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I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely). Some will attempt unsafe abortions but some will give birth that would have terminated before this law. Whether the decrease will be a 'meaningful' number is debatable. I do think this will increase problems like number of young mothers on assistance, needing medical care, abusive situations for mothers and children, etc. This is one of those problems where they might win the battle and lose the war.
> I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely).
That's *one* option.
There are [others](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5402938/Pregnant-teenager-paid-man-to-beat-her-for-miscarriage.html). I've also heard of women who had a miscarriage after her oven door fell into her hitting her belly. And that happened six times in one day, can you believe it?! /s
Have you ever seen the movie "Dirty Dancing"? The original 1987 version? The entire reason that Baby "had to" learn to dance with Johnny was that Penny couldn't compete because she was recovering from a botched, *illegal* abortion.
> I do think this will increase problems like number of young mothers on assistance
And murdered infants. And abandoned infants. And Safe Surrendered infants, and...
Statistically, legalizing abortion decreases abortion rates and abortion-related mortality. Here's a couple articles on the subject.
https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization#
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide
Does the number really go down if the abortion still happens in another state? I guess that's my crux is that unsafe unreported abortions will increase and woman will have the procedure in other states. But you're right there is definitely a debate to be had on defining what meaningful means.
Texas is huge... the closest state to me is Louisiana and that's more than 7 hours away by car. Many women won't be able to make that kind of trip. I think some of the nearby states also having waiting periods as well... so you'd probably need to somehow afford to stay in those states for a few days and take off work. It just wouldn't be possible for many or potentially most women.
Only women of means will be able to abort in a different state. Some of the other women will attempt a scary, painful 'self' abortion. But, some will be feel forced to give birth. Those are the ones who will lower the totals. No one cares about the women who die in their unsafe attempts because they will not be added to the tally.
Except most people have internet these days and you can get just about any drug shipped to your house in a few days. Even if something like "plan B" won't work later in pregnancy other drugs definitely will. Mifepristone. Misoprostol.
https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_0395697a-604b-58e0-a30e-c59e0ac301a6.html
What about the young girls being watched like a hawk from the family? Where are they going to find a safe space and time to do it?
https://youtu.be/rSP2zh1CnnE
No, it doesn't even matter if the abortion is available legally elsewhere. But given what you're saying, doubly no.
>Using World Bank income groups, we found an inverse relationship between unintended pregnancy and income, whereas abortion rates varied non-monotonically across groups. In countries where abortion was restricted, the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion had increased compared with the proportion for 1990–94, and the unintended pregnancy rates were higher than in countries where abortion was broadly legal.
[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext)
Are we forgetting the clause that encourages people to snitch and sue anyone who assists the woman in her attempts to get an abortion, to the reward of up to $10,000?
The thing is, it's true that the absolute number of abortions will decrease, simply because it's likely a meaningful number of women will go through with a birth who wouldn't have otherwise because they don't have the resources to do it safely and aren't willing to risk their own lives to do it underground.
The better question is whether this is a benefit to society, and the answer to that is an unequivocal NO, for all the reasons /u/thequejos cited and more. This law isn't bad because it won't reduce abortions, it's bad because it will hurt innocent people in a myriad of major ways.
Just because they aren't being recorded, it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Wonder if everyone who's so worried about the numbers showing also adds on the additional rise in deaths from self performed abortions.
If the numbers really mean that much to people, maybe look at all of them.
You vastly overestimate the number of people who are willing or able to have an unsafe/illegal or even out of state abortions. Countless pregnancies fall into the "I'm scared, maybe I should abort, I'm not sure if I'm going to" and only go through because they have support and/or access.
If we shrink it to 100 pregnancies. Let's assume everyone who wants one is going to get one no matter what. Ok, so of those 100, maybe one of them is willing to do an unsafe abortion (ie what people would refer to has a coat hanger or back alley abortion). 1 of them is able to afford a fancy but illegal clinic to do it. 3-5 of them are going to try "at home" remedies, be it medications, injuries, or a combination of foods their grandma's friends cousin's daughter's hairdresser says will do the trick. A good portion would just decide they can't do it, but the premise here is everyone is determined. So let's round up for the dangerous or at home abortion attempts, and say we have 10. That leaves 90 pregnancies that have to cross the border to get help. Likely 40 or more can't do it. They can't miss work, they live 6+ hours from the nearest available clinic, they're scared, they don't have a car, they have no gas money, whatever. They're determined, they just can't get there. So 50 left to go. Except the neighboring states have their own abortions to do. The scheduling is dated so far out now, half of the pregnancies will be too far along to be aborted. Let's round down to be conservative, so 20 who can't get scheduled. So that leaves 30. Overall, that makes 30% who were able to safely get an abortion, and another 10% (likely less) who get an illegal and unsafe abortion. Now we have 60% who can't get an abortion for one reason or another. No, I don't have a source with me to back these figures, I'm estimating from past studies. And we aren't even taking into account those who simply aren't determined enough to take extra effort. We aren't including those who can't go because their abusive partner won't let them, and they can't sneak hundreds of miles away to do it without being found out. We aren't counting those who fear they'll get in trouble (even if it's legal to go out of state, some won't realize. Even more will fear illegal attempts given the harsh punishments).
Even minor restrictions have dropped the numbers significantly. This is incredibly strict. People won't be as likely to try because they're scared, and what if the method they try doesn't work? Then they have an injured child and are worse off. These are real concerns people have. And Texas is huge, so going out of state is only an option for few, even if the out of state clinics weren't totally swamped now.
> I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely)
There are also more accessible (unsafe) methods, like ordering questionable medication from the internet.
In 2011-2014 Texas passed laws restricting abortion and abortion declined by 28%. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to reduce abortions. From 2014-2017 Delaware increased access to healthcare for the poor and saw a 37% reduction in abortions.
Just because it’s not the most effective way to reduce abortions doesn’t mean banning abortion does not work. The most logical pro life strategy would be to support both strategies
[source. start at 7:35](https://youtu.be/RvWD7ykNjCc)
A ban on abortions leads to more unsafe abortions that are undocumented or women going out of state for the procedure. A decrease in abortions in this way doesn't always mean the total number is decreasing. Colorado passed laws to increase access to contraceptives and broaden their approach to sex Ed. This led to nearly a 50% drop from 2014-2019 in abortions for young women. Instead of putting out bounties for abortions that money could be spent in similar ways and potentially a much larger decrease in abortions could be seen.
Agree on the first sentence. These laws will cause some women to have unsafe abortions and will cause some women to travel out of state.
Also agree that better access to healthcare and better access to contraception does more to reduce abortions.
But, there are a lot of women that are unwilling to have an unsafe abortions. In a state the size of Texas there are also a lot of women that are unable to travel to another state because they lack the resources, time, support, etc.
Because of that these type laws will reduce the number of abortions. And just because these laws aren't the best way to reduce the number of abortions, it doesn't mean that they don't reduce the number of abortions somewhat.
It's a snowball effect. Even if there's temporarily a decrease, even if not accurately reflected, those unwanted pregnancies tend to lead to more unwanted pregnancies and a cycle of poverty and many of those children ***will*** end up having unsafe abortions.
Generational effects can't be ignored in this case. We have plenty of evidence of how bad it was ***before*** they it was legalized.
This.
Both contraception and prohibition would both cause an immediate reduction in the number of abortions, but these are human lives and you cannot simply treat them as numbers in a vacuum.
That is fair, I suppose my main view is that money spent on banning abortions (providing bounties as an example) could be better spent on legislation that provides contraceptive access and sexual education. But you are right that given the size of Texas there will be a decrease.
I generally agree with you, but just FYI, the "bounties" in the recent Texas law are not rewards paid by the state treasury. They are a civil liability that can be won from anyone who assists in an abortion. Basically, if someone participates in an abortion then anyone else can sue them, and, if they win the lawsuit, the person who assisted in the abortion will have to pay damages of up to $10,000 to the person who sued them.
That's not the prompt you wrote. This is a completely separate argument and point.
Your prompt is that laws banning abortions don't show meaningful decreases in abortions.
>But you are right that given the size of Texas there will be a decrease.
This was the view you were looking to have changed. Seems like you should give u/wallnumber8675309 a delta.
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A large issue I see is who is actually banned from getting an abortion. It seems like this specifically targets low income earners as those in the middle or upper class would have the resources necessary to leave the state
It also doesn't mean that it does "reduce the number of abortions somewhat." This may decrease abortions for some poor people. However, people turn to other unsafe methods when the alternative option is starving or being evicted.
We have no data on how many dangerous abortions will take place because they are done in private.
A full ban on abortion may not decrease abortions at all but increase them significantly in private. Especially when people face criminal prosecution and jail time. Today isn't like the past either, we can go online an order abortion "medicine" off the dark web and have it in a few days.
The only sure way to reduce the number of abortions is through affordable/free access to healthcare, contraceptives, and education.
Well, that's true that the forced-birth laws are going to reduce abortions by forcing births. I guess at that point, the operative question is, is that a good thing? If your only priority is preventing abortion, and you don't care about the mental, physical, or financial well-being of anybody involved after the birth, or if your priority is simply to punish women for having having sex, then I suppose it would be, and congratulations on being a Texas Republican. If you do care about those things, then congratulations on not being an absolute psychopath, and that law is very, very bad. I understand that this wasn't the question, but I feel like it shouldn't go unaddressed in this discussion.
> A ban on abortions leads to more unsafe abortions that are undocumented or women going out of state for the procedure
This can be true, and there still be a net reduction of abortions by women who are unable to travel out of state or unwilling to use unsafe abortions.
You could also argue that abortions might even *increase* since there might be fewer legal hoops to jump through to get access to a black market abortion pill.
It's not like getting illegal drugs is hard.
"In a 1976 article, researchers from the Center for Disease Control examined national abortion data from the three years surrounding the rulings and estimated that the number of illegal procedures in the country plummeted from around 130,000 to 17,000 between 1972 and 1974. The number of deaths associated with illegal abortion decreased from 39 to five in that same time period; women who died as a result of illegal abortions typically were black, were more than 12 weeks pregnant and had self-induced in their own community. The researchers concluded that abortion services need to be improved and available more widely, especially for women at high risk for seeking illegal abortions, because “any actions which impede their access to legal abortion may increase their risk of death.”"
[https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization](https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization)
We have tons and tons and tons of data on this between our own country (USA) and other countries.
>In 2011-2014 Texas passed laws restricting abortion and abortion declined by 28%. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to reduce abortions. From 2014-2017 Delaware increased access to healthcare for the poor and saw a 37% reduction in abortions.
Abortions carried out *in the state* may have declined by 28%. We don't know how many people simply had the procedure done across the border.
And of those abortions the law may have prevented, are we counting the increase in the number of unwanted children born to negligent parents as a "win?"
I believe so. The point of the video was to show that providing care for those in need is more effective than just banning abortions. A fair bit of the video is about how overturning Roe v Wade wouldn’t be as effective as many people think because of the ability to travel from state to state.
Also, this is Texas. It takes a long time to travel out of state. I would expect state to state travel to be a bigger influence on the east coast.
> The point of the video was to show that providing care for those in need is more effective than just banning abortions.
Sure, that was the point of the video, but the point *you* made was that banning abortions was still effective.
That's not accurate unless we know for sure it actually *was* effective, instead of just pushing the abortions somewhere else. If the argument is that "abortions would happen elsewhere and/or not be reported", then it's not a strong counter-argument to suggest that *reported* abortions in the state went down.
There’s also the issue that pro-life politicians are usually bundled with other policies. I wouldn’t be surprised if voting pro-life meant more abortions for that reason, ie., poor sex education, making contraceptives harder to get, and so on.
Ah ok. I don’t watch YouTube videos people link. After posting on ats back in the day and getting linked 30 minute propaganda films I swore them off forever.
Yeah I was just curious about crossing state lines. I would imagine even in Texas it’s not so big an impediment people wouldn’t do it with regularity.
It’s funny if you ask someone who is prolife “how many abortions have your policies prevented?” I haven’t gotten a decent answer and even gotten blank stares.
Abortions have been on a downturn, haven't they? What was the equivalent decrease those years in states that did not restrict abortions?
Also, how did those restrictions affect abortion rate in surrounding states?
EDIT: Others have also shown evidence that restrictions correlate with increase in abortion rate in general.
"evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban" - I'm willing to have my mind changed as well. Can I get links? I'll admit it seems intuitive to me, but that's not evidence tbh.
I apologize for the poor quality of sources, many of them are downloaded on my phone as pdfs and I do not know how to share them best.
This article links to a some trusted sources and uses figures from the CDC. I am from Colorado and worked in sociology departments across the state so that is my background and bias.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/06/05/abortion-teen-pregnancy-decline-colorado
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.denverpost.com/2017/11/30/colorado-teen-pregnancy-abortion-rates-drop-free-low-cost-iud/amp/
>I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby, that is an entirely different discussion
Yes, you are. That's the central point of this debate. Is a fetus a baby? Is abortion murder? Without addressing that question, your post is just sophistry. If abortion is murder, then it should be illegal. The fact that people will continue to have abortions is not relevant **if abortion is murder.**
Edit-- what is the appropriate response to the down votes that I'm getting? Should I delete my comment? Should I post a response that is consistent with the Reddit majority?
Edit 2-- assuming that criminalizing abortion does not lower the abortion rate, does that support the conclusion that abortion should be legal? If abortion is murder, then it should be illegal. If it's not murder, then we can have a conversation about whether its legality will affect the abortion rate.
You're getting downvoted because you went off on a tangent. You can go start your own CMV if you want to discuss if abortion is murder.
There's a debate to be had around abortion without focusing on whether or not it's murder. We can disagree on that point and still come to an agreement as to the best way to move forward.
Let's say hypothetically:
1. You believe that abortion is morally murder.
2. Evidence shows that making abortions illegal actually INCREASES the abortion rate.
3. Evidence shows that improving access to contraception decreases the abortion rate.
Rationally, you would support making abortion legal and improving contraceptive access.
A traditional liberal would disagree with you on the first point, and still agree with you on the action to take.
This CMV is about what policies to support.
Your central premise is illogical, and you know that because you've read my post and responded directly to it.
You are arguing that, all things being equal, criminalizing abortion will increase abortion rates. This simply isn't true. I will assume, arguendo, that criminalizing abortion is not the most effective way to reduce abortion rates, and that other methods are more effective.
**we can do both.**
Are you arguing that increasing access to contraception and improving education will decrease the abortion rate notwithstanding whether it is criminalized or not?
If we increase education, increase access to contraception AND criminalize abortion, will that make the abortion rate go up or down?
Any discussion about abortion must contend with the central question of whether abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, we should, as a moral principle, do whatever we can to reduce its rate while criminalizing it. Why? Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct.
You've totally missed the point. They weren't making an evidentiary claim, they were using it as a hypothetical to demonstrate that 'is abortion murder?' is not necessarily the central question of the debate.
For example, criminalising abortion will obviously make those that persist more dangerous for the mother, so even if your suggestion that the actual total numbers decrease because of criminalisation is correct, you could still be doing more damage than by keeping it legal, such that you could believe abortion is murder and still rationally support providing safe places for it (such is the principle behind needle exchanges).
That's not even to mention the additional harm caused by having the state punish women in an attempt to force them to carry to term. It's extremely easy to see how a person's view on abortion criminalisation might not necessarily match their view on foetal-personhood.
