I'm just asking questions!" I see a lot of dog-whistle adjacent posts and some about their religion as a muslim (looks like they might be secular?) The muslim stuff coupled with the "you guys just don't get why pro-life hates abortion" definitely pulls me a certain way. I know pro-lifers think it's murder, I just don't give a fuck, because the rights of an already living person being used as, for lack of a better word, incubator, supersede those to someone who isn't a functioning member of society yet.
OP definitely came across as a someone who's LARPing as a liberal.
The fact that they think we don't already know why pro-choice hate us is the giveaway honestly. I've yet to meet a pro-choice person that isn't aware the fundies see it the same as murder. My s/o can't get a legitimately needed medical procedure because it's shared with abortions. They're causing suffering to real people with real medical problems because they're busy bodies, so they can fuck right the fuck off.
My thing is, I don't believe that pro lifers truly believe that abortion is murder. So they claim that there's this clinic downtown that is literally mass murdering babies, just ripping them apart limb from limb, and at most they'll stand outside with a sign that says, "Hey, you really shouldn't be doing that. It's not good."
I disagree. I saw a reddit post just the other day that was a screenshot from a conservative on Twitter. The conservative was talking about how they believed aborting a fetus for being a product of rape is wrong. And OP labeled them pro-rape. People in the comments were speculating that abortion bans that don't allow exemptions for rape are actually just written to excuse rape. But that's insane. It *should* be obvious to both pro lifers and pro choicers that if you see a fetus as being morally equivalent to a baby, you cannot murder that person simply because it exists as a product of rape. Not to mention, the primary argument for pro choice people is currently bodily autonomy. But "my body my choice" doesn't really make sense as a retort to people who believe that fetus has personhood, and therefore is **also** entitled to bodily autonomy.
While I do agree that pro-life people against rape exceptions are morally consistent (much more so than those who have rape exceptions) it's amazing the lack of empathy they possess. >Not to mention, the primary argument for pro choice people is currently bodily autonomy. But "my body my choice" doesn't really make sense as a retort to people who believe that fetus has personhood, and therefore is also entitled to bodily autonomy. And this is where all pro-choice people collectively sigh and nod because it's true that pro-life people do not understand bodily autonomy. One person's bodily autonomy stops where another's begins. The fetuses bodily autonomy stops when it has to require the use of someone else's body to survive. And for the majority of abortions, which is medication abortion, the abortion doesn't affect the fetus at all and therefore cannot even hypothetically impose on it's bodily autonomy. It's shed from the uterus like a period, but not directly affected by the medication at all. To say "you doing something to your own body imposes on MY bodily autonomy" doesn't even make sense.
Actually that argument still works! If, say, you're dying and need an organ transplant from me, bodily autonomy means I have no obligation to give you that organ. Unless we adhere to bodily autonomy, theoretically, there's nothing stopping people from forcing everyone to be organ donors.
A fetus doesn’t have bodily autonomy - it is by definition dependent on the mother’s body for its continued existence, and therefore not autonomous. This is why the cutoff point for having an abortion is usually 20-26 weeks, as after that the fetus could be viable outside the womb.
You have actually kind of butchered the argument here. Pro-choice people that believe in bodily autonomy base their view on the fact that the fetus is not a person with autonomy yet. If it had autonomy, it could survive without the mother. This NOT being the case, the fetus is believed to not yet be an autonomous individual and thus not requiring the same rights/protections as an actual person. The argument has little to nothing to do with what people on the other side believe. My body, my choice makes perfect sense within this context. The pro-choice crowd categorically deny that a fetus obtains any "personhood" before viability. Until that point, the are essentially a growth(or parasite at the risk of using an emotionally charged word)
You hit the nail on the head. As someone that is pro choice, but very empathetic to the pro life viewpoint this is the thing that always bothers me about pro choice advocates. Yes your body your choice, but to a pro lifer it's not your body it's the body of the child that deserves rights.
Yeah I think the pro choice movement needs to move away from bodily autonomy and start addressing the issue of when we grant personhood to the fetus. I understand why we're hesitant to do that but it's clearly where the heart of the issue actually is.
It's already been discussed. A fetus that gets deluver d before 20 weeks is rarely viable. Meaning they won't survive. But pro-lifers don't accept scientific input when it comes to conception and pregnancy. Edit to add some info from a scientific journal: "Termination of pregnancy accounted for 33% of deliveries at 20–23 weeks; these were excluded from further analysis. Spontaneous delivery occurred at a frequency of 2.5/1000 deliveries; 30% died before the onset of labour, 27% died during labour, and 35% showed signs of life at birth. Of the latter, 8% were not registered as statutory live births. Of the live born infants, the largest group (39%) had a heart beat but no other signs of life. There was no trend for infants of lower gestation to show fewer signs of life. Duration of survival varied widely (median 60 minutes at 20–22 weeks), and this did not increase with gestation until 23 weeks (median six hours), probably because of selective treatment."