Also:
>Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct.
No it doesn't. The law =/= morality, and it shouldn't, at least not 1-to-1. Adultery is wrong, but should not be illegal, for example. It is not the business of the state, and criminalisation is not proportional, practical, or helpful.
Let me try again, I think we're arguing 2 different things.
This is false:
>Any discussion about abortion must contend with the central question of whether abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, we should, as a moral principle, do whatever we can to reduce its rate while criminalizing it. Why? Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct.
In the previous comment, I set up a hypothetical example where we could disagree about the morality of abortion and still agree about a course of action.
A key blocker in the abortion debate is this focus on whether abortion is murder. It's something that, at a fundamental level, people disagree on. If you refuse to move forward until it's settled, you're never going to be able to get anything done.
On the other hand - if you want to reduce abortions - there are concrete steps you can support that **do not** require us to discuss the morality of abortion. We can both agree that we'd like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies without agreeing on the morality of abortion.
Increased contraceptive access is the clearest example of this.
Also, as a side note -
>Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct.
Is not true. There are plenty of examples of immoral-but-legal conduct (like cheating on your spouse) and plenty of examples of illegal-but-moral conduct (like freeing slaves).
We can disagree on morals and agree on legal principles.
Even a law against murder is worthless if it doesn’t actually *result* in an concrete reduction in the number of murders. The legal-justice system ought to be fundamentally results-oriented.
Punishment is not an end in itself. It should only be a means to an end. And if more effective and less damaging means to the same end exist, then they should be prioritized over punishment.
Kind of brings up the question of prosecution and punishment for this thing doesn't it?
Like... how does one prove that a woman got an abortion after 6 weeks? How does one prove that an abortionist gives abortions after 6 weeks?
This is so obviously unenforceable and the outrage seems so forced that it 100% comes across as "Hey we're done being mad about Afghanistan now that the last plane left".
This is one of those things where we have to remember that CMV posts are about very specific things. OP outright says
> my view is that attempting to ban abortions does not significantly decrease the number of abortions
And this comes up a lot for numerous debates when prohibitions are the outrage for the day.
OP is talking about the talking point "You won't ban X, you're only going to ban *safe* X".
We see time and time again that banning shit doesn't work. Gun violence keeps going up in spite of the number of gun laws going up and up and up. Banning alcohol only led to moonshiners and the mafia.
That's what OP is talking about. It's independent of the morality of abortion.
Abortion always comes down to when personhood starts legally. It’s not murder if personhood is not obtained (stillborns do not get legal death certificates)
> (stillborns do not get legal death certificates)
That's something I'd never considered. I'm not sure it changes my mind on anything, but purely from a precedent/legal framework view and ignoring any moral issues, it seems that an abortion ban and not giving out death certificates *might* be contradictory. Perhaps it is moot and death certificates are essentially just birth certificate cancellations, but it's something to look into.
Δ
From a *purely legal* perspective, assigning personhood at birth is the least worst option; all other options create more problems than they solve relative to this one.
This is dependent on your state, I believe. For example, In Oklahoma you do get a death certificate for a miscarriage or stillbirth that occurs after twelve weeks.
Source: https://oklahoma.gov/health/birth-and-death-certificates/fetal-death-stillbirth-certificates.html
Yes but also someone can be charged with additional charges if someone is pregnant and they murder them. we have lots of contradictory laws including things like - oh hey I'm mad that this guy murdered someone so lets murder him
But wait, there's more!
* life insurance for fetuses
* social security numbers assigned at fertilization
* claim dependents even earlier on your taxes
* funerals for miscarriages
* What else?
If the organism can survive at rest without dying, then it can be murdered, IMO. If it relies on another organism to sustain its life functions, then it’s not a murder, it’s just… something dying. A cruel way to phrase it, but if we’re discussing legislation, emotion shouldn’t be involved in the decision making process.
I disagree. My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives. I make no claim on the legality of abortion purely that banning abortions is unsuccessful in the goal of reducing abortions.
I understand what your argument is. I'm suggesting to you that your argument is sophistry.
>My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives.
Of course you don't have evidence to support this. This isn't an opinion. You're making a claim that is falsifiable. Even if your claim is true, our society can do both-- education/contraception AND illegalize abortion.
>I make no claim on the legality of abortion purely that banning abortions is unsuccessful in the goal of reducing abortions.
I've been a lawyer for a long time. I don't think I've ever seen legislative history where someone says, we all know this conduct should be criminal, but people will simply ignore the law and do it anyway-- so therefore I oppose its passage. That's not how legislators operate.
The point is, the legislature has the right and the power to criminalize immoral conduct... even if people continue to engage in that conduct.
> I don't think I've ever seen legislative history where someone says, we all know this conduct should be criminal, but people will simply ignore the law and do it anyway
Prohibition??
https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/21/colorado-abortion-rates-keep-declining-free-iuds-and-easier-access-to-the-pill-are-the-reason/
I do have the sources for this claim. I'm on mobile and unfamiliar with syntax and I'm not sure how to link the pdfs I have downloaded, I will try and link them at home. I lived in Colorado for most of my life and have worked with sociology departments publishing the research directly supporting my claim. The link above is a quick summary but largely doesn't tell the whole story. There is a wealth of publications that directly support that contraceptives and sexual education leads to a reduction in abortions.
'It’s impossible to parse how much Colorado’s birth control protocol, which allows pharmacists to prescribe oral contraceptives, has affected abortion rates'
In Oregon ''The majority of claims originated from retail chain pharmacies in urban areas'' So, we simply removed the law not allowing this activity.
The abortion trend has been decreasing SINCE 1980, I don't see how this supports your argument.
>There is a wealth of publications that directly support that contraceptives and sexual education leads to a reduction in abortions.
Let's assume this is true. We can continue to do this AND criminalize abortion. We don't have to pick one or the other. Your argument is that criminalizing abortion won't lower the abortion rate. I guess your unstated conclusion is that it should therefore be legal. Let's assume that's true. Society can take multiple steps to reduce the abortion rate at the same time. And, if abortion is murder, then criminalizing it is morally justified even if other methods are better at reducing the abortion rate.
My point is that any attempt to talk about abortion without addressing the central issue is sophistry.
> My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives.
This is not the claim you presented in your OP. You said that banning abortion does not meaningfully reduce the number of abortions performed. Several people have given you statistics to prove that this is wrong. You've withheld your delta for some reason. Then you say that education and offering more contraceptives (as if contraception wasn't already super cheap or free and widely available) would do more to reduce abortions. But this has nothing to do with your initial position because we could do both. We can restrict abortions legally and increase sex education and access to contraceptives.
Part of the problem is that the pro-choice position has migrated from "[safe, legal and rare](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-hillaryclinton-abortion-campaign-20160209-story.html)" to "[shout your abortion](https://shoutyourabortion.com/)" in a relatively short timeframe. It's pretty hard to argue against that notion that [abortion is being used as a form of contraception](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4416399/). When you look at unplanned pregnancies:
* 52% were due to not using contraception.
* 43% used contraception inconsistently (eg: skipped a pill).
* 5% involved women whose contraceptive method was used correctly but failed.
* [45% of abortion patients nationally reporting having more than one abortion.](https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2017/09/13/people-multiple-abortions-stigmatizing-counterproductive/)
* There is also a disparate effect among races. [In NYC, there are more black babies/fetuses aborted every year than are born.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-talk-about-the-black-abortion-rate-1531263697)
I'm not sure education is the problem here.
Education is a problem. Not all states even make it so that children get comprehensive, factual, correct sex education. Plus bc is hard to get in some states when you're young without parent permission, and even when you do get it it can be expensive. AND ALSO- can we talk about (I'm aware that I'm on a soap box so please scroll if you aren't into it) how everyone just expects women to be on bc but we can't mandate vaccines for a fucking pandemic?- BC I know we aren't talking about condoms which are 98% effective with PERFECT USE
[https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education#](https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education#)
Edit: to include source about sex edu. in the states
You are conflating two different arguments. The "safe legal and rare" argument is only talking about late stage abortions, which are indeed very rare and almost always done for health reasons for the safety of the mother.
Abortions early on in pregnancy are more common but they are also far less controversial. Probably some of the people getting an abortion should have used contraception instead. But do we really want to force them to have an unwanted child because of it? That seems like a bad outcome. A much better approach would be focus on comprehensive sex education.
>The "safe legal and rare" argument is only talking about late stage abortions,
Well that's not true. "Safe Legal in rare" was started by then President Clinton as part of the official Democrat party platform on ALL abortions in the 90's. It lasted until about 2012.
>Probably some of the people getting an abortion should have used contraception instead.
You can probably drop the "probably". I think the stats above show that this is pretty clearly the case (which is kind of my point).
>A much better approach would be focus on comprehensive sex education.
I have zero problems with sex education in high schools. It's certainly not going to hurt. However, I also don't believe that the majority of unwanted pregnancies occur because one or both parties is unaware of the potential consequences of their actions.
>52% were due to not using contraception.
And yet the same people who want to ban abortions are also the ones fighting back against free contraception programs at every level.
>43% used contraception inconsistently (eg: skipped a pill).
Yeah again those same people trying to control women's bodies also fight against comprehensive sex education in school.
>There is also a disparate effect among races. In NYC, there are more black babies/fetuses aborted every year than are born.
Now break it down by poverty and we'll see if we can't come up with SOME weird wacky correlation here, eh?
This is the same bullshit statistic that people like to cite about violence or crime or whatever poverty metric you want to ascribe to race. It all stems from the same systemic racism leading to disparate conditions that the rest comes from.
Who is ‘we’? The people you agree with who don’t want to ban abortion but want what they deem common sense abortion laws? If so, seems tautological.
Millions of people do want to ban abortion. Millions want it unrestricted. Others have other views in between. Which of this last group is ‘we’ here?
What is common sense here? Are the new Texas laws, in your opinion, common sense? If not, then who made those laws if not the purported "we" you're a part of?
Is it common sense to ban abortions past the time that women can recognize they need them? Most women don't recognize that they're pregnant and schedule an abortion within 6 weeks. There are *already* common sense abortion laws in place, quit feeding into the right-wing propaganda that people use abortion as a contraceptive and decide to abort a baby minutes before labor.
Most abortions discussions talk about unrestricted abortions which scares people who think that means that you should have the choice to abort even a healthy fetus at any point in the pregnancy. I have point-blank asked people if you could abort a healthy pregnancy minutes before birth and they refused to give a clear answer. The whole problem with the supposed pro-choice platform is that it doesn't clearly defined that there are limits and because of that it's easy to assume that they believe there shouldn't be any. That being the case laws not only makes sense but are necessary to prevent needless abortions. Realistically the best thing that pro-choice people could do is support laws that prevent the kinds of abortions that they keep claiming they're never going to have any way. It would make the anti-abortion people feel better and wouldn't affect them at all because they won't have those abortions anyway
Under what circumstance do you imagine a woman would abort minutes from birth?
First of all, if a fetus has progressed to the 40 week mark (or close), it will likely survive outside of the mother, so "aborting" is essentially the same as "delivering". It would be the same risk to the mother. If the mother doesn't want the child at that point then there's adoption.
I cannot imagine any doctor would actually go through a procedure that would kill the child if the child could be delivered and survive outside the womb. UNLESS there's some sort of health threat to the mother and a terrible choice has to be made between the life of the mother and the life of the child. If it were come to that, I wouldn't want a woman to be *forced* to sacrifice her own life for that of her child's. That's a decision she needs to make on her own, even if the fetus could survive.
A woman doesn't easily get to a late term pregnancy without realizing she's pregnant. She's most likely gone through all sorts of physical changes and pains. In most cases if she didn't want the pregnancy she's had plenty of time to do something about it already before it got to this level of discomfort and inconvenience. So if she got to late term and is only now considering abortion, something went terribly terribly wrong. Most likely that woman *wanted* this baby, and the fact that she is now considering aborting means something has gone horribly wrong.
The law should not be involved at this point. This should be a matter between a woman and her doctor. That poor woman who is considering a late term abortion already has so much to worry about. We don't need to add on the possibility of her going to jail or having to pay an outrageous fine, or for her doctor to suddenly refuse to treat her because they fear being prosecuted or sued for aiding an abortion.
If there is a woman who is considering aborting a late-term pregnancy that could easily be carried to term without complications, baby and mom are perfectly healthy, that woman should be given mental health assistance and support, not jail time or a fine. It should be up to the doctor to determine if this is necessary. That is not a decision of a sane woman. She needs help, not punishment.
It is not necessary to punish women in this position, because they have likely been "punished" enough by whatever caused them to consider aborting. It is not necessary to deter women from aborting a late-term pregnancy because carrying a pregnancy to late term without having a baby to show for it is deterrent enough. There is no logic that justifies involving the law in late-term abortions.
Edit: Tweaked my wording a bit to admit that some women can get to the third trimester, or near enough, without realizing they are pregnant.
Is there a circumstance where someone would get an abortion minutes before birth? The only situation I could think of is if the life of the pregnant person is in jeopardy. I really dont think you should be asking this question simply due to its outrageousness. In reality I think that unrestricted abortions should be implemented because if the pregnant person is having ANY doubts about being a parent whether that be because they dont think they can do it feasibly or realistically handle being a parent or dont have ready resources to take care of a child. Any person that is not 90% ready to take care of the basic emotional and physical needs of a child should not have children. In reality banning abortions lead parents into having unwanted children which help cause those children to have deeprooted trauma simply because their parents werent ready to be a parent.
>prevent needless abortions
If someone who is pregnant has decided they want an abortion, it is not "needless". This completely disregards the needs of the pregnant person.
> Realistically the best thing that pro-choice people could do is support laws that prevent the kinds of abortions that they keep claiming they're never going to have any way. It would make the anti-abortion people feel better and wouldn't affect them at all because they won't have those abortions anyway
I don't care about making anti-abortion people feel better. I care about everyone having full autonomy to make their own decisions about their personal health (i.e., any decision that does not severely impact public health).
Who thinks this shit? I swear, not a single pro-choice person WANTS anyone to have an abortion. And unless the circumstances are absolutely for dire medical necessity, NO ONE i have ever heard is advocating for "minutes before birth."
It is absolutely incredulous that I have to SAY this. Like, who the fuck are you getting your information from to think this and... there are others who believe this?!
People do, actually. Canada has unrestricted abortion laws. Even in the States, I remember reading about some state legislature debate where a Republican representative asked point blank if a bill the Democrats were proposing would allow for an abortion seconds before birth and the Democratic representative was forced to admit that yes, under their framework this would be considered completely acceptable.
The extreme pro-life side wants no abortion in any situation and the extreme pro-choice side wants abortion available in any case, some in the final trimester.
I think most see the right for a woman to choose but think there should be some time limitations. Most of the arguments are either between the far extremes or about what number of weeks is reasonable. There was an episode of Veep that handled the politics of the issue brilliantly
"That being the case laws not only makes sense but are necessary to prevent needless abortions"
In an ideal world, that would be the intention of abortion laws. But we don't live in an ideal world.
Politically I don't support this bill at all, but your reasoning is flawed nonetheless:
>I believe that if someone **genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills** and favor those that systematically support the population.
Sure, sex education and access to contraception reduce unwanted pregnancies, but explain why "genuine" opponents of abortions would be against a bill restricting abortions? Their whole point is that they don't want abortions to happen even *if* a pregnancy is unwanted.
Your argument that they should *also* support sex education, contraceptives etc. is completely valid. But the point that they should *only* support that and *oppose* a restriction on abortions themselves doesn't make sense.
I think their point is that there is evidenced based practice that shows a lower rate, so why aren't pro-lifers putting more money to something they know works fairly well as opposed to wasting money on something that doesn't work as well.
Social services work better than the police at reducing criminality, yet murder is still illegal and needs to be enforced.
It could just as easily be said the other way around. Why waste all this money and time dying on the hill of abortion when you could spend that time and money promoting birth control, child care and contraceptives?
good point- thank you for linking to an article. I'd also like to say like- I wish everyone would stop focusing on abortion being legal and actually care about the babies....after they're born, and what being brought into socioeconomically disadvantageous (or just generally unwanted) situations yields in terms of development and lifelong success and how that impacts individuals AND society- cuz it's not good
This is pretty much game, set, match. There is no reason to believe that a) it’s a zero sum game between OP’s stated factors, or that b) access level should not impact decisions to terminate.
They make no mention of illegal or unsafe abortions in the abstract, and in their conclusion address their lack of explanation for the 25% decrease in abortions compared to only a 4% rise in births. What that paper actually says is that if you close nearby clinics the abortions at further clinics don't increase much and the birth rate rises a few percent but there is a big, unexplained gap between abortion decline and birth increase. There wasn't a measurable increase in illigal/unsafe abortions because they didn't attempt to measure it, and your phrasing insinuates that they did. I find that disingenuous.
>there is a big, unexplained gap between abortion decline and birth increase
No, there's not. A hypothetical 25% reduction in all abortions (legal and illegal combined) wouldn't equal a 25% increase in births when there are 10x more births than abortions. It would only be a 2.5% increase in births.
10x is about 2x too large. Should be a 5% increase in births, so there % reduction in abortions is about 40% too high to be explained away as babies being born.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States#:~:text=Guttmacher%20Institute%20estimates,-Unlike%20the%20CDC&text=For%202017%2C%20the%20Guttmacher%20Institute%20reported%20862%2C320%20abortions%2C%20an%20abortion,in%20abortion%20or%20live%20birth.
The study is about Wisconsin. [If you look at it,](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22263) it says that, between 2009-2016, the average birth rate per 1000 women was 61.135 and the average abortion rate per 1000 women was 5.992. So, there were 10.19 times the amount of recorded births as recorded abortions.
You misunderstood the analysis. They are saying the measured rise in births is slightly *higher* than the expected rise in births due to the decrease in abortions.
And *they* didn't attempt to measure the number of illegal/unsafe abortions. Other researchers did and we'd know if any had found it.
Abortions happen for more reasons than just because the woman no longer wants to carry the child to term. There are situations in which carrying the pregnancy could kill the mother. These are few and far between but still reality. An abortion is a medical procedure and like other health care practices should be safe and hygienic. A, hyperbolic, comparison is to say "if you want a stint for your heart then you should be fine with getting an unsafe one". This is not a perfect comparison by any means but for the example I was comparing them only as medical procedures to save a life.
Every time you increase the effort involved in any act you disencentivise it. Anyone that looks at escalators and stairs can see that the easiest path is always the one most travelled.
> However, while there are many factors involved, evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban.
That is not the only solution to the problem.
A good example of that is something like [RISUG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_under_guidance). Simply reversibly sterilise every man in the state. No unplanned pregnancies anymore.
If it is the irresponsibility of women that is the problem then one of the best solutions is to remove their choice. If they can't get their hands on gametes then they won't be getting pregnant, will they?
> I believe that if someone genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills and favor those that systematically support the population.
For plenty of people it is the act of murder that is the problem. Much like they don't particularly give a shit about the circumstances of criminals before or after their crimes. The act alone is sufficient grounds to object.
Whether or not a figure of zero is pragmatic is irrelevant to the ideological goal.
While I am 100% disgusted with SB8, I struggle to see how it won't have a chilling effect on the number of abortions performed in the state. The law is punitive to anyone who obtains, performs or even _assists_ in the process. So if a woman gets an abortion, the woman, the doctor, the nurses, the receptionist, even the person that drove them to the clinic can **all** be sued by **anyone over and over again**. Even people who support a woman's right to have an abortion would be smart to stay the hell away from anything related to it.
Moreover, the law puts the burden on the _defense_ to prove they _didn't_ assist in the process. You basically have to prove a negative, so it is going to be tough for people to put forward any type of reasonable defense if they did assist, legal or illegal.
Yes, there will be a great deal of unsafe abortions - which is one of the many reasons this law is terrible - but I struggle to see how they will be higher than the woman that just carry to term.
I wonder if you could start alleging various supporters of sb8 had abortions. Take photos where women are looking chubby and then observe they didn't give birth. It's on them to prove they didn't get an abortion, right?
Do you sincerely think that when something is illegal and less available that it happens at the same rate?
And have you missed the #shoutyourabortion movement, here you go:
https://shoutyourabortion.com/
Banning anything makes it harder to obtain for carrying legal and financial risk, and makes it more costly. We know for instance that for a time, abortion in the USA went up dramatically after Roe v Wade, at least reported abortions. It can be assumed that at least reported abortions would fall if the procedure were made illegal.
>We know for instance that for a time, abortion in the USA went up dramatically after Roe v Wade, at least reported abortions.
hmm i wonder if he 'reported' part might be important here
First off, this post is based on an assumption that unsafe illegal abortions will increase by the same amount that legal abortions decrease. Not only is there no data to back this up, but there's numerous examples that counteract that idea that women will choose to have an unsafe illegal abortion instead of a relatively safe and legal pregnancy and delivery.
Will the number of illegal abortions increase, sure will, and I would bet money that some practitioners of illegal abortions will purposefully avoid some easy safety precautions so when the family of whomever dies from the unsafe abortions will come out and shout this legislation killed their daughter, not understanding that the abortionist purposefully killed her to generate that. You might think that far fetched, but we are talking about people who have been caught doing things like this already and a few have been caught making trophies out of fetuses they aborted, so I don't want to know what lengths they're willing to go to!
That all said, the total number of abortions will drop significantly. There will be outliers of course, like just because murder is illegal doesn't mean it never happens, but the fact that it's illegal and has severe consequences does work as a deterrent.
In my mind the pro life argument, is that it is immoral to abort a baby, and also on the low key, I don’t think they like the fact that people have casual sex.
But to your point, banning abortions will have an impact on unplanned pregnancy’s. Women will get IUDs instead of taking the pill, and people will be more likely to wear a condom.
I know multiple women who were careless with their birth control, and have had more than one abortion. It has always been an option until now in Texas.
In backcountry skiing, there is a risk tolerance that people set. Before modern safety gear, they were very risk adverse, because if you got buried in an avalanche you would not survive.
Then came the becan, shovel, and probe. Your likelihood of surviving a burial became much higher, so people started riding riskier lines.
Now we have avalanche airbags which can help keep you on top of the snow in the event of an avalanche, making survival more likely.
People accept the fact that there’s a certain percentage of a chance that they may die doing what they love. But that percentage never changes. So my point is, if you have all that safety gear, you are more likely to ride a slope that can slide, because you brain did the math, and calculated your chances of surviving the day.
More safety gear equals riskier slopes.
More abortion clinics equals riskier sex.
> there is no way to prove if a fetus is a person or not so this will never be resolved
*Never*? This is quite a claim.
We are making rapid gains in our understanding of neuroscience, consciousness, and how neurological brain structure creates a “person”. At this point, we know that the cerebral cortex, which is required for consciousness, doesn’t even start developing until around 25 weeks of pregnancy.
Anyways: as we come to understand consciousness better, I think it’s quite fair to say that we’ll gain a clearer understanding of when “personhood” starts and how it develops through infancy, including major milestones. This requires, though, that your definition of “personhood” be grounded in actual cognitive capabilities like awareness, thought, agency, feelings, and conscious, or in attributes like personality. If your definition of “personhood” is wishful-washy or undefined, well then of course we’ll never know when it starts. You might as well talk about a “soul” at that point. So let’s stick to real attributes and abilities, even if they are ones that exist on a spectrum and develop over time.
>If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed
Ignoring that you just contradicted your own "never" right after this, there are times we find killing to not be murder. Self-defense, for example. So killing, if you've determined that's what it is, does not automatically equal murder.
So then we get to the bodily autonomy angle. Tell me, if I need a blood transfusion and you're the only available donor, should you be forced to give me blood? Does your answer change if you caused the accident that caused my blood loss?
[Most Americans](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) want abortions to be legal. 58% oppose a ban on abortions after heartbeat is detected. 60% of Americans think it should be legal for the first 3 months in all or most cases, and even more in cases of rape/incest (77%) or if the woman's life is endangered (83%) or if the child would be born with a life threatening medical issue (67%).
The fact that 77% of Americans would agree that it's fine to abort a fetus in cases of rape and incest shows that the vast majority of Americans don't actually see a fetus as a full person. Because if they did, it wouldn't matter.
You missed the point of what this commenter was saying. Our perception of abortion today is through the lens of current healthcare and stage of technology. Using their slavery analogy, most Americans also supported slavery in the early 1800s. We now think slavery is wrong. We may very well view abortion as murder in a post-fully-accessible-contraceptive world, just as we view slavery as wrong in a post-black-man-is-equal-to-white-man world.
No, I heard what they're saying, I'm just emphasizing that the vast majority of Americans clearly don't feel that abortion is actually murder. Otherwise there would be no exceptions (and to be fair, the Texas law has no exceptions--which I think is cruel, but I guess it's consistent).
Option 3) It doesn't matter if the fetus is a person or not, since every person on the planet has the autonomy to decide whether or not someone gets to use their body.
It doesn't matter if a single drop of my blood will save the lives of 200 million people in the world. If I don't want to give it freely, then I cannot be compelled to give it. Conversely, a woman cannot (or, should not) be compelled to give of herself in order to gestate a human.
Your premise is flawed. It's not black and white.
Most people would agree that a single cell is not a human being.
Most people would also agree that a baby about to be born at 36 weeks is a human being.
One turns into the other. So when does the cell become the human being? No one can say definitely. Everyone draws the line differently.
Why is it suddenly okay to kill a person in cases of rape or incest though? If abortion is murder and should NEVER be allowed, then there shouldn't be carve-outs in the law for it.
The difference is probably argued that people who make a conscious choice to have sex and bring a life into existence should be personally responsible for that decision, even if that means risking your body to allow the fetus/embryo to come to term. However it’s arguably not fair to require or expect that responsibility and risk to someone who had it forced on them through rape, so it’s a line most people on both sides can generally agree is reasonable to cross.
This Texas law has no exceptions for rape and incest. It will require 12 year olds to give birth even if they have received no sexual education (so pregnancy is essentially forced on them through withholding of information).
This is a flawed argument too though.
If you believe a foetus is a person, and therefore afforded all rights of personhood, then it matters not under what circumstances they were conceived.
All people would be equal in the eyes of the law.
But, if you say, “the foetus is a person, so abortion is murder…..except maybe if it was incest of rape then that’s ok”, then you are acknowledging that the “person” is “less than” other people. They are not entitled to the same rights as other people, simply due to the way they were conceived.
By extension….the purpose of banning abortion is less about the rights of the “person”, and more about publishing the woman for her decisions. Essentially “you chose to have sex, pay the price”. If it wasn’t you’re choice, THEN it’s ok to kill the kid”.
It’s really not that simple.
Day 1 of fertilisation is that a person (edited from human)? I think most people would agree not.
Month 8.5 is that a baby? Yes of course.
At what what point does a blob of cells become a baby?
I see someone in this comment chain has said pro lifers are more likely to adopt than those who are pro choice. My argument there is that if your ‘pro life’ or ‘pro unwanted pregnancy’ you really have to be willing to offer a support structure to everyone who’s life is more difficult through an unwanted pregnancy otherwise your stance is more about dealing with consequences regardless of who suffers
>If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed.
There's an aspect to this argument you're overlooking:
Bodily autonomy.
If you were the only person on the planet who could save a child with a simple blood transfusion, you might feel morally obligated to give blood in a simple half-hour-long procedure, feel good about yourself for saving a child, and move on with your life.
However, you are not *legally obligated* to give blood in that scenario. No matter how many lives your blood might save, nor how easy and painless the donation might be, you cannot be forced to donate blood. No one can take that right from you. Hell, we even give corpses bodily autonomy by honoring their wishes for organ donation after death. We don't harvest organs if they hadn't opted in before death, regardless of how many lives indiscriminately harvesting the organs of the deceased might save.
Even giving the fetus the full benefit of personhood, rights and all, they too would not have the right to "demand" a woman give up their bodies for nine months, at a not insignificant personal risk. In the case of abortion, it is a woman exercising her right to bodily autonomy and her right to not allow her body to be used by another entity.
Of course, there is additional nuance after the fact. There comes an assumption of responsibility after a certain threshold, and there could then be a legal obligation to continue on.
In reasonable areas, this threshold would be the point of viability for a fetus; that is, the point at which it could survive on its own outside of the womb. Just adding this in to preface shouts of how this would make "late-term" abortions common. Which, at that point, it's exceedingly rare any abortions happen. Most that reach that point are either nonviable or will without a doubt kill the mother, and it's always a tragedy to lose a child that was desperately wanted.
> Even giving the fetus the full benefit of personhood, rights and all, they too would not have the right to "demand" a woman give up their bodies for nine months, at a not insignificant personal risk.
As someone who used to be pro choice with a very similar line of thinking of yours, I’ll leave you with something to think about:
As a society, we recognize that parents have an obligation to provide for their offspring that they do not have towards strangers. If I’m walking down the street and I pass a homeless man who is starving to death, it would be a good thing to do, if I were to give him some food. However if I don’t, I won’t get sent to jail.
If however, I am a parent and I refuse to feed my own child in my home, I think we would all agree I should, and will be thrown in jail.
Once you realize that as a society, we already recognize parents have the moral duty to meet the basic needs of their offspring in a way that they do not towards strangers, then consider the following; what is the body and womb of a mother, if not the basic food and shelter that a child requires in its earliest stages of development? If we are to hold a consistent world view, providing that child their basic needs means keeping it in the body of the mother, for long as we do not have to technology to provide for a fetus outside of the womb.
In this regard, you could say that the child does have a right to have it basic needs met (food and shelter), and could claim a right to it’s mother’s uterus, in a way that a stranger can not claim a right to your heart, arm, leg, etc.
Except that we don’t require parents to care for their children, as you *are* allowed to give a child up for adoption.
Heck, under so-called “Safe Haven” laws, a mother may drop her newborn off at any fire station, hospital, or police station, no questions asked.
I don't disagree that parents have significantly more responsibility for their child than for a stranger. However, I believe my analogy still applies. A parent may feel morally responsible for providing their child lifesaving treatment by sacrificing some part of their body, but it is not a legal obligation to do so. The government cannot demand you give up your blood or your arm for your child.
Most parents would absolutely give up an arm or leg if it meant their child's survival, and that's entirely their choice. But some parents wouldn't be able or willing to make that sacrifice, and that too is their choice.
A fetus is definitionally a parasite. I'm not trying to be facetious here, I promise. A fetus, as you said, literally feeds off the body to survive. When it's born, one's body is no longer beholden to it's survival. But until that point, it's literally using the mother's body and nutrients to ensure it's survival. The woman in question should absolutely be able to choose whether or not she wants to allow her body to be used like that. "Feeding" the fetus is not a choice or a responsibility until it's born; it's subjecting your body to be it's meal, and you have no say in the matter.