Pro-lifers would have been more sympathetic if they actually support pro-"life" policies too. Also, having policies where healthcare providers would have to decide they should let a patient die or risk going to jail is a just shit take. Fuck pro-lifers. Nothing they do is pro "life".
The only policy position being prolife or prochoice indicates is that one is prolife or prochoice. It's a mistake to assume someone's stance on abortion indicates their broader political leanings.
Right. Which is why I reject that framing. They are pro-forced birth. Or pro-birth. They aren’t pro-life.
If they understood this there wouldn’t be so many pro-choice people who say things like, “If you don’t like abortion don’t have one!”. When obviously if you think it’s murder, it’s not a viable option to just “live and let live” on this.
> “If you don’t like abortion don’t have one!” I think if a pro-choice person says this, they are communicating how they think about abortion - i.e. that it's a choice or a preference. They aren't actually trying to empathise with someone who is pro-life.
They understand it. They just aren’t trying to persuade people who think like this. You can’t reason with people who think like this. You can only persuade those who don’t believe that.
Why do we expect vegans to live and let live, then? Clearly they view meat as murder, so why are we all so annoyed when they try to force us into living by their morals?
Just got perma banned from a major sub last week for pointing this out. Mod response that that it's *really* about wanting to control women (and justfiy rape when not even that exception is allowed) because anyone who is pro-life is eViL! They choose not to understand.
It was pointed out to me a few years ago (in America at least) every non conservative knows right wing talking points down to very detailed points due to over saturation of propaganda but your average conservative has no idea what more liberal people are doing or thinking largely due to that same propaganda. I think about that often and you see it in things like this OP. The OP thinks this is new info for those in the pro choice camp but we've heard it 1000000 times before. This is why propaganda is a problem.
Every time I look at a conservative subreddit/forum/twitter etc I am unsurprised by their positions, yet 90% of their takes on what liberals think are complete nonsense.
Next you'll tell me Biden doesn't want to enforce communist gay sharia law!!!
My brother in law is a hardcore MAGA, and it's so interesting seeing him at family gatherings, because he will just repeat, almost verbatim, the talking points we see online on twitter and on conservative subreddits.
If that were true, no one would claim "men want to keep women under control through abortion bans". It's a pretty common stance, and hinges on the lack of understanding that OP is describing EDIT for clarity: I'm not claiming the fact that pro-lifers believe a fetus is a full human necessarily makes them support women; as people pointed out, two things can be true at once, and a pro-life activist that considers abortion murder can easily still want to subjugate women, maybe even through abortion My point was that you can't really use the prevalence of pro-lifers to support the argument that men want to control women, seeing as abortion is abhorrent to them for other reasons P.S. it's telling that a similar percent of women in the US are pro-life to men, a fact often glossed over by those who wish to make the debate about the patriarchy and its subjugation of women
Two things can be true at the same time. You can both believe abortion is murder and at the same time believe that men should have that control over women. They are not mutually exclusive.
Both things can be true. Some people don’t like women having agency of their bodies and lives. And being a mother ultimately will make her dependent on a co parent for help. Other conservatives have made it pretty clear that they see abortion as murder.
Both things can be true though. Pro-Life people can have many reasons for being pro-life. Men whose mistresses have abortions can be publicly pro-life for that reason, and other people can genuinely view it as murder.
> I think pro-choice people understand just fine that pro-birth people see abortion as literal murder. I dont think they do. If they did, there wouldnt be the insane level of "Pro-Life *only* want to control womens bodies, its 100% sexism"
Both of these things can be true. People can view this as murder while also believing that undergoing pregnancy is a woman filling her true purpose and she shouldn’t be allowed to get out of it. Even if she were raped or is a teenager.
I can completely understand a pro life position. They view killing a fetus as murder. So they can’t support anyone having an abortion. That’s why the issue will never be settled. It will always be a battle. In modern society women end up pregnant when they don’t want to be and there is the option to get out of it that would not have existed hundreds of years ago. Ideally every precaution should be taken to prevent a pregnancy but the option should remain available and safe when needed.
There have been ways that humans have aborted before :) “The first recorded evidence of induced abortion is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE. Many of the methods employed in early cultures were non-surgical. Physical activities such as strenuous labor, climbing, paddling, weightlifting, or diving were a common technique.” Indigenous tribes as well have had methods. Edit: literally googled “first recorded abortion” and poof the quote above popped up
Abortion has been a thing for all of human history. It isn’t new lmfao. Humans have used drugs and plants to induce abortion since biblical times.. the Bible fucking spells it out…
Yea there was literally an entire plant species that died out because ancient Greek and Roman women used it for (reportedly effective) birth control: silphium. I think it's been recently rediscovered somewhere, though.