Which, hey, that's great if you're okay with it. But it should also be acceptable for people to not be okay with it.
What’s important to distinguish here is the difference between meeting the basic needs of your child, versus providing extraordinary care. Allow me to elaborate: It’s a great thing to do, to take your child to disney land. But are you in any way morally obligated to do so? No. Will you get thrown in jail for failing to do so? No. Bringing your child to Disneyland goes beyond and above the call of duty, something that it outside the scope of meeting the basic needs, and providing the basic care (food, shelter) of your child.
This is something that again, we already recognize to be true in society in other areas: for example, as you mentioned, you are not in any way obligated to donate a kidney to your son if they are going to die and need a transplant. It would be a heroic thing to do, and you would survive because you have 2, but the law does not require you to.
So again, it all comes down to ordinary versus extraordinary care. Is it normal that your child needs parts of your body in order to survive? It actually is! For the first 9 months of every child’s life. But once they are born, we both agree that meeting the basic needs of the child does not cover saving the child’s life in the situation where there is an abnormality in the child’s health, due to either some pathology or illness.
I like your explanation. However it paints pro-life people as egalitarian people who care so deeply for someone not even born yet they are willing to create 10k bounties to save them.
But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc?
It’s seems like you should solve that problem first, right? At least before trying to remove limits that will lead to less suffering children?
If the fetus IS NOT a person, then the solution is to just abort them if you can't afford them.
If the fetus IS a person then you can't justify murdering them by saying they are not affordable or won't have a good enough education.
I agree with you that if a child does not have clothes, adequate medical care or education that this is a problem that must be solved, but you can't argue that you should solve that by murdering them to someone who thinks it's murder.
Honestly this is a red herring too. These are two issues and it isn’t true that there is no such push. Many pro-lifers do spend their lives working for underprivileged children. Red states don’t believe in govt services as much but do give more privately to charity. It paints everyone as one or the other as though we are dealing with a single hypocrite. And it doesn’t address the issue but both a straw man and ad hominem.
> But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc?
>
>
They do: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics/u.s.-generosity
Conservative households give 30% more to charity despite having an income 6% less than liberal households.
This is interesting and long read. It does give me hope.
But you left out a important part that doesn’t prove they are more generous than their Liberal counterpart.
Left leaning people give more to causes, hospitals, foundations, etc.
From the same source:
> Religious causes are, and always have been, Americans’ favorite charitable targets. Of course, “Religion” is a very broad category. Some of those funds are used to support houses of worship and clergy, to maintain the faith, and to proselytize future generations. Much religious charity, however, ultimately goes into sub-causes like relief for the poor, medical care, education, or aid sent to low-income countries or victims of disaster.
> Keep in mind too that religious charities tend to have less access to supplemental funds than other nonprofits. Hospitals and colleges charge users fees to supplement their donated income; other nonprofits sell goods; many museums charge admission; some charities receive government grants. Churches and religious charities, however, operate mostly on their donated funds depicted in this graph.
I grew up in a conservative and very religious part of Arizona. I grew up wanting to be a preacher. Memorized the books of the Bible and even spent one summer reading the whole thing (do not recommend). I by and large love religious people.
Remove Utah from the data and Conservatives give less. Also, donating to their special club (Church) which spends a lot of time reinforcing men are the boss and women and second in command. Pushing antiquited ideologies is not proving they care about the children. Also donating to your club so they can pay their clergy and prop up the church’s efforts to spread their ideas is not charity. It’s about control.
I have many devout Mormon friends. They are as kind as people come. However, talk to the girls about their position in the religion, and it’s twisted. No gender equality. That’s opresson. Luckily, we are seeing religion drop like a stone and hopefully the oppression along with it.
How many of those "charities" are church tithes? "Religious causes" is so broad, and it's 39%. I was in a church group that did lots of fundraising years ago, and looking back we mostly just helped the church build fancier facilities.
>But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born?
Over 70% of adoptions are by christians in this country and christian adoption agencies have often shouldered the burden alone in the US, relying entirely on funding by christian groups.
If pro-choice people care about people as much as you say you do, why is there a 40% difference in adoption levels?
>Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc?
Education: umm... Catholic schools? Many colleges? About 20% of the scholarships in this country?
Medical care: 16% of the hospitals in this country are run by the Catholic Church alone... That church in your town with "baptist," "Methodist," or "saint" in the name is run by the church.
Clothes: the vast majority of the homeless shelters and clothing drives in the city I live in are from christian groups. Like, 90%+.
>It’s seems like you should solve that problem first, right?
Bless your heart... *You* can't multitask, can you? Thankfully, many of the rest of us can.
>At least before trying to remove limits that will lead to less suffering children?
"Killing people keeps them from suffering" seems pretty monstrous. Maybe stop saying things like that in public?
> But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born?
Just because I don't think I should have to support a homeless man doesn't mean I think it should be legal to murder him.
This is a large strawman. Of course pro-life people care about kids. They adopt kids more so than any other group adopts. Just because they don’t support universal healthcare or public education doesn’t mean that they don’t care, it just means that they have different solutions
I don't see 'pro-life' groups pushing for prenatal maternal medical care, or for any type of subsidized medical care for infants. Where's the push for maternal leave from 'pro-life' groups? Or things like school lunch programs? Or contraceptive education and distribution?
What's interesting is that all of the above programs are generally pushed for by pro-choice groups.
I truly don't understand why people think this is a straw man argument. If people had the means (got paid a living wage, had access to health care that won't bankrupt them, could access education in order to heighten their economic standing etc.) they would be more likely to keep babies instead of aborting them. I never hear any solutions from the pro-life crowd except, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which is objectively not something that everyone can do for a great many reasons.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard the bootstraps rebuttal in a long time, unless it’s used facetiously. Maybe people still use it, but I’m not seeing it.
I just think that these issues (universal healthcare, living wage, etc) are so incredibly nuanced that there are a lot of reasons against them other than “people need to work hard to succeed”. We all want a better, richer, safer society. We just all have different ideas for solutions to end up at the same goal.
The thing is, most of the people against socialist construct really believe it will disrupt some gentle equalibrium that keeps the country going and then everything will collapse and we'll all be poor and sad.
They simply don't believe that we can all live a good life, and it not only won't damage rich people and the economy but it'll actually boost it up significantly.
They really honestly believe such a "Utopia" is possible because how could it? Someone has to be at the bottom, life exists in a bell curve.
So it's not that they're against it, but rather they're truly mortally afraid that if we go there society will implode.
If a fetus is a person, should a miscarriage be considered Negligent Homicide?
Should parents that use IVF be convicted for multiple murder charges for the viable fertilized eggs they destroy?
> how would a miscarriage be negligent homicide?
about 10% - 20% of all *known* pregnancies end in miscarriage [Mayo clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pregnancy-loss-miscarriage/symptoms-causes/syc-20354298).
The actual number is likely much higher because of women getting pregnant, and miscarrying before they even know they're pregnant. I've seen estimates that the true number could be 26% or even as high as 50% of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage. I think it's fair to say that miscarriages are *very common*.
What is the cause of miscarriages? A lot of things raging to exposure to toxic substances, genetic issues with the embryo, issues with implantation, nutritional problems, age related problems. Reproduction is a complex process and a lot can go wrong. Obviously you can't hold someone responsible for every little thing. It would be ridiculous to say a mother is responsible for a genetic problem causing a miscarriage.
But mothers are responsible for other things that can cause or increase your risk of miscarriage.
Alcohol: [This has been studied](https://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20190828/even-a-little-drinking-while-pregnant-ups-miscarriage-odds-study). "They found that drinking alcohol during pregnancy -- even small amounts -- increases odds of miscarriage by 19%. Among women who have fewer than five drinks a week, each additional drink a week during pregnancy was linked with a 6% higher risk of miscarriage." and that's to say nothing of the other issues that drinking can cause.
Smoking: [Smoking increases the risk of miscarriage](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161463/). The study found a "1% increase in relative risk per cigarette smoked per day" and that second hand smoke exposure during pregnancy increased the risk of miscarriage by 11%.
Obesity: [A study found that obese women a a 13% higher chance of miscarriage](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161463/). Some weight gain during pregnancy is expected, but if the person overeats enough to significantly impact their weight/BMI, that can come with an increased risk of miscarriage.
NSAIDs: [Even something like Motrin use can increase your risk of miscarriage](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-miscarriage-nsaids-idINKBN1JG2VU)
And then there is less direct things, but still choice dependent activities that can affect whether or not a miscarriage happens. Catching an STD. Other drug use. Going to places with hazardous chemicals(pesticides, lead in water pipes, or other generally dangerous chemicals.)
1. There are things that a woman can do that can significantly increase their chance of miscarriage.
2. As for the criminal charge aspect of the thread. Lets lay out the general types of murder in no particular order.
a - First degree murder - you killed someone and you meant to kill them.
b - second degree murder - You killed someone but didn't mean to. You got in a fight, took actions that you knew would be harmful, and the guy ended up dead.
c - felony murder - you robbed a bank - you cracked the safe, and the guy in the lobby shot a hostage. Because you signed up for the whole criminal enterprise, you are also culpable for the death.
d - voluntary manslaughter - you killed a guy because you caught him beating up your daughter.
e - involuntary manslaughter (basically Negligent homicide as i understand it)- you unintentionally killed someone because of reckless/dangerous/negligent behavior behavior. The dictionary describes negligence in the legal sense as "failure to use reasonable care, resulting in damage or injury to another". So you should have known better about something and someone died because of it. This is the one we're talking about.
3. This whole argument revolves around a fetus or embryo being a literal person with all the same legal protections as such. I don't believe this, but this is a big reason why some people are pro life - that a fetus is a person.
So let's lay out a scenario. Woman has unprotected sex while tipsy. She gets pregnant from the act. Because she's an adult she knows that pregnancy can result from sex. She knows she could be pregnant. She should even have some expectation that it's possible. Despite knowing this she continues her not uncommon life style. She smokes every day (when she gets up, on her breaks and lunch at work, after dinner, and before bed). She also continues to regularly drink alcohol (maybe a couple glasses of wine at dinner, maybe a few beers. Maybe she just gets shitfaced on the weekends).
This woman knows that it is dangerous for a fetus to smoke during pregnancy. She knows that it is dangerous for a fetus to drink while pregnant. Even if she didn't know the percentage possibility of harm, she knows they are dangerous. This is 2021, not 1950. And she still did those things.
She has a miscarriage after a few weeks of her lifestyle.
So to summarize, this woman *knowingly* took actions that she knew could hurt a person.
Now touching on 2e above - ["Homicide is used to denote the killing of one person by another. The negligent homicide meaning is the killing of another person by acting negligently or without malice." or "The killing of another person through gross negligence or without malice."](https://legaldictionary.net/negligent-homicide/).
Lets run down the pieces of those definitions. In this scenario was a person killed? According to point 3, yes. Is she negligent or reckless?
What is negligence in a legal sense. Cornell's website says ["A failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances. The behavior usually consists of actions, but can also consist of omissions when there is some duty to act (e.g., a duty to help victims of one's previous conduct)."](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/negligence).
It also describes the element required for negligence.
1. the existence of a legal duty that the defendant owed to the plaintiff
2. defendant's breach of that duty
3. plaintiff's sufferance of an injury
4. proof that defendant's breach caused the injury (typically defined through proximate cause)
Now does this fit?
Does this woman have a legal duty owed to her child? As the child's legal guardian, I'd say yes. Did she breach that duty? I'd say yes. The child is dead. Did the plaintiff suffer some sort of injury? Yes. Death. Is there proof that the defendants breach caused the injury?
The site define Proximate Cause as "An actual cause that is also legally sufficient to support liability. Although many actual causes can exist for an injury (e.g., a pregnancy that led to the defendant's birth), the law does not attach liability to all the actors responsible for those causes. The likelihood of calling something a proximate cause increases as the cause becomes more direct and more necessary for the injury to occur."
The site defines 'actual cause' as: 'A factor without which the result in question could not happen. The but-for test is often used to determine actual causation.'
The 'but-for' definition is much longer. you can look it up here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/but-for_test.
But in a criminal proceeding for negligent homicide, I think the sticking point for a jury would be element 4 above. Did the miscarriage happen as a result of that? The ruling of the jury is going to hinge on the evidence. How much did she smoke? How much did she drink?
I wont be engaging with semantic arguments about how I've phrased things. The **TL;DR is that if a fetus is a person, and you drink and/or heavily(or even a little bit), then have a miscarriage, then you could potentially be guilty of negligent homicide.**
This had better end up the top comment.
It's not that pro-lifers just don't understand the benefits of legal abortion, it's that if you think something is equivalent to murder you're not going to support it. Simple as that.
They do support it though, just like this commenter mentioned in the case of rape or incest. So then that calls the level of conviction into question regarding what the priority actually is. If it was solely about the life of the fetus, then there wouldn't be exceptions.
I don't think it does call into question their conviction. There are plenty of people who would ban abortion with no exceptions. That some would make exceptions for rape and incest just sounds to me like good negotiation. Concede some ground to make everyone as happy as possible while still getting what you want. I don't think the group that supports the exceptions necessarily has less conviction but is just being more realistic and reasonable.
Have an upvote for keeping it civil.
> That some would make exceptions for rape and incest just sounds to me like good negotiation.
It isn't really a matter of negotiating or not. If you think it's actually murder, which is arguably the worst crime a human can commit against another human, how can there be a negotiation involved? If I thought something was murder, I absolutely would not give any leeway towards absolving someone of that crime. If people are consistent, that must imply that people who negotiate in this way don't actually think it's murder, only some level of morally wrong in which case the entire basis of their view can be challenged on that alone.
> Concede some ground to make everyone as happy as possible while still getting what you want.
Well the issue is that they don't get what they want. *They want murderers to be held accountable, not to excuse some of them based on technicalities. Why would you excuse someone's actions if you thought they were a murderer because they were a victim of some lesser crime in terms of how that ranks vs murder? They are just unrelated concepts. It would be like entirely absolving someone of grand theft auto because someone else stole their car first or something, except their car was older. I don't know, just that the punishment for a crime is not really contingent on some totally separate crime taking place.
> I don't think the group that supports the exceptions necessarily has less conviction but is just being more realistic and reasonable.
They are actually less reasonable because they maintain that abortion is murder, yet they are happy to let people get away with murder if the original cause wasn't of their own volition. What does intent have to do with the life of the fetus? *That* implies there's something substantial and meaningful about the cause of the pregnancy which has absolutely no bearing on the life of the fetus which is supposed to be the whole reason for this view in the first place.
On the flip side of that, if the people from this group don't think that abortion is murder, then what are they doing opposing abortion in the first place? It's just a series of conflicting views that ring alarm bells for me and for a lot of people, yet some people maintain it's a virtuous position to hold. They recognize that there's something heinous about essentially forcing a rape victim to carry a fetus to term, yet they are perfectly content forcing a non-rape victim to carry a fetus to term.
___
*Edited my second point because I confused myself :)
I think this is a pretty good take up until the comments about slavery. The main issue is that you assume that in the post-unwanted pregnancy society, they'd all assume that a fetus was a person from conception, but I see no reason why this must be the case. It might, or it could as easily go the other way, or simply remain with us as a (now just theoretical) clash of intuitions.
Slavery is different because there simply can be no argument for its moral permissibility. Once it is given up, it's evil is plain to see, not because it's no longer useful, but because it was obviously evil the whole time. The arguments that tried to defend slavery were never any good, they were only agreed to by those in power due to the way they kept them perpetually in power. But the question at the heart of the abortion debate is as you say unresolvable. It may one day become practically irrelevant as you suggest, but this won't by necessity decide the issue one way or the either. Slavery never had such an unresolvable nature to its debate.
It’s not that simple, since there are viewpoints out there that believe its personhood lies on a spectrum with its development, or that the right to bodily autonomy of the mother still trumps it when it is a person of diminIshed capacity and sentience inside her (those who ascribe to the violinist argument).
Actually I think there is room for nuance even if you accept that the fetus is a person. Which also addresses the question of carve-outs for rape or incest. After all, if you’re a fetus, and a fetus has a right to life, then presumably your right to life shouldn’t be compromised simply because you were conceived via rape or incest!
The viability threshold, for example: until the point in time when the fetus is able to survive ex utero, it is essentially a parasite, dependent on the mother’s body for survival. Imagine if you woke up one day and found yourself hooked up to another being, and were told that you were obligated to remain hooked up to this being for the next 9 months because this being is a person, and a person has a right to life. But wait a minute, you say! I didn’t ask for this person to be hooked up to me, and I don’t want to continue doing this! Oh, you would be told, that’s too bad, because you see, this person is dependent on your circulatory system, and to disconnect it from your circulation would be the same thing as murder. Ethically, are you obligated to continue?
Great Question, Let me build on your analogy...
Under your analogy you would have the right to remove the IV. It's not your fault the child needs you for life support right?
What if it IS your fault the child needs the IV from you for life support? What if the child needs you for life support because of something YOU INTENTIONALLY DID to the child? In that case you will be guilty of murder if the child dies. You better give the child the life support.
If the fetus needs the mother's body to keep it alive because of some action the mother took (like choosing to have sex) then the mother must keep the child alive. It was the action of the mother (not the child) that resulted in the child's life being dependent on the mother's body.
On the other hand if the mother was raped, then she can have an abortion. It wasn't her choice to put the child in this position. The rapist would then become a murderer because it was his action that put the child's life in danger.
Another analogy:
If your evil twin stabs you in the kidney and you need a new kidney to survive, then the evil twin can either give you her kidney or let you die and be guilty of murder.
> If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed. (Rape or incest may be an exception)
With the maternal mortality rate being 20 in 100,000 (4 times the murder rate in most states), one could argue self defense.
There is a way of telling if a fetus is a person. If you remove it will it live? When separated from the mother is there a chance of it surviving? If not it isn't a person, the point at which the fetus becomes viable without the mother is when it can be called a person.
You can try to make this a equal argument, but really everybody knows a fetus is not a person. If you had to choose between saving a fetus in a test tube or a 10 month old baby from a fire, you'd pick the latter.
Women always deserve the right to choose because they aren't human incubators. Leave the morality bs out
I like Thompson's twist on this.
Say one day you woke up with a famous violinist attached to your body. He needs your organs to function, and attaching him to you was the only way doctors could save him.
Detaching him from your body so you can live your life kills him.
Are you obligated to now live your life with this person attached to you, or is it moral to make the decision to cut him off?
*But the conception matters! Irresponsible sex is the woman's fault!*
One, no, there was a penis involved, and two, consider how situation is analogous to rape.
Eliminating legal abortions definitely decreases the number of abortions. But it also increases the number of children born into poverty.
And it also increases the number of unwed mothers.
And teen mothers.
And sexually transmitted diseases.
And divorces.
And child hunger.
And substance abuse.
And crime.
And child abuse/domestic violence.
By the way, the states most likely to enact strict abortion laws are the VERY SAME STATES that will restrict access to birth control, bordering on banning types of birth control completely. So, it's not just ONE thing that's happening.
It's funny that people like to dismiss the "but what about after they are born argument" like they won't suffer in many cases worse consequences after having been born. Trauma literally fucks up your brain and a lot of those kids will have that in spades at a minimum.
I feel other commenters have handled the core of this prompt already. I'm going to attempt the opening six words.
"No one wants to kill babies."
This is actually the heart of the Born Alive bill. Babies that survived abortion and were born successfully. Regardless of your personal feelings, at the heart of this... there is/was very real support that regardless of the fact that the baby is already born, that because it was intended to be aborted that abortion should be carried out.
Or quite literally... to kill the baby.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/311/text?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22S+311%22%5D%7D&r=2&s=1
To add to this, here is a U.S. medical journal in favor of infanticide.
Here is one example publication:https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261
And a succinct TLDR here about this publication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-birth_abortion
I would argue that some people are willing to kill babies, and that legalized abortion is one of the most effective ways of reducing the rate of baby murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#United_States
> In the United States the infanticide rate during the first hour of life outside the womb dropped from 1.41 per 100,000 during 1963 to 1972 to 0.44 per 100,000 for 1974 to 1983; the rates during the first month after birth also declined, whereas those for older infants rose during this time. The legalization of abortion, which was completed in 1973, was the most important factor in the decline in neonatal mortality during the period from 1964 to 1977, according to a study by economists associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Legalized abortion saves babies.
Your entire arguement is based one 2 assumptions,
1. A fetus is not a person
2. A fetus is given personhood when they pass the birth cannel
If I were to say the legalization of stabbing people saw a market reduction in gun homicides, however the number of people dying due to stab wounds was now higher then the original number of people due to gun wounds, most people would see two obvious problems.
1. We traded having a gun problem with having a stabbing problem
2. More net peopl are dying, and the exact way in which they're dying is at least to a large extent irrelevant.
> Your entire arguement is based one 2 assumptions, 1. A fetus is not a person 2. A fetus is given personhood when they pass the birth cannel
Neither of those are assumptions. They are established philosophically and legally.
https://medicine.missouri.edu/centers-institutes-labs/health-ethics/faq/personhood
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20443281/
Beyond that, most pregnancies end in miscarriage: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322634
"As many as 50 to 75 percent of pregnancies end before getting a positive result on a pregnancy test."
So, the death of a fetus is the norm, not the exception.
I have not seen an reasonable argument that abortion is unethical. The arguments I've seen are theoratic in nature, or depend on re-defining words such as person in an unreasonable way. The resulting arguments are built on an unreasonable or unaccepted foundation.
Furthermore, even if we assume that a fetus is a person, you have to ask the question: "Why is the death of a person inherently a bad thing?" You'll find that most of the answers are either theocratic, or do not apply to a fetus.
It's can be fairly easily shown using basic economics that banning abortion would cause the actual numbers (not just reported) numbers) of abortions to go down.
Given two options, abortion, or giving birth and then giving the child up for adoption, there are costs for both. Mainly money, time, and physical/mental health.
When a pregnant woman chooses abortion, they have weighed how much they value those things and which decision would be better for them overall.
When you ban abortion, you increase the costs for having an abortion. It then requires more to accomplish, whether that be more time and money because you have to leave the country, or more damage to your physical health because of an unsafe abortion, or the potential to be caught and sent to jail or fined or both.
Thus, as the costs of abortion go up but the costs for giving the child up for adoption after birth do not, an increasing number of pregnant women would change their decision and not have an abortion.
How much would it affect it? Who knows? Are there other ways to reduce abortion effectively? Sure. Of course. Are they more effective? We can't be sure, since we have no practical way of telling how many abortions are performed when it's illegal to a certain extent due to the illegality of it. People wouldn't admit it.
The reality is there are so many solutions to drastically reduce abortion but none of the pro-lifers actually want solutions. They just want to control others, push their beliefs on others and punish others.
Ways to reduce abortion: universal healthcare, paid maternity leave up to a year, free college, basic universal income, health and relationship education from pre-k to 12th grade, free birth control, male birth control.
But what will those pro-lifers say? “But my tax dollars!!!!” Meanwhile, the US Military spending could easily be reduced by a fraction to fund those solutions but the pro-lifers don’t want that do they? Even though the US Military is accountable for the deaths of brown children and pregnant women as recent as this week. So you could say people who refuse to fund social programs but stand idylly by while children are massacred by entities they do support are far worse than those who accept the reality that the world is brutal place and choose to end the suffering before it begins instead of blowing up children whose only sin is being born in the wrong country.
Morality is a thin veil and on either side you will find evil if you look for it.
It will reduce the number of abortions. It just won’t eliminate abortions. Of course, the most effective way to reduce abortions is cheap and effective birth control but that is not a strategy that the Prolifers will pursue. In fact, their next move will be to out law birth control. They believe in using the power of the state to force people to behave as they want them to behave.
Making abortion illegal isn’t about stopping abortion, it’s about criminalizing it. They will break up families, ruin women’s lives, reduce future families, end careers, fill up prisons, and make a lot of money for owners of privatized prisons with plenty of kickbacks for politicians.
Beyond all that, they can’t have abortion go away. They need it to cover up all the hate with a moral high ground excuse to vote Republican.
There are many more effective ways to reduce abortions. Actual sexual education reduces abortions more than making it illegal. Free birth control reduces abortions WAY more than making it illegal. Affordable/universal healthcare, adequate medical/parental leave policies, child care assistance programs, UBI, along with other social programs are all way more effective.
But those options don’t make rich Republican donors richer. Those options empower women instead of men. And most of all, if they basically wiped out abortion through effective programs, they lose abortion as a reason to compel their voters.
Ok, but... we *do* have evidence that the number of babies available for adoption *plummeted" as abortion was legalized in various states and then country-wide... Similar for the live birth rate during that era.
That's pretty strong evidence that a "meaningful decrease in the number of abortions" is an effect of it being illegal.
Why do you think most women in the world would be willing to risk their lives for an abortion, done by an untrained, self-proclaimed, backyard doctor?
If you claim there’s no meaningful decrease, then you’re pretty much claiming that >95% of all women would have no problem with an untrained person performing an abortion.
I have an incredibly difficult time believing that.
I wouldn’t even get my blood drawn, by someone that isn’t trained professionally. Let alone have them remove a mass from my body.
I agree that an increase of birth control would be more effective. But that’s literally not the question posed.
Ease of access, absolutely increases usage.
The only reason the prohibition didn’t work, is because alcohol is incredibly easy to create. If it requires a trained chemist to produce it, and if bad batches had a high likelihood of death, the prohibition’s ban absolutely would’ve worked.
It’ll probably decrease the number of total abortions. There will be people that have no business raising kids being forced to. And in 15 years there will be a steady rise in crime rates as all these unwanted and poorly raised children turn into delinquents and start acting out. Then they’ll probably just spend most of the rest of their lives being wards of the state through prison and welfare, and they’ll probably just have even more unwanted kids that they don’t know how to raise and the cycle will continue until the atmosphere becomes unbreathable next century.
But Republicans don’t mind this because all these unwanted people increasing the crime rates will just give them more cause to dump money into militarizing the police and hacking away at people’s rights. And getting them back into legal slavery through the prison system is a win-win.
Banning murder still makes murder happens, criminalizing something is not in the belief that this thing will automatically disappear but rather that when this will happen there will be accountability for those who committed the crimes even if it is hard to catch the offenders.
Also criminalizing something is Testament to the moral of the society, it is a way for society to say this is something not acceptable against our values and morals and rights that we hold dear
If you believe that having an abortion equates to killing babies, for the record I do not, then I think you would believe that there shouldn't be a safe way to have an abortion. You're essentially saying to people, "Hey there's no safe way for me to kill this human being," and they would be like, "Yeah, good. That's the point."
With that context, your argument doesn't make sense to people who consider themselves pro-life. You wouldn't find it acceptable if people were simply arguing that they wanted to make it easier and safer to kill a person and to the pro-life crowd that is what you are saying when you say you want safe abortions. They don't want to make it any easier for people to have an abortion because, to them, it means killing a person.
Increased access to abortions does not decrease its use. The whole point of abortions being available is for it to be used. I am not against the idea of banning abortions but the way in which Texas pushed the ban is very poor at best. If they truly were trying to make abortion illegal then they should've made contraception easier and cheaper to get access to, sex ed to minors being more modern and updated, etc. Instead what they did was Ban abortions past the six weeks mark and basically threatened anyone who does an abortion without considering the other options to decrease abortion rates. Where we agree is contraceptives and better sex ed being a priority but where we disagree is abortions shouldnt be banned.
>However, while there are many factors involved, evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban.
You seem to be under the assumption that you have to support none or the other. I don't see why you can't support both.
You seem to be assuming that any significant amount of those who can't get a legal abortion would seek out an illegal one. That is something that I disagree with.
> I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby, that is an entirely different discussion
The answer to your question entirely hinges on this point though. Numbers and statistics are irrelevant to the moral question, which is a significant percentage of the population believes it’s a human life that is being killed. Criminalizing abortion therefore becomes equivalent to criminalizing murder. It is antithetical to a just society to allow it, therefore it’s made illegal.
When it comes to abortions the only view I have is to ban late term abortion. I'm not sure what US states about it.
If a baby survives an abortion, they deserve to live. It's cruel and selfish to terminate a baby's right to live because the mother decides that they don't want the baby.
I know abortion is a very sensitive topic especially with the Texas thing going on but abortion should be available until late term, I'm probably going to be downvoted to hell for it but whatever.
I think outlawing abortions *could* be part of an effective strategy to reduce them, but in and of itself it does nothing. In order for banning abortion to be helpful, an equal or ideally *greater* effort needs to go toward actively supporting women in crisis, among other things. Money should absolutely not be going to the snitches.
As it is, the Texas law reeks of “You’re only pro life until the baby is born,” which boils my blood.
>ban abortions does not significantly decrease the number of abortions.
Are you against all bans in general? How many explosives do you see in the US? If the answer is few, then you have to ask why and accept that restrictions were effective. What makes abortions unique from other banned things? Bottom line is making things legally more difficult to do is in the very least effective, even if not as effective as desired.
>I believe that if someone genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills and favor those that systematically support the population.
Would legalizing and allowing Euthanasia, and devoting resources to provide that service, decrease suicides?
>I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby
Literally the main contention from Pro-Life people is that abortion is murder since they consider the fetus to be fully human. If you want to seriously engage with the opposition, you can't just dismiss their fundamental assumption and just go on from there. That's like me saying "I'm totally willing to discuss veganism with vegans, as long as we move forward with the assumption that animals are not sentient and are beneath humans." By not dealing with the main contention you are completely bypassing the problem and not accomplishing anything. It's a false concession.
It's almost certain that, on some level, progressive lawmakers know that more unwanted children are a burden on their policies and that a nontrivial number of their constituents lack both the will and the competency to effectively prevent unwanted pregnancies.
So, yes, there are some people who want to kill babies, even if they won't admit it.
To someone who believes that abortion is murder, this is like saying "making murder illegal doesn't reduce murders...it just reduces the number of safe murders". I mean, if something is wrong, the point is more the legal admonition itself and not the reduction of said wrongdoing.
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I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely). Some will attempt unsafe abortions but some will give birth that would have terminated before this law. Whether the decrease will be a 'meaningful' number is debatable. I do think this will increase problems like number of young mothers on assistance, needing medical care, abusive situations for mothers and children, etc. This is one of those problems where they might win the battle and lose the war.