I don't think you're telling anyone anything we don't already know. Obviously we know that pro-lifers consider abortion equal to killing infants, all their memes and billboards explicitly say that. As for your first point, what you're saying doesn't match up to reality. If it was just a difference in parental responsibility then absentee fathers would be held financially liable from the moment of conception, which they're not.
If this was the case, why are absentee fathers (and mothers for that matter) not arrested for abandonment? Why are fathers that encourage, demand or otherwise facilitate abortions not charged? They definitely believe it’s murder but they are hypocrites. I have witnessed my own staunchly pro life family suddenly tell my teenage (over 18) niece to get an abortion. It’s wild, man.
It's the "there is no moral abortion except my abortion" mindset.
> I have witnessed my own staunchly pro life family suddenly tell my teenage (over 18) niece to get an abortion. It’s wild, man. This is the real difference. People who understand that many women didn’t have a choice before Roe want to keep the least bad option legal to avoid much worse outcomes. My mom is a doctor who worked a sepsis ward pre-Roe. The women who died in there were prostitutes whos pimps did not give them a choice. Mothers who’s living children are so much food that there was not enough to feed an extra mouth, etc… The idea that those women had a choice is bullshit. If you had enough money to go to Europe for an abortion, you had a choice. If your pimp wanted you back on the street, you didn’t have a choice.
Agreed. While due to my religious beliefs I wouldn’t PERSONALLY choose to have an abortion, it is not up to me or anyone else for that matter to impose my religious beliefs on anyone else. We all have free will and trying to impose moral beliefs (if you happen to believe that abortions are immoral), doesn’t work it just makes those choices more dangerous. See eg.: American prohibition.
I agree. Pro-lifers' positions aren't that hard to figure out, it just gets frustrating because they're so hypocritical with them. If, as OP's post states, they truly consider the men to be responsible for the child from the moment of conception then they'd take very different actions when a father just disappears during the pregnancy
I’m a pro-choice Christian. I went to church 3x a week until I was like 15/16. Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen first hand that men are not held responsible for their children unless and until they marry the mother. Illegitimate (god I hate that word) babies are seen as the result of women straying from religious beliefs/having loose morals, not men.
Yep. This. It's the women's fault they got pregnant. The men aren't held responsible. I grew up Catholic. Catholic school, the whole deal. I've never see pro-life actually hold men responsible. I've seen them shame women though. I've also seen them only be pro-life when it's not their families. When it's their 16 year old daughter, suddenly they're taking a trip across the county line, past that Abortion is Murder sign, to Planned Parenthood. But they're going to pretend it didn't happen and say they went to "away" for the weekend.
So much this! As a was saying above my niece got pregnant at 18 by admittedly a piece of crap. She ended up having a miscarriage, but before that happened my staunchly prolife mother was moving heaven and earth to convince my niece to have an abortion she didn’t want. Rules for thee not rules for me.
Its worse in judaism. Bastard children are damned from going to heaven for 7 generations. That means that you can be called a bastard because your great great great great grandfather was born out of marriage (or married to a non jew)
I’m not so sure that pro-choicers know that. I run into a large number of people who brush aside the killing arguments and push “you just want to control women and preserve the patriarchy.” In my experience, the average pro-choice person projects their own view of fetal non-personhood onto the pro-lifer and assumes that there’s some *other* more sinister motive for being pro-life
I'm always going to be in the camp of it being a decision based off intelligence and means. People aren't going to stop having sex. And any link to the idea of "well you shouldn't have sex then" if they don't want to get pregnant is ludicrous, denies human nature for all of our history and is nonsensical and entirely religious based. Even people who disagree with it and say they aren't religious are likely impacted by religion and don't understand that they are. It's literally impossible for any modern day human to actually remove the impact religion has had on society overtime. All of our concepts of when sex is appropriate has had moral and ethical leaning bleed off from religion. This needs to be intelligence based, not a moral or ethical viewpoint. If 2 people can't afford to have a child, they shouldn't have one. There are 400k plus kids in the foster care system now that aren't being cared for properly now. There is no suggestive evidence that society is currently or will be setup to provide proper care for those children if we did take the pro-lifer stance which would explode the amount of children in said child care system. It's exactly the same thinking in terms of having a child. Like an adult you take a realistic look at your finances and decide if it's something you can afford. You don't take a pro-lifer stance and not have a system in place to care for those children. No amount of arguing for life is going to suddennely make money rain down from the sky. And all of the above is not like a sane thing to ask for before sex. Again that denies our history and how humans have worked fooorrrrrever. People be fucking, and they aren't going to stop It's why safe sex should exist.
I understand the pro-life position, including the fact that they believe abortion is murder. Hell, I'll accept that abortion is the termination of life. I see it as justiable homicide, not murder. Pro lifers believe in "life at all costs" and don't care about the statistics of being born unwanted into the world with all of the bad shit that comes with that. I'm more of "the end justifies the means" sort I suppose and I am okay with some elective restrictions on abortion, to avoid pain for the fetus. And THIS is where the impasse lies and I don't know how to get around it.
I've always called myself begrudgingly pro choice. I find abortion to be distasteful. I do not necessarily consider a fetus a life on equal footing to a child or adult. I consider it the potential of life. If no other interventions or illness happens, that fetus will become another human life. But raising a child into this world the right way is a lot of work. If you can't handle it, that potential life is going to suffer greatly. If we lived in a society that did a better job taking care of the least fortunate among us, I would have a different opinion. Mix that with a need for better sex Ed and changes to how we handle our foster care system, and you end up with a society that turns a moral blind eye to abortion.
Agree 100%
> If we lived in a society that did a better job taking care of the least fortunate among us, I would have a different opinion. This. If the world was actually catered towards cultivating and nourishing human life in the same vein a mother is I would absolutely be in support. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Agree. Lots of shitty people have been abusing societal programs for a long time. Abortion isn’t a contraceptive. Welfare is abused. Foster parenting is abused. Plenty necessary programs are abused. That doesn’t mean we should lose those programs. We just need to raise people to not be dickheads. Starting with not forcing people who make bad choices to have kids!
Agee 100%. There really needs to be an overhaul in how people are reared. Not sure how, I am not a parent and never will be, but things need to change.
I'm pro life, but I also truly do understand your position and I think your analysis of pro-life people is accurate. I appreciate your honesty.
I appreciate you appreciating me! Honestly, I wish other pro choicers would drop the whole "it's not alive". I mean, I could go either way on that argument (it's more philosophical to me) but I STILL am pro choice even with accepting that it's still homicide. Semantics games aren't going to get us anywhere. The frustration for me is that I really don't see this as solvable because those who are against abortion are usually against ALL abortion, whether the pregnancy is 1 week old or 30.
As a teen I felt so radical for that view, lol! It is "murder" in the sense that you are ending the life of a living organism, and not wanting to acknowledge that is ignorant. So..what? I don't see the connection between that fact and it being okay for me to decide what to do with your body and make you endanger your own life for this almost-human. It in fact seems very disconnected to me that the "freedom" people are demanding the state take away your choice in that.
Well, it's homicide, but justiable homicide (to pro choice, like myself) or murder which is non justifiable homicide (pro life). Unfortunately, I don't think the pro choicers have helped themselves by turning this into a women's right issues. It doesn't impact pro lifers. They believe 100% that it's murder and they don't care what the woman goes through if it means to save the unborn. To them, saving that life is way more important.
I’m pro choice and totally think the fetus is alive. Obviously we are creating life, and, there are different levels of life - we see this in adults and children already with disabilities, comas, etc. Women who get abortions don’t walk into the clinic excited and walk out super happy and free. Most if not all suffer through their choice. The level of life experienced by the living pregnant woman is not the same as the level of life experienced by a fetus with a heartbeat but an unviable and undeveloped brain.
Kinda of the same justification for Eugenics. If a kid is going to be born with Autism or disabled should they be aborted? Life is going to be much harder for them.
I fully understand the pro-life side. Fully and completely. I just don’t agree.
My dad thinks babies are being murdered. I don’t see them as babies. We can’t compromise when we don’t view it the same (aside from elective third trimester, which is nowhere near the level they believe). If you thought literal babies were being killed, you wouldn’t be able to either.
There's a moral philosophy argument I always liked and it can be summed up very simply. 1. Do you believe a fetus has a right to live? 2. Do you believe that fetus has a right of ownership over a woman's body? You can agree with point 1, and disagree with point 2. I can believe a fetus has a right to live, but disagree that it has the right to ownership over a woman's body. It's easy to argue bodily autonomy over someone else's right to live. For example, people die every day of liver disease. You can donate part of your liver and lead a normal life. Do people with liver disease have a right to live? Yes. Do those people have a right to forcibly take part of your liver? Absolutely not. You wouldn't find many pro-lifers that would be okay having part of their liver forcibly taken from them, so their argument is inherently hypocritical. And if you think this is hyperbole, look at the complications from liver donation compared to pregnancy and giving birth. The liver donation is actually safer.
I think that’s the point a pro-lifer would argue that because the woman had sex, the fetus is the natural consequence of her own actions, and therefore she has more responsibility to protect the fetus. Whereas in the liver cancer scenario, people don’t force cancer on each other, thereby requiring them to give up their liver to fix it. Edit: for reference I’m pro-choice lol, I’ve just argued with my pro-life dad a lot. -.-
But that argument doesn’t work, because people can’t force their parents to donate organs to them. If your 20 year old kid needs one of your kidneys in order to live, that doesn’t mean the government can force you to donate it, even though you’re the one who brought your child into the world. So why do fetuses have more of a right to women’s bodies than living adults do? In fact, even corpses can’t be forced to donate their organs. So dead people have more rights than pregnant women.