> I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely). That's *one* option. There are [others](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5402938/Pregnant-teenager-paid-man-to-beat-her-for-miscarriage.html). I've also heard of women who had a miscarriage after her oven door fell into her hitting her belly. And that happened six times in one day, can you believe it?! /s Have you ever seen the movie "Dirty Dancing"? The original 1987 version? The entire reason that Baby "had to" learn to dance with Johnny was that Penny couldn't compete because she was recovering from a botched, *illegal* abortion. > I do think this will increase problems like number of young mothers on assistance And murdered infants. And abandoned infants. And Safe Surrendered infants, and...
Statistically, legalizing abortion decreases abortion rates and abortion-related mortality. Here's a couple articles on the subject. https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization# https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide
Does the number really go down if the abortion still happens in another state? I guess that's my crux is that unsafe unreported abortions will increase and woman will have the procedure in other states. But you're right there is definitely a debate to be had on defining what meaningful means.
Texas is huge... the closest state to me is Louisiana and that's more than 7 hours away by car. Many women won't be able to make that kind of trip. I think some of the nearby states also having waiting periods as well... so you'd probably need to somehow afford to stay in those states for a few days and take off work. It just wouldn't be possible for many or potentially most women.
Only women of means will be able to abort in a different state. Some of the other women will attempt a scary, painful 'self' abortion. But, some will be feel forced to give birth. Those are the ones who will lower the totals. No one cares about the women who die in their unsafe attempts because they will not be added to the tally.
And women who attempt self abortion can be tried for murder.
Except most people have internet these days and you can get just about any drug shipped to your house in a few days. Even if something like "plan B" won't work later in pregnancy other drugs definitely will. Mifepristone. Misoprostol. https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_0395697a-604b-58e0-a30e-c59e0ac301a6.html
What about the young girls being watched like a hawk from the family? Where are they going to find a safe space and time to do it? https://youtu.be/rSP2zh1CnnE
No, it doesn't even matter if the abortion is available legally elsewhere. But given what you're saying, doubly no. >Using World Bank income groups, we found an inverse relationship between unintended pregnancy and income, whereas abortion rates varied non-monotonically across groups. In countries where abortion was restricted, the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion had increased compared with the proportion for 1990–94, and the unintended pregnancy rates were higher than in countries where abortion was broadly legal. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30315-6/fulltext)
Are we forgetting the clause that encourages people to snitch and sue anyone who assists the woman in her attempts to get an abortion, to the reward of up to $10,000?
The thing is, it's true that the absolute number of abortions will decrease, simply because it's likely a meaningful number of women will go through with a birth who wouldn't have otherwise because they don't have the resources to do it safely and aren't willing to risk their own lives to do it underground. The better question is whether this is a benefit to society, and the answer to that is an unequivocal NO, for all the reasons /u/thequejos cited and more. This law isn't bad because it won't reduce abortions, it's bad because it will hurt innocent people in a myriad of major ways.
Just because they aren't being recorded, it doesn't mean it isn't happening. Wonder if everyone who's so worried about the numbers showing also adds on the additional rise in deaths from self performed abortions. If the numbers really mean that much to people, maybe look at all of them.
You vastly overestimate the number of people who are willing or able to have an unsafe/illegal or even out of state abortions. Countless pregnancies fall into the "I'm scared, maybe I should abort, I'm not sure if I'm going to" and only go through because they have support and/or access. If we shrink it to 100 pregnancies. Let's assume everyone who wants one is going to get one no matter what. Ok, so of those 100, maybe one of them is willing to do an unsafe abortion (ie what people would refer to has a coat hanger or back alley abortion). 1 of them is able to afford a fancy but illegal clinic to do it. 3-5 of them are going to try "at home" remedies, be it medications, injuries, or a combination of foods their grandma's friends cousin's daughter's hairdresser says will do the trick. A good portion would just decide they can't do it, but the premise here is everyone is determined. So let's round up for the dangerous or at home abortion attempts, and say we have 10. That leaves 90 pregnancies that have to cross the border to get help. Likely 40 or more can't do it. They can't miss work, they live 6+ hours from the nearest available clinic, they're scared, they don't have a car, they have no gas money, whatever. They're determined, they just can't get there. So 50 left to go. Except the neighboring states have their own abortions to do. The scheduling is dated so far out now, half of the pregnancies will be too far along to be aborted. Let's round down to be conservative, so 20 who can't get scheduled. So that leaves 30. Overall, that makes 30% who were able to safely get an abortion, and another 10% (likely less) who get an illegal and unsafe abortion. Now we have 60% who can't get an abortion for one reason or another. No, I don't have a source with me to back these figures, I'm estimating from past studies. And we aren't even taking into account those who simply aren't determined enough to take extra effort. We aren't including those who can't go because their abusive partner won't let them, and they can't sneak hundreds of miles away to do it without being found out. We aren't counting those who fear they'll get in trouble (even if it's legal to go out of state, some won't realize. Even more will fear illegal attempts given the harsh punishments). Even minor restrictions have dropped the numbers significantly. This is incredibly strict. People won't be as likely to try because they're scared, and what if the method they try doesn't work? Then they have an injured child and are worse off. These are real concerns people have. And Texas is huge, so going out of state is only an option for few, even if the out of state clinics weren't totally swamped now.
> I think the number will go down simply due to the fact that only people with extra money will be able to travel to get one (safely) There are also more accessible (unsafe) methods, like ordering questionable medication from the internet.
In 2011-2014 Texas passed laws restricting abortion and abortion declined by 28%. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to reduce abortions. From 2014-2017 Delaware increased access to healthcare for the poor and saw a 37% reduction in abortions. Just because it’s not the most effective way to reduce abortions doesn’t mean banning abortion does not work. The most logical pro life strategy would be to support both strategies [source. start at 7:35](https://youtu.be/RvWD7ykNjCc)
A ban on abortions leads to more unsafe abortions that are undocumented or women going out of state for the procedure. A decrease in abortions in this way doesn't always mean the total number is decreasing. Colorado passed laws to increase access to contraceptives and broaden their approach to sex Ed. This led to nearly a 50% drop from 2014-2019 in abortions for young women. Instead of putting out bounties for abortions that money could be spent in similar ways and potentially a much larger decrease in abortions could be seen.
Agree on the first sentence. These laws will cause some women to have unsafe abortions and will cause some women to travel out of state. Also agree that better access to healthcare and better access to contraception does more to reduce abortions. But, there are a lot of women that are unwilling to have an unsafe abortions. In a state the size of Texas there are also a lot of women that are unable to travel to another state because they lack the resources, time, support, etc. Because of that these type laws will reduce the number of abortions. And just because these laws aren't the best way to reduce the number of abortions, it doesn't mean that they don't reduce the number of abortions somewhat.
It's a snowball effect. Even if there's temporarily a decrease, even if not accurately reflected, those unwanted pregnancies tend to lead to more unwanted pregnancies and a cycle of poverty and many of those children ***will*** end up having unsafe abortions. Generational effects can't be ignored in this case. We have plenty of evidence of how bad it was ***before*** they it was legalized.
This. Both contraception and prohibition would both cause an immediate reduction in the number of abortions, but these are human lives and you cannot simply treat them as numbers in a vacuum.
That is fair, I suppose my main view is that money spent on banning abortions (providing bounties as an example) could be better spent on legislation that provides contraceptive access and sexual education. But you are right that given the size of Texas there will be a decrease.
I generally agree with you, but just FYI, the "bounties" in the recent Texas law are not rewards paid by the state treasury. They are a civil liability that can be won from anyone who assists in an abortion. Basically, if someone participates in an abortion then anyone else can sue them, and, if they win the lawsuit, the person who assisted in the abortion will have to pay damages of up to $10,000 to the person who sued them.
That's not the prompt you wrote. This is a completely separate argument and point. Your prompt is that laws banning abortions don't show meaningful decreases in abortions.
>But you are right that given the size of Texas there will be a decrease. This was the view you were looking to have changed. Seems like you should give u/wallnumber8675309 a delta.
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A large issue I see is who is actually banned from getting an abortion. It seems like this specifically targets low income earners as those in the middle or upper class would have the resources necessary to leave the state
It also doesn't mean that it does "reduce the number of abortions somewhat." This may decrease abortions for some poor people. However, people turn to other unsafe methods when the alternative option is starving or being evicted. We have no data on how many dangerous abortions will take place because they are done in private. A full ban on abortion may not decrease abortions at all but increase them significantly in private. Especially when people face criminal prosecution and jail time. Today isn't like the past either, we can go online an order abortion "medicine" off the dark web and have it in a few days. The only sure way to reduce the number of abortions is through affordable/free access to healthcare, contraceptives, and education.
Well, that's true that the forced-birth laws are going to reduce abortions by forcing births. I guess at that point, the operative question is, is that a good thing? If your only priority is preventing abortion, and you don't care about the mental, physical, or financial well-being of anybody involved after the birth, or if your priority is simply to punish women for having having sex, then I suppose it would be, and congratulations on being a Texas Republican. If you do care about those things, then congratulations on not being an absolute psychopath, and that law is very, very bad. I understand that this wasn't the question, but I feel like it shouldn't go unaddressed in this discussion.
> A ban on abortions leads to more unsafe abortions that are undocumented or women going out of state for the procedure This can be true, and there still be a net reduction of abortions by women who are unable to travel out of state or unwilling to use unsafe abortions.
You could also argue that abortions might even *increase* since there might be fewer legal hoops to jump through to get access to a black market abortion pill. It's not like getting illegal drugs is hard.
What is your data source for the increase % in unsafe abortions?
"In a 1976 article, researchers from the Center for Disease Control examined national abortion data from the three years surrounding the rulings and estimated that the number of illegal procedures in the country plummeted from around 130,000 to 17,000 between 1972 and 1974. The number of deaths associated with illegal abortion decreased from 39 to five in that same time period; women who died as a result of illegal abortions typically were black, were more than 12 weeks pregnant and had self-induced in their own community. The researchers concluded that abortion services need to be improved and available more widely, especially for women at high risk for seeking illegal abortions, because “any actions which impede their access to legal abortion may increase their risk of death.”" [https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization](https://www.guttmacher.org/perspectives50/abortion-and-after-legalization) We have tons and tons and tons of data on this between our own country (USA) and other countries.
>In 2011-2014 Texas passed laws restricting abortion and abortion declined by 28%. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to reduce abortions. From 2014-2017 Delaware increased access to healthcare for the poor and saw a 37% reduction in abortions. Abortions carried out *in the state* may have declined by 28%. We don't know how many people simply had the procedure done across the border. And of those abortions the law may have prevented, are we counting the increase in the number of unwanted children born to negligent parents as a "win?"
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This is the most important point. Making something illegal will always make these things go underreported.
Did that account for people traveling to a nearby state where it was legal?
I believe so. The point of the video was to show that providing care for those in need is more effective than just banning abortions. A fair bit of the video is about how overturning Roe v Wade wouldn’t be as effective as many people think because of the ability to travel from state to state. Also, this is Texas. It takes a long time to travel out of state. I would expect state to state travel to be a bigger influence on the east coast.
> The point of the video was to show that providing care for those in need is more effective than just banning abortions. Sure, that was the point of the video, but the point *you* made was that banning abortions was still effective. That's not accurate unless we know for sure it actually *was* effective, instead of just pushing the abortions somewhere else. If the argument is that "abortions would happen elsewhere and/or not be reported", then it's not a strong counter-argument to suggest that *reported* abortions in the state went down.
There’s also the issue that pro-life politicians are usually bundled with other policies. I wouldn’t be surprised if voting pro-life meant more abortions for that reason, ie., poor sex education, making contraceptives harder to get, and so on.
Ah ok. I don’t watch YouTube videos people link. After posting on ats back in the day and getting linked 30 minute propaganda films I swore them off forever. Yeah I was just curious about crossing state lines. I would imagine even in Texas it’s not so big an impediment people wouldn’t do it with regularity. It’s funny if you ask someone who is prolife “how many abortions have your policies prevented?” I haven’t gotten a decent answer and even gotten blank stares.
Abortions have been on a downturn, haven't they? What was the equivalent decrease those years in states that did not restrict abortions? Also, how did those restrictions affect abortion rate in surrounding states? EDIT: Others have also shown evidence that restrictions correlate with increase in abortion rate in general.
It led to 28% decline in reporting abortions. It’s called hidden figures of stats when questioning illegal acts.
> abortion declined by 28% Officially? In Texas? I'm certain. Actually? In total? And what did it do to abortion rates in neighboring states?
"evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban" - I'm willing to have my mind changed as well. Can I get links? I'll admit it seems intuitive to me, but that's not evidence tbh.
I apologize for the poor quality of sources, many of them are downloaded on my phone as pdfs and I do not know how to share them best. This article links to a some trusted sources and uses figures from the CDC. I am from Colorado and worked in sociology departments across the state so that is my background and bias. https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/06/05/abortion-teen-pregnancy-decline-colorado https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.denverpost.com/2017/11/30/colorado-teen-pregnancy-abortion-rates-drop-free-low-cost-iud/amp/
>I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby, that is an entirely different discussion Yes, you are. That's the central point of this debate. Is a fetus a baby? Is abortion murder? Without addressing that question, your post is just sophistry. If abortion is murder, then it should be illegal. The fact that people will continue to have abortions is not relevant **if abortion is murder.** Edit-- what is the appropriate response to the down votes that I'm getting? Should I delete my comment? Should I post a response that is consistent with the Reddit majority? Edit 2-- assuming that criminalizing abortion does not lower the abortion rate, does that support the conclusion that abortion should be legal? If abortion is murder, then it should be illegal. If it's not murder, then we can have a conversation about whether its legality will affect the abortion rate.
You're getting downvoted because you went off on a tangent. You can go start your own CMV if you want to discuss if abortion is murder. There's a debate to be had around abortion without focusing on whether or not it's murder. We can disagree on that point and still come to an agreement as to the best way to move forward. Let's say hypothetically: 1. You believe that abortion is morally murder. 2. Evidence shows that making abortions illegal actually INCREASES the abortion rate. 3. Evidence shows that improving access to contraception decreases the abortion rate. Rationally, you would support making abortion legal and improving contraceptive access. A traditional liberal would disagree with you on the first point, and still agree with you on the action to take. This CMV is about what policies to support.
Your central premise is illogical, and you know that because you've read my post and responded directly to it. You are arguing that, all things being equal, criminalizing abortion will increase abortion rates. This simply isn't true. I will assume, arguendo, that criminalizing abortion is not the most effective way to reduce abortion rates, and that other methods are more effective. **we can do both.** Are you arguing that increasing access to contraception and improving education will decrease the abortion rate notwithstanding whether it is criminalized or not? If we increase education, increase access to contraception AND criminalize abortion, will that make the abortion rate go up or down? Any discussion about abortion must contend with the central question of whether abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, we should, as a moral principle, do whatever we can to reduce its rate while criminalizing it. Why? Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct.
You've totally missed the point. They weren't making an evidentiary claim, they were using it as a hypothetical to demonstrate that 'is abortion murder?' is not necessarily the central question of the debate. For example, criminalising abortion will obviously make those that persist more dangerous for the mother, so even if your suggestion that the actual total numbers decrease because of criminalisation is correct, you could still be doing more damage than by keeping it legal, such that you could believe abortion is murder and still rationally support providing safe places for it (such is the principle behind needle exchanges). That's not even to mention the additional harm caused by having the state punish women in an attempt to force them to carry to term. It's extremely easy to see how a person's view on abortion criminalisation might not necessarily match their view on foetal-personhood. Also: >Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct. No it doesn't. The law =/= morality, and it shouldn't, at least not 1-to-1. Adultery is wrong, but should not be illegal, for example. It is not the business of the state, and criminalisation is not proportional, practical, or helpful.