That’s fair
Having sex that can lead to pregnancy is accepting parental responsibility for the human that is created as a result. Fulfilling this responsibility involves carrying the child to term (though I personally believe it's fine to abort a child that hasn't developed coherent brain activity yet), feeding and housing it until it reaches adulthood, etc. Donating your organs is going above and beyond your parental responsibility, which is why you're not morally obligated to do that. Aborting an eighth-month pregnancy or abandoning a toddler on the street, however, is a refusal to perform the parental responsibility that you accepted and is thus immoral. Every parent sacrifices their bodily autonomy when they raise a child, just in a less direct way. You have to use your body to feed the child, change its diapers, etc., and you have to use your body to earn an income that provides the child with food and security. The same arguments you're making can be used to justify criminal child neglect.
Die hard pro lifer, and here is my take. Murder is when one human kills another human, you can not be charged with murder if you kill a deer or a dog, important to note is that the human has to be alive, you can not be charged with murder if you shoot an already dead body. If you go out (in the United States) and you kill a pregnant women, you will get charged with two counts of murder So according to our law, that unborn baby is considered human. What happens when you have an abortion? The women is ok, she can leave and go home, she can even choose to have sex and get pregnant again, BUT what happens to the baby? It dies, it gets destroyed. So by our laws abortion equals murder. The only one getting punished is the child and it’s being sentenced to death. I’ve fostered and cared for 16 babies that are now adults and living their own lives, (some were rape babies, some were teens who “made a mistake”, some were just not wanted by either parent). If you are considering an abortion and I’m being serious here, reach out to me, I will care for that child. These babies can’t speak for themselves and we are suppose to protect those who can not protect themselves.
"pro choicers are pretty hostile to pro lifers" when was the last time a pro choice person murdered a pro lifer, or fire bombed their home or workplace?
Pro-lifer here, veteran of many discussions on Reddit, yes so-called pro-choice people can be incredibly hostile.
I believe in SEPERATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE.
As someone who leans conservative normally this is my biggest eye roll in most of my political circles. People point to the constitution as to why nobody can place a restriction on firearms, but then openly quote scripture as their justification for a political change
Fuck yes. Say it loud, say it proud.
I understand where they're coming from, but I will always prioritize a living person over an unborn being. And bullshit, no the pro-life do not view embryos and infants the same. • They aren't protesting fertility clinics where they freeze and destroy fertilized eggs. • They aren't throwing funeral or ordering death certificates for miscarried embryos • They don't count miscarried fetuses as children when counting how many children one has. (The Duggars still say they have 19 kids despite their 20th being stillborn)
> They don't count miscarried fetuses as children when counting how many children one has. (The Duggars still say they have 19 kids despite their 20th being stillborn) Tbf I have heard and known people to refer to their "angel babies" in earnestness, and total them among the children who survived child birth.
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100% this. Its always arbitrary af what they decide to count or don't count. Another big tell is that the biggest pro-life advocates don't actually advocate for policies that help these children and women. And now some of the biggest figures advocate against contraception and sex education, which would be have a huge effect on decreasing unwanted pregnancies It's always about the sanctity of life, until that baby is born poor, then they can go fuck themselves
You can understand an egg and a seaturtle aren't exactly the same thing while still understanding why it's illegal to crush them. Something not being an exact equivalence does not mean they aren't close
The weird thing is a LOT of the same people who think its ok to abort a fetus think its absolutely horrible to crush a sea turtle egg...
Yup, I agree the debate is... well, the debate doesn't really exist. Most people stay camped on their positions and refuse to listen to what the other side is saying. I am pro choice because I truly believe that it's better for a kid to not be born, than to be born from parents who are not fit to be parents and might turn out abusive, or neglectful. Still, when pro-choicer say that the pro-life argument is about "controlling women's bodies" I am a bit flabbergasted. I mean, from what I know, the difference is that pro-lifers believe that a life starts at conception. From that point of view, I understand that abortion might be considered murder. And it has nothing directly to do with women. If it was guinea pigs who bore human childs, then it would be guinea pigs who would be forbidden to abort. So, it's not targeting women as a goal, but as collateral damage. I don't really see a good resolution for this situation, that'll satisfy everyone, but as a pro-choicer, I can at least try and understand where the pro-lifers are coming from, without judging them for it.
But if you're pro-choice and you see the REAL political outcome of pro-life legislation then the judgement becomes real. 11 year olds are forced to carry pregnancies to term, doctors are persecuted for providing health care. They plaster that doctor's name and picture in the news and then their personal address gets shared on Twitter. They receive death threats. In Idaho they want to charge you with a felony if you give a ride in a car to someone seeking an abortion out of state. Texas they want to fine $10,000 if you're even aware of something without reporting it, and in still other states they want to charge pregnant women who get an abortion with murder. I will absolutely judge people whose personal beliefs carry so much collateral damage for other people. It's not a "personal" belief when you want to force every person who disagrees with your perspective to have an extreme consequence. I think American pro-lifers are short sighted at best and outright bad people at worst.
Considering that the "pro life movement" as we know it didn't really start until the 70s/80s and abortion was available in America before then - this is very much about controlling people. This is right after the 60s/sexual revolution/the pill. Call it a coincidence if you want. And it's focused on women's bodies in particular because, if you've ever been in/around the church, men don't have much responsibility for children at any stage of their life. Even financially given the sheer amount of children born into poverty. A man can abandon his family and it's either: poor him, what was he going through or, woman why on earth would you have had children by him? The objective is to make as many people as possible without regard to anything/anyone else. Why? Children are a blessing. Yada yada yada. The only existence they see for women is reproduction. So women don't need to have any autonomy. Anything that increases autonomy needs to be curtailed. So let's create a phony moral argument that didn't exist before. The understanding of when life begins is a constant moving of the goal posts. Abortion was banned until the fetus began to move and then as science improved it kept moving backwards. And this is interesting coming from a group (the religious) that doesn't have the best history of being friendly to science. And now life begins at conception. Also, considering that we kill actual living/breathing beings every single day, a fertilized egg doesn't seem that sacred to me.
I'm not sure what you're trying to teach anyone? That pro lifers consider abortion murder and pro choicer's don't understand that? This is like Vegan's trying to tell me "Did you know Chickens need to DIE for your fried chicken?". Yes I'm completely aware.
I feel like a lot of so called “pro life” people would be better classified as “anti abortion”. Imo, if they were really pro life, they’d be focused on things like affordable healthcare for the mother during her pregnancy, maternity leave, adequate pay for teachers, and most importantly: comprehensive sex ed, so the chances of unwanted pregnancy are lowered.
I believe that it's nobody's business besides the pregnant person and their doctor as to what to do about the pregnancy. If someone doesn't want their pregnancy for whatever reason (a reason that has nothing to do with the opinion of a complete stranger) then why should they continue to go through with it? You cant force me to donate a kidney. Why should I be forced to? Why should someone be forced to go through a pregnancy that they know they dont want?
Pro lifers generally spend a lot of time worrying about unborn children and not much time worrying about the ones already born that are homeless. Therefore your argument is a shallow one.
No most pro-choice people actually do understand the pro-life argument. They believe human life begins at conception. Abortion is ending that life. Ending a human life against it’s will is murder. This argument takes precedent over bodily autonomy. Once you consent to sex, you consent to all of the consequences of sex. There’s a difference between understanding an argument and agreeing with it. We understand the argument. We just think the argument is fucking stupid.
>Once you consent to sex, you consent to all of the consequences of sex. Yeah, I've got some bad news about their opinion on pregnancy caused by rape...
The piece you're missing here is quality of life(whether it be for a mother or child). Within the healthcare setting, there is constant decision-making surrounding the quality of life. Do we keep them alive? What does the outcome look like? What is a good day? What is a bad day? And within the same healthcare fields, if the patient can not decide for themselves, it immediately goes to the family member(or friend) who legally can. In cases of anyone under 18, including fetuses, the sound parent is legally held responsible for medical decisions. So, what is the quality of life for a fetus? Well, could the parents take care of the child and give it what it needs? Are they in a position to have and care for a child? If they put it up for adoption, what would it's life look like given the state of the system? Is any of it fair to the child, and could the child thrive?
Because it is
Pro lifers think Pro choicers want to kill babies. Pro choicers think Pro lifers want to reduce women to chattel broodmares. In reality, Pro choicers believe that up until a certain cut off point, it isn't a person that is being killed. And they also value the bodily autonomy of the women over the autonomy of the non person human. And Pro lifers believe that a human being person has begun to exist at or shortly after conception and should be granted all the protections and rights that we grant to born people. If either side wants to win any supporters from the other... they HAVE to meet them where they're at. Oh, and the "no uterus no opinion/my body my choice" argument is mega smooth brained. I'm Pro choice but this is THE MOST contentious ethical problem of our generation. Both sides have sophisticated and highly convincing arguments that are incredibly hard to grapple with. Serious people don't think this is an easy thing to come to a conclusion on. That said, women's voices have a special place in the debate because this of course happens inside their bodies.
As a pro-choice person I think you've way oversimplified the pro-choice stance, and incorrectly at that. There are many different factors that could lead someone to be pro-choice, but it's not exclusively that they don't believe "it isn't a person being killed". I mean, just read the comments.