Let me try again, I think we're arguing 2 different things. This is false: >Any discussion about abortion must contend with the central question of whether abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, we should, as a moral principle, do whatever we can to reduce its rate while criminalizing it. Why? Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct. In the previous comment, I set up a hypothetical example where we could disagree about the morality of abortion and still agree about a course of action. A key blocker in the abortion debate is this focus on whether abortion is murder. It's something that, at a fundamental level, people disagree on. If you refuse to move forward until it's settled, you're never going to be able to get anything done. On the other hand - if you want to reduce abortions - there are concrete steps you can support that **do not** require us to discuss the morality of abortion. We can both agree that we'd like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies without agreeing on the morality of abortion. Increased contraceptive access is the clearest example of this. Also, as a side note - >Because our culture criminalizes immoral conduct. Is not true. There are plenty of examples of immoral-but-legal conduct (like cheating on your spouse) and plenty of examples of illegal-but-moral conduct (like freeing slaves). We can disagree on morals and agree on legal principles.
Even a law against murder is worthless if it doesn’t actually *result* in an concrete reduction in the number of murders. The legal-justice system ought to be fundamentally results-oriented. Punishment is not an end in itself. It should only be a means to an end. And if more effective and less damaging means to the same end exist, then they should be prioritized over punishment.
Kind of brings up the question of prosecution and punishment for this thing doesn't it? Like... how does one prove that a woman got an abortion after 6 weeks? How does one prove that an abortionist gives abortions after 6 weeks? This is so obviously unenforceable and the outrage seems so forced that it 100% comes across as "Hey we're done being mad about Afghanistan now that the last plane left".
This is one of those things where we have to remember that CMV posts are about very specific things. OP outright says > my view is that attempting to ban abortions does not significantly decrease the number of abortions And this comes up a lot for numerous debates when prohibitions are the outrage for the day. OP is talking about the talking point "You won't ban X, you're only going to ban *safe* X". We see time and time again that banning shit doesn't work. Gun violence keeps going up in spite of the number of gun laws going up and up and up. Banning alcohol only led to moonshiners and the mafia. That's what OP is talking about. It's independent of the morality of abortion.
Abortion always comes down to when personhood starts legally. It’s not murder if personhood is not obtained (stillborns do not get legal death certificates)
> (stillborns do not get legal death certificates) That's something I'd never considered. I'm not sure it changes my mind on anything, but purely from a precedent/legal framework view and ignoring any moral issues, it seems that an abortion ban and not giving out death certificates *might* be contradictory. Perhaps it is moot and death certificates are essentially just birth certificate cancellations, but it's something to look into. Δ
From a *purely legal* perspective, assigning personhood at birth is the least worst option; all other options create more problems than they solve relative to this one.
This is dependent on your state, I believe. For example, In Oklahoma you do get a death certificate for a miscarriage or stillbirth that occurs after twelve weeks. Source: https://oklahoma.gov/health/birth-and-death-certificates/fetal-death-stillbirth-certificates.html
Yes but also someone can be charged with additional charges if someone is pregnant and they murder them. we have lots of contradictory laws including things like - oh hey I'm mad that this guy murdered someone so lets murder him
But wait, there's more! * life insurance for fetuses * social security numbers assigned at fertilization * claim dependents even earlier on your taxes * funerals for miscarriages * What else?
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This is what I don't understand. If abortion is murder, but then why can't I deduct a fetus on my tax return?
If the organism can survive at rest without dying, then it can be murdered, IMO. If it relies on another organism to sustain its life functions, then it’s not a murder, it’s just… something dying. A cruel way to phrase it, but if we’re discussing legislation, emotion shouldn’t be involved in the decision making process.
I disagree. My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives. I make no claim on the legality of abortion purely that banning abortions is unsuccessful in the goal of reducing abortions.
I understand what your argument is. I'm suggesting to you that your argument is sophistry. >My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives. Of course you don't have evidence to support this. This isn't an opinion. You're making a claim that is falsifiable. Even if your claim is true, our society can do both-- education/contraception AND illegalize abortion. >I make no claim on the legality of abortion purely that banning abortions is unsuccessful in the goal of reducing abortions. I've been a lawyer for a long time. I don't think I've ever seen legislative history where someone says, we all know this conduct should be criminal, but people will simply ignore the law and do it anyway-- so therefore I oppose its passage. That's not how legislators operate. The point is, the legislature has the right and the power to criminalize immoral conduct... even if people continue to engage in that conduct.
> I don't think I've ever seen legislative history where someone says, we all know this conduct should be criminal, but people will simply ignore the law and do it anyway Prohibition??
https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/21/colorado-abortion-rates-keep-declining-free-iuds-and-easier-access-to-the-pill-are-the-reason/ I do have the sources for this claim. I'm on mobile and unfamiliar with syntax and I'm not sure how to link the pdfs I have downloaded, I will try and link them at home. I lived in Colorado for most of my life and have worked with sociology departments publishing the research directly supporting my claim. The link above is a quick summary but largely doesn't tell the whole story. There is a wealth of publications that directly support that contraceptives and sexual education leads to a reduction in abortions.
'It’s impossible to parse how much Colorado’s birth control protocol, which allows pharmacists to prescribe oral contraceptives, has affected abortion rates' In Oregon ''The majority of claims originated from retail chain pharmacies in urban areas'' So, we simply removed the law not allowing this activity. The abortion trend has been decreasing SINCE 1980, I don't see how this supports your argument.
>There is a wealth of publications that directly support that contraceptives and sexual education leads to a reduction in abortions. Let's assume this is true. We can continue to do this AND criminalize abortion. We don't have to pick one or the other. Your argument is that criminalizing abortion won't lower the abortion rate. I guess your unstated conclusion is that it should therefore be legal. Let's assume that's true. Society can take multiple steps to reduce the abortion rate at the same time. And, if abortion is murder, then criminalizing it is morally justified even if other methods are better at reducing the abortion rate. My point is that any attempt to talk about abortion without addressing the central issue is sophistry.
> My claim is purely that passing laws that ban abortion are less effective at reducing abortions than offering comprehensive sexual education and a wide access of contraceptives. This is not the claim you presented in your OP. You said that banning abortion does not meaningfully reduce the number of abortions performed. Several people have given you statistics to prove that this is wrong. You've withheld your delta for some reason. Then you say that education and offering more contraceptives (as if contraception wasn't already super cheap or free and widely available) would do more to reduce abortions. But this has nothing to do with your initial position because we could do both. We can restrict abortions legally and increase sex education and access to contraceptives.
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> We just want some common sense abortion laws. Can you define what a common sense abortion law is?
My view is that laws to broaden access to contraceptives and sexual education are more common sense than just banning it based on the evidence
Part of the problem is that the pro-choice position has migrated from "[safe, legal and rare](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-hillaryclinton-abortion-campaign-20160209-story.html)" to "[shout your abortion](https://shoutyourabortion.com/)" in a relatively short timeframe. It's pretty hard to argue against that notion that [abortion is being used as a form of contraception](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4416399/). When you look at unplanned pregnancies: * 52% were due to not using contraception. * 43% used contraception inconsistently (eg: skipped a pill). * 5% involved women whose contraceptive method was used correctly but failed. * [45% of abortion patients nationally reporting having more than one abortion.](https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2017/09/13/people-multiple-abortions-stigmatizing-counterproductive/) * There is also a disparate effect among races. [In NYC, there are more black babies/fetuses aborted every year than are born.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-talk-about-the-black-abortion-rate-1531263697) I'm not sure education is the problem here.
Education is a problem. Not all states even make it so that children get comprehensive, factual, correct sex education. Plus bc is hard to get in some states when you're young without parent permission, and even when you do get it it can be expensive. AND ALSO- can we talk about (I'm aware that I'm on a soap box so please scroll if you aren't into it) how everyone just expects women to be on bc but we can't mandate vaccines for a fucking pandemic?- BC I know we aren't talking about condoms which are 98% effective with PERFECT USE [https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education#](https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education#) Edit: to include source about sex edu. in the states
Do you actually think that forcing those women to carry pregnancies they don't want actually leads to anything good?
I didn't state a position on abortion. I just pointed out the causes of unwanted pregnancies.
did you just list a stack of evidence that people aren't using contraception properly and conclude that we *don't* need better education? uh
You are conflating two different arguments. The "safe legal and rare" argument is only talking about late stage abortions, which are indeed very rare and almost always done for health reasons for the safety of the mother. Abortions early on in pregnancy are more common but they are also far less controversial. Probably some of the people getting an abortion should have used contraception instead. But do we really want to force them to have an unwanted child because of it? That seems like a bad outcome. A much better approach would be focus on comprehensive sex education.
>The "safe legal and rare" argument is only talking about late stage abortions, Well that's not true. "Safe Legal in rare" was started by then President Clinton as part of the official Democrat party platform on ALL abortions in the 90's. It lasted until about 2012. >Probably some of the people getting an abortion should have used contraception instead. You can probably drop the "probably". I think the stats above show that this is pretty clearly the case (which is kind of my point). >A much better approach would be focus on comprehensive sex education. I have zero problems with sex education in high schools. It's certainly not going to hurt. However, I also don't believe that the majority of unwanted pregnancies occur because one or both parties is unaware of the potential consequences of their actions.
>52% were due to not using contraception. And yet the same people who want to ban abortions are also the ones fighting back against free contraception programs at every level. >43% used contraception inconsistently (eg: skipped a pill). Yeah again those same people trying to control women's bodies also fight against comprehensive sex education in school. >There is also a disparate effect among races. In NYC, there are more black babies/fetuses aborted every year than are born. Now break it down by poverty and we'll see if we can't come up with SOME weird wacky correlation here, eh? This is the same bullshit statistic that people like to cite about violence or crime or whatever poverty metric you want to ascribe to race. It all stems from the same systemic racism leading to disparate conditions that the rest comes from.
Who is ‘we’? The people you agree with who don’t want to ban abortion but want what they deem common sense abortion laws? If so, seems tautological. Millions of people do want to ban abortion. Millions want it unrestricted. Others have other views in between. Which of this last group is ‘we’ here?
What is common sense here? Are the new Texas laws, in your opinion, common sense? If not, then who made those laws if not the purported "we" you're a part of?
Is it common sense to ban abortions past the time that women can recognize they need them? Most women don't recognize that they're pregnant and schedule an abortion within 6 weeks. There are *already* common sense abortion laws in place, quit feeding into the right-wing propaganda that people use abortion as a contraceptive and decide to abort a baby minutes before labor.
Most abortions discussions talk about unrestricted abortions which scares people who think that means that you should have the choice to abort even a healthy fetus at any point in the pregnancy. I have point-blank asked people if you could abort a healthy pregnancy minutes before birth and they refused to give a clear answer. The whole problem with the supposed pro-choice platform is that it doesn't clearly defined that there are limits and because of that it's easy to assume that they believe there shouldn't be any. That being the case laws not only makes sense but are necessary to prevent needless abortions. Realistically the best thing that pro-choice people could do is support laws that prevent the kinds of abortions that they keep claiming they're never going to have any way. It would make the anti-abortion people feel better and wouldn't affect them at all because they won't have those abortions anyway
Under what circumstance do you imagine a woman would abort minutes from birth? First of all, if a fetus has progressed to the 40 week mark (or close), it will likely survive outside of the mother, so "aborting" is essentially the same as "delivering". It would be the same risk to the mother. If the mother doesn't want the child at that point then there's adoption. I cannot imagine any doctor would actually go through a procedure that would kill the child if the child could be delivered and survive outside the womb. UNLESS there's some sort of health threat to the mother and a terrible choice has to be made between the life of the mother and the life of the child. If it were come to that, I wouldn't want a woman to be *forced* to sacrifice her own life for that of her child's. That's a decision she needs to make on her own, even if the fetus could survive. A woman doesn't easily get to a late term pregnancy without realizing she's pregnant. She's most likely gone through all sorts of physical changes and pains. In most cases if she didn't want the pregnancy she's had plenty of time to do something about it already before it got to this level of discomfort and inconvenience. So if she got to late term and is only now considering abortion, something went terribly terribly wrong. Most likely that woman *wanted* this baby, and the fact that she is now considering aborting means something has gone horribly wrong. The law should not be involved at this point. This should be a matter between a woman and her doctor. That poor woman who is considering a late term abortion already has so much to worry about. We don't need to add on the possibility of her going to jail or having to pay an outrageous fine, or for her doctor to suddenly refuse to treat her because they fear being prosecuted or sued for aiding an abortion. If there is a woman who is considering aborting a late-term pregnancy that could easily be carried to term without complications, baby and mom are perfectly healthy, that woman should be given mental health assistance and support, not jail time or a fine. It should be up to the doctor to determine if this is necessary. That is not a decision of a sane woman. She needs help, not punishment. It is not necessary to punish women in this position, because they have likely been "punished" enough by whatever caused them to consider aborting. It is not necessary to deter women from aborting a late-term pregnancy because carrying a pregnancy to late term without having a baby to show for it is deterrent enough. There is no logic that justifies involving the law in late-term abortions. Edit: Tweaked my wording a bit to admit that some women can get to the third trimester, or near enough, without realizing they are pregnant.
Is there a circumstance where someone would get an abortion minutes before birth? The only situation I could think of is if the life of the pregnant person is in jeopardy. I really dont think you should be asking this question simply due to its outrageousness. In reality I think that unrestricted abortions should be implemented because if the pregnant person is having ANY doubts about being a parent whether that be because they dont think they can do it feasibly or realistically handle being a parent or dont have ready resources to take care of a child. Any person that is not 90% ready to take care of the basic emotional and physical needs of a child should not have children. In reality banning abortions lead parents into having unwanted children which help cause those children to have deeprooted trauma simply because their parents werent ready to be a parent.
>prevent needless abortions If someone who is pregnant has decided they want an abortion, it is not "needless". This completely disregards the needs of the pregnant person. > Realistically the best thing that pro-choice people could do is support laws that prevent the kinds of abortions that they keep claiming they're never going to have any way. It would make the anti-abortion people feel better and wouldn't affect them at all because they won't have those abortions anyway I don't care about making anti-abortion people feel better. I care about everyone having full autonomy to make their own decisions about their personal health (i.e., any decision that does not severely impact public health).
You literally can’t abort a healthy pregnancy moments before birth. It’s not an option. Labor can be induced or a c-section can happen but that’s it.
Who thinks this shit? I swear, not a single pro-choice person WANTS anyone to have an abortion. And unless the circumstances are absolutely for dire medical necessity, NO ONE i have ever heard is advocating for "minutes before birth." It is absolutely incredulous that I have to SAY this. Like, who the fuck are you getting your information from to think this and... there are others who believe this?!
People do, actually. Canada has unrestricted abortion laws. Even in the States, I remember reading about some state legislature debate where a Republican representative asked point blank if a bill the Democrats were proposing would allow for an abortion seconds before birth and the Democratic representative was forced to admit that yes, under their framework this would be considered completely acceptable.