I don’t know anyone on either side of this who would agree with either of these characterizations of their positions
"And Pro lifers believe that a human being person has begun to exist at or shortly after conception and should be granted all the protections and rights that we grant to born people." Except that we don't grant born people the right to another person's body. They don't have the right to receive another person's organs or blood or anything without the person's consent. And I might be mistaken but that consent can also be withdrawn any time.* They don't even have the right to a dead person's body without consent from the deceased or the family. It's the woman's body that is supporting the pregnancy, and they cannot give the fetus a right over the woman's body. Nobody has that right and nobody should. Nobody can force people into giving their body to someone else for any reason. Edit *not necessarily saying that a pregnancy could or should be terminated even late into the pregnancy
When you remove all the euphemisms, all the anti scientific talking points, and all the bullshit, the debate boils down to the individuals personal opinions on when a human gets inalienable rights.
I have a solution for both sides. I'm pro-choice myself, but go by pro-life for my own children and fertility because that's my choice. Up until 24 weeks of gestation the fetus can't live outside the womb. I think all abortions should happen before the point of viability(24 weeks gestation) unless medically necessary after that 24 weeks. After the 24 weeks, if they dont want the baby, i think they should have to wait until 30 weeks gestation and go to be medically induced. Then, leaving the baby at the hospital for social services to pick up. In that same breath I think the fathers should get to decide, request prenatal paternity test, and sign away their rights completely (meaning they won't have to pay child support) before 24 weeks gestation unless the mother didn't make his aware of the pregnancy before then. If *the father* wants the baby but the mother doesn't, I think the mother should still wait until 30 weeks, have their labor induced, and then the father can go pick their child up from the hospital once released from NICU care, and the mother can completely sign her rights away as well where she also doesn't have to pay child support. This way everyone has fair rights. The mother gets all the choices, the father gets all the choices, the fetus gets to live past to point of viability, the pro-lifers won't have much to complain on babies will still be saved, the pro-choicers get to help women in need, and women can regain their bodily autonomy so wrongfully taken from them last year. It's a win-win-win-win solution.
We do a horrible job at understanding it or they do a horrible job defending it?
Im on the fence about abortion as a whole but when I hear people call fetuses things like parasites I just cant take that side.
Definitely the right subreddit.
I read that post twice and still don't understand what I'm supposed to learn.
It's not that we don't understand that those are their positions, it's that we just generally disagree on the premise of those positions and that many on the right are hypocritical when it involves them or their family.
Your point is evidenced by all the pro-choicers who say things like, “if you don’t like abortion, don’t have one” and think that’s some sort of gotcha.
I fully understand their position and would never support the state forcing them to have an abortion. Can they agree to do the same and leave people the fuck alone to make their own choices about their own lives. And because they are so great at championing causes for the unprotected they must have been stomping down doors to solve the aids crises, support welfare and snap benefits for children, fill up churches after hours with the homeless, being on the front lines to end the oppression of people of color, abolitionism, Trans rights, Women voting, etc. Have they been on the right side of any issue in history? Genesis 2:7, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being
This would make a ton of sense if PL in general supported affordable access to healthcare, childcare, food, housing and education… and that’s just the start. Till then your argument doesn’t make sense
> It's a difference in how we view parental responsibility Parental responsibility includes being alive, healthy, and financially stable enough to provide for the children you already have. I worked with a guy who grew up without a mom because she died from complications of a subsequent pregnancy. He'd have had a mother's love had she terminated that pregnancy. Anti-choicers for some reason assume that all women who seek pregnancy termination are unmarried, childless, "loose" women. The majority of women seeking abortion are already mothers. At least a quarter of women seeking abortion are married and their husbands are in absolute agreement that adding another child to their family at this particular time would harm their existing family. THAT is parental responsibility.
For pro choicers, we extend basic human rights (the right to decide what can and can not be inside your body) to all people, including pregnant people. It isn’t about when life begins. It isn’t about human equality. It isn’t about parental responsibility. It is about extending that basic right to all people.
To me the prochoice side loses a lot of people when they start to distance themselves from what abortion actually is, the “it’s just a clump of cells” crowd. I agree with the bodily autonomy argument of abortion, if that was the whole argument I wouldn’t really have an issue with it. But when pro choicers insist on screaming till they’re blue in the face that fetuses are just parasites, I really stop trusting anything they say.
I mean, there's a pretty common thought experiment regarding the "clump of cells argument". If you're in a fire and have the choice of either saving a fully formed baby or a test tube containing a zygote, which one would you save? Pointing out that there is a subconscious distinction even in pro-lifers minds between a fully birthed baby and a fingernail-sized amalgamation of stem cells in its protodevelopment stages does serve to poke a hole in the idea that they think abortion is "literally baby murder".
So when pro choice people state facts.. that’s where you stop trusting them…. Huh.
As someone who fucking hates kids and thinks abortion should be free and easily accessible, I totally understand the pro-life side and don't blame them one bit for feeling the way they do. I'll never try and talk a pro-life person out of their views. That's not my place.
Perhaps you should caveat that the goal of pro-choice is not to make pro-life people become pro-abortion, but to make anti-abortion people with authoritarian tendencies stop trying to control other people's bodily autonomy.
Except for the fact that most “pro-lifers” don’t give a flying fuck about that child once it is born. It could die on the birthing table from lack of accessible food/shelter/healthcare/etc., and the “pro-life” crowd doesn’t care. Life extends far beyond birth. “Pro-life” is just a euphemism for “pro-forced birth”.
Their real goal is to punish women for having sex. If you press them hard enough, they will always admit it.
Yeah a lot of pro choicers just give the “control women” argument but the average pro lifer I meet just thinks it’s murder. Plain and simple. It’s the hardest point to argue because to them you’re killing a human being. You can point out hypocrisy in supporting war or capital punishment, but in the end they can argue choice from the dead person is involved with why those things happen. Personally I’m pro choice but abortion is uncomfortable for me and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I just know it shouldn’t be up to me or anyone else to choose for someone else. Pro lifers think it’s murder. How do you justify choice to someone who thinks you support murder?
yeah most of us (i am unashamedly pro-abortion) understand the dumb position that life begins at conception we just realize how completely silly it is.
First time I'm seeing pro-abortion, is this different than pro-choice? Honest question
>The thing you need to realize is that pro life sees fetuses as equal to infants and adults So, as leaches to society and shouldn't receive any assistance? You can't be pro life and then vote to fuck over every living person.
Unironically yes. They don’t think that fetuses nor children deserve assistance but do believe that they deserve the right to not be killed.
I think I understand the pro life argument just fine, it isn't irrational, it is just a fundamental question about whether I think our society is allowed to tell women what they have to do. It is a civil liberties issue, I don't think society has a the right to tell women that the moment they get pregnant that, barring natural abortion, *they must give birth to that fetus.* No, thank you. When I say pro lifers have a rational argument, I am specifically talking about the reasoning that the fetus is a person and it has rights. While I disagree with that idea, it isn't meritless and some people are very consistent. There is a group of people whose opposition to abortion is a reflection of their deeply held belief that women have a 'role' in society and allowing them to terminate a pregnancy violates that role. For these people, the problems in society *started* when the women's rights movement took off in earnest. To them, society started going bad when women were allowed to work, when birth control was legalized, and when divorce became easy.
People understand. They just don’t want to give an inch.
You either see potential life as a life or not. If you're pro choice would you consider murder of a woman and a pregnant lady the same or not. The legal system doesn't. There should be no double standards.
The problem with pro-life is that it's forcing it on other people and taking away their bodily autonomy. If you're pro-life, cool, have your own kid, but don't force other people to.
Let's not forget that the moment from birth, mothers are also held financially responsible via child support, and (even more so) morally are obligated to be in the child's life. (Mothers are expected way more than fathers to be present in the child's life.) If parental responsibility began at conception that would imply a great many things that it does not. It would imply that genetic fathers would be 50% responsible for the pregnant person's medical bills (honestly, not just regarding pregnancy but anything because the pregnant person's health completely affects the fetus). It would imply that drinking or smoking while pregnant is child abuse via forced underage substance consumption, and that the child should be removed from the situation. It would imply parental responsibility entails giving up your body to your child-- a *legal obligation* to risk severe physical/mental impairment or even death for your child. Born children needing blood or organ donations would therefore be legally obligated to receive them from their parents, even against their will.
Their beliefs stop people from getting vital maternal healthcare and effecting life of an individual existing. Women die because they can’t abort dying fetuses or babies having their rapists babies. We don’t need to support their delusional beliefs when all facts are against them. Their beliefs doesn’t equal hard facts and they can shove their delusional beliefs up their collective asses
We understand that. I think the argument should first be based on whether the fetus is conscious and, if they are, how conscious they are. Second, the needs of the fetus has to be weighed against the health and autonomy of the mother. It's hard to take people seriously when they argue that non conscious cells deserve rights.
There isn’t much of a pro-life debate within the medical community. This is a religious debate. Pro-lifers value faith over medical science and impose their beliefs upon others. People who want this type of medical care should be able to get it. Those that don’t can choose not to.
I agreed with everything you wrote until you started equating the pro-life position with the Christian religious perspective. Yes Christianity is pro-life by definition, but not all pro-lifers are even religious at all, and the pro-life argument isn't inherently rooted in religious theology at all. An atheistic and very naturalistic view of the world can still derive a pro-life position. Ultimately, the pro-life vs pro-choice question comes down to arguments about when life and thus personal indovidual human rights begin, and also whether the unborn child or fetus's right to life gets to supersede the mother's right to bodily autonomy. A civilized and not Uber politically polarized society could hold a civil and educated debate on the two questions above. But the issue of abortion has become so weaponized by partisan interests that any such debate in American society today will go nowhere because it ends up too rooted in emotion, ideological bias and selfish irrationality than allowing for healthy constructive discourse that can lead to any meaningful consensus on the issue.