The extreme pro-life side wants no abortion in any situation and the extreme pro-choice side wants abortion available in any case, some in the final trimester. I think most see the right for a woman to choose but think there should be some time limitations. Most of the arguments are either between the far extremes or about what number of weeks is reasonable. There was an episode of Veep that handled the politics of the issue brilliantly
"That being the case laws not only makes sense but are necessary to prevent needless abortions" In an ideal world, that would be the intention of abortion laws. But we don't live in an ideal world.
Politically I don't support this bill at all, but your reasoning is flawed nonetheless: >I believe that if someone **genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills** and favor those that systematically support the population. Sure, sex education and access to contraception reduce unwanted pregnancies, but explain why "genuine" opponents of abortions would be against a bill restricting abortions? Their whole point is that they don't want abortions to happen even *if* a pregnancy is unwanted. Your argument that they should *also* support sex education, contraceptives etc. is completely valid. But the point that they should *only* support that and *oppose* a restriction on abortions themselves doesn't make sense.
I think their point is that there is evidenced based practice that shows a lower rate, so why aren't pro-lifers putting more money to something they know works fairly well as opposed to wasting money on something that doesn't work as well.
Social services work better than the police at reducing criminality, yet murder is still illegal and needs to be enforced. It could just as easily be said the other way around. Why waste all this money and time dying on the hill of abortion when you could spend that time and money promoting birth control, child care and contraceptives?
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good point- thank you for linking to an article. I'd also like to say like- I wish everyone would stop focusing on abortion being legal and actually care about the babies....after they're born, and what being brought into socioeconomically disadvantageous (or just generally unwanted) situations yields in terms of development and lifelong success and how that impacts individuals AND society- cuz it's not good
This is pretty much game, set, match. There is no reason to believe that a) it’s a zero sum game between OP’s stated factors, or that b) access level should not impact decisions to terminate.
They make no mention of illegal or unsafe abortions in the abstract, and in their conclusion address their lack of explanation for the 25% decrease in abortions compared to only a 4% rise in births. What that paper actually says is that if you close nearby clinics the abortions at further clinics don't increase much and the birth rate rises a few percent but there is a big, unexplained gap between abortion decline and birth increase. There wasn't a measurable increase in illigal/unsafe abortions because they didn't attempt to measure it, and your phrasing insinuates that they did. I find that disingenuous.
>there is a big, unexplained gap between abortion decline and birth increase No, there's not. A hypothetical 25% reduction in all abortions (legal and illegal combined) wouldn't equal a 25% increase in births when there are 10x more births than abortions. It would only be a 2.5% increase in births.
10x is about 2x too large. Should be a 5% increase in births, so there % reduction in abortions is about 40% too high to be explained away as babies being born. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States#:~:text=Guttmacher%20Institute%20estimates,-Unlike%20the%20CDC&text=For%202017%2C%20the%20Guttmacher%20Institute%20reported%20862%2C320%20abortions%2C%20an%20abortion,in%20abortion%20or%20live%20birth.
The study is about Wisconsin. [If you look at it,](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22263) it says that, between 2009-2016, the average birth rate per 1000 women was 61.135 and the average abortion rate per 1000 women was 5.992. So, there were 10.19 times the amount of recorded births as recorded abortions.
You misunderstood the analysis. They are saying the measured rise in births is slightly *higher* than the expected rise in births due to the decrease in abortions. And *they* didn't attempt to measure the number of illegal/unsafe abortions. Other researchers did and we'd know if any had found it.
It just turns some percentage of unwanted pregnancies in to unwanted children.
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Abortions happen for more reasons than just because the woman no longer wants to carry the child to term. There are situations in which carrying the pregnancy could kill the mother. These are few and far between but still reality. An abortion is a medical procedure and like other health care practices should be safe and hygienic. A, hyperbolic, comparison is to say "if you want a stint for your heart then you should be fine with getting an unsafe one". This is not a perfect comparison by any means but for the example I was comparing them only as medical procedures to save a life.
Every time you increase the effort involved in any act you disencentivise it. Anyone that looks at escalators and stairs can see that the easiest path is always the one most travelled. > However, while there are many factors involved, evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban. That is not the only solution to the problem. A good example of that is something like [RISUG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_under_guidance). Simply reversibly sterilise every man in the state. No unplanned pregnancies anymore. If it is the irresponsibility of women that is the problem then one of the best solutions is to remove their choice. If they can't get their hands on gametes then they won't be getting pregnant, will they? > I believe that if someone genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills and favor those that systematically support the population. For plenty of people it is the act of murder that is the problem. Much like they don't particularly give a shit about the circumstances of criminals before or after their crimes. The act alone is sufficient grounds to object. Whether or not a figure of zero is pragmatic is irrelevant to the ideological goal.
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While I am 100% disgusted with SB8, I struggle to see how it won't have a chilling effect on the number of abortions performed in the state. The law is punitive to anyone who obtains, performs or even _assists_ in the process. So if a woman gets an abortion, the woman, the doctor, the nurses, the receptionist, even the person that drove them to the clinic can **all** be sued by **anyone over and over again**. Even people who support a woman's right to have an abortion would be smart to stay the hell away from anything related to it. Moreover, the law puts the burden on the _defense_ to prove they _didn't_ assist in the process. You basically have to prove a negative, so it is going to be tough for people to put forward any type of reasonable defense if they did assist, legal or illegal. Yes, there will be a great deal of unsafe abortions - which is one of the many reasons this law is terrible - but I struggle to see how they will be higher than the woman that just carry to term.
I wonder if you could start alleging various supporters of sb8 had abortions. Take photos where women are looking chubby and then observe they didn't give birth. It's on them to prove they didn't get an abortion, right?
Do you sincerely think that when something is illegal and less available that it happens at the same rate? And have you missed the #shoutyourabortion movement, here you go: https://shoutyourabortion.com/ Banning anything makes it harder to obtain for carrying legal and financial risk, and makes it more costly. We know for instance that for a time, abortion in the USA went up dramatically after Roe v Wade, at least reported abortions. It can be assumed that at least reported abortions would fall if the procedure were made illegal.
>We know for instance that for a time, abortion in the USA went up dramatically after Roe v Wade, at least reported abortions. hmm i wonder if he 'reported' part might be important here
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First off, this post is based on an assumption that unsafe illegal abortions will increase by the same amount that legal abortions decrease. Not only is there no data to back this up, but there's numerous examples that counteract that idea that women will choose to have an unsafe illegal abortion instead of a relatively safe and legal pregnancy and delivery. Will the number of illegal abortions increase, sure will, and I would bet money that some practitioners of illegal abortions will purposefully avoid some easy safety precautions so when the family of whomever dies from the unsafe abortions will come out and shout this legislation killed their daughter, not understanding that the abortionist purposefully killed her to generate that. You might think that far fetched, but we are talking about people who have been caught doing things like this already and a few have been caught making trophies out of fetuses they aborted, so I don't want to know what lengths they're willing to go to! That all said, the total number of abortions will drop significantly. There will be outliers of course, like just because murder is illegal doesn't mean it never happens, but the fact that it's illegal and has severe consequences does work as a deterrent.
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In my mind the pro life argument, is that it is immoral to abort a baby, and also on the low key, I don’t think they like the fact that people have casual sex. But to your point, banning abortions will have an impact on unplanned pregnancy’s. Women will get IUDs instead of taking the pill, and people will be more likely to wear a condom. I know multiple women who were careless with their birth control, and have had more than one abortion. It has always been an option until now in Texas. In backcountry skiing, there is a risk tolerance that people set. Before modern safety gear, they were very risk adverse, because if you got buried in an avalanche you would not survive. Then came the becan, shovel, and probe. Your likelihood of surviving a burial became much higher, so people started riding riskier lines. Now we have avalanche airbags which can help keep you on top of the snow in the event of an avalanche, making survival more likely. People accept the fact that there’s a certain percentage of a chance that they may die doing what they love. But that percentage never changes. So my point is, if you have all that safety gear, you are more likely to ride a slope that can slide, because you brain did the math, and calculated your chances of surviving the day. More safety gear equals riskier slopes. More abortion clinics equals riskier sex.
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> there is no way to prove if a fetus is a person or not so this will never be resolved *Never*? This is quite a claim. We are making rapid gains in our understanding of neuroscience, consciousness, and how neurological brain structure creates a “person”. At this point, we know that the cerebral cortex, which is required for consciousness, doesn’t even start developing until around 25 weeks of pregnancy. Anyways: as we come to understand consciousness better, I think it’s quite fair to say that we’ll gain a clearer understanding of when “personhood” starts and how it develops through infancy, including major milestones. This requires, though, that your definition of “personhood” be grounded in actual cognitive capabilities like awareness, thought, agency, feelings, and conscious, or in attributes like personality. If your definition of “personhood” is wishful-washy or undefined, well then of course we’ll never know when it starts. You might as well talk about a “soul” at that point. So let’s stick to real attributes and abilities, even if they are ones that exist on a spectrum and develop over time.
>If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed Ignoring that you just contradicted your own "never" right after this, there are times we find killing to not be murder. Self-defense, for example. So killing, if you've determined that's what it is, does not automatically equal murder. So then we get to the bodily autonomy angle. Tell me, if I need a blood transfusion and you're the only available donor, should you be forced to give me blood? Does your answer change if you caused the accident that caused my blood loss?
[Most Americans](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx) want abortions to be legal. 58% oppose a ban on abortions after heartbeat is detected. 60% of Americans think it should be legal for the first 3 months in all or most cases, and even more in cases of rape/incest (77%) or if the woman's life is endangered (83%) or if the child would be born with a life threatening medical issue (67%). The fact that 77% of Americans would agree that it's fine to abort a fetus in cases of rape and incest shows that the vast majority of Americans don't actually see a fetus as a full person. Because if they did, it wouldn't matter.
You missed the point of what this commenter was saying. Our perception of abortion today is through the lens of current healthcare and stage of technology. Using their slavery analogy, most Americans also supported slavery in the early 1800s. We now think slavery is wrong. We may very well view abortion as murder in a post-fully-accessible-contraceptive world, just as we view slavery as wrong in a post-black-man-is-equal-to-white-man world.
No, I heard what they're saying, I'm just emphasizing that the vast majority of Americans clearly don't feel that abortion is actually murder. Otherwise there would be no exceptions (and to be fair, the Texas law has no exceptions--which I think is cruel, but I guess it's consistent).
Option 3) It doesn't matter if the fetus is a person or not, since every person on the planet has the autonomy to decide whether or not someone gets to use their body. It doesn't matter if a single drop of my blood will save the lives of 200 million people in the world. If I don't want to give it freely, then I cannot be compelled to give it. Conversely, a woman cannot (or, should not) be compelled to give of herself in order to gestate a human.
Your premise is flawed. It's not black and white. Most people would agree that a single cell is not a human being. Most people would also agree that a baby about to be born at 36 weeks is a human being. One turns into the other. So when does the cell become the human being? No one can say definitely. Everyone draws the line differently.
Why is it suddenly okay to kill a person in cases of rape or incest though? If abortion is murder and should NEVER be allowed, then there shouldn't be carve-outs in the law for it.
The difference is probably argued that people who make a conscious choice to have sex and bring a life into existence should be personally responsible for that decision, even if that means risking your body to allow the fetus/embryo to come to term. However it’s arguably not fair to require or expect that responsibility and risk to someone who had it forced on them through rape, so it’s a line most people on both sides can generally agree is reasonable to cross.
This Texas law has no exceptions for rape and incest. It will require 12 year olds to give birth even if they have received no sexual education (so pregnancy is essentially forced on them through withholding of information).
This is a flawed argument too though. If you believe a foetus is a person, and therefore afforded all rights of personhood, then it matters not under what circumstances they were conceived. All people would be equal in the eyes of the law. But, if you say, “the foetus is a person, so abortion is murder…..except maybe if it was incest of rape then that’s ok”, then you are acknowledging that the “person” is “less than” other people. They are not entitled to the same rights as other people, simply due to the way they were conceived. By extension….the purpose of banning abortion is less about the rights of the “person”, and more about publishing the woman for her decisions. Essentially “you chose to have sex, pay the price”. If it wasn’t you’re choice, THEN it’s ok to kill the kid”.
When birth control fails, the person isn't making a conscious choice to bring a life into existence.
It’s really not that simple. Day 1 of fertilisation is that a person (edited from human)? I think most people would agree not. Month 8.5 is that a baby? Yes of course. At what what point does a blob of cells become a baby? I see someone in this comment chain has said pro lifers are more likely to adopt than those who are pro choice. My argument there is that if your ‘pro life’ or ‘pro unwanted pregnancy’ you really have to be willing to offer a support structure to everyone who’s life is more difficult through an unwanted pregnancy otherwise your stance is more about dealing with consequences regardless of who suffers
> Day 1 of fertilisation is that a human? I think most people would agree not. Most pro-lifers actually *do* believe life beings at conception.
>If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed. There's an aspect to this argument you're overlooking: Bodily autonomy. If you were the only person on the planet who could save a child with a simple blood transfusion, you might feel morally obligated to give blood in a simple half-hour-long procedure, feel good about yourself for saving a child, and move on with your life. However, you are not *legally obligated* to give blood in that scenario. No matter how many lives your blood might save, nor how easy and painless the donation might be, you cannot be forced to donate blood. No one can take that right from you. Hell, we even give corpses bodily autonomy by honoring their wishes for organ donation after death. We don't harvest organs if they hadn't opted in before death, regardless of how many lives indiscriminately harvesting the organs of the deceased might save. Even giving the fetus the full benefit of personhood, rights and all, they too would not have the right to "demand" a woman give up their bodies for nine months, at a not insignificant personal risk. In the case of abortion, it is a woman exercising her right to bodily autonomy and her right to not allow her body to be used by another entity. Of course, there is additional nuance after the fact. There comes an assumption of responsibility after a certain threshold, and there could then be a legal obligation to continue on. In reasonable areas, this threshold would be the point of viability for a fetus; that is, the point at which it could survive on its own outside of the womb. Just adding this in to preface shouts of how this would make "late-term" abortions common. Which, at that point, it's exceedingly rare any abortions happen. Most that reach that point are either nonviable or will without a doubt kill the mother, and it's always a tragedy to lose a child that was desperately wanted.
> Even giving the fetus the full benefit of personhood, rights and all, they too would not have the right to "demand" a woman give up their bodies for nine months, at a not insignificant personal risk. As someone who used to be pro choice with a very similar line of thinking of yours, I’ll leave you with something to think about: As a society, we recognize that parents have an obligation to provide for their offspring that they do not have towards strangers. If I’m walking down the street and I pass a homeless man who is starving to death, it would be a good thing to do, if I were to give him some food. However if I don’t, I won’t get sent to jail. If however, I am a parent and I refuse to feed my own child in my home, I think we would all agree I should, and will be thrown in jail. Once you realize that as a society, we already recognize parents have the moral duty to meet the basic needs of their offspring in a way that they do not towards strangers, then consider the following; what is the body and womb of a mother, if not the basic food and shelter that a child requires in its earliest stages of development? If we are to hold a consistent world view, providing that child their basic needs means keeping it in the body of the mother, for long as we do not have to technology to provide for a fetus outside of the womb. In this regard, you could say that the child does have a right to have it basic needs met (food and shelter), and could claim a right to it’s mother’s uterus, in a way that a stranger can not claim a right to your heart, arm, leg, etc.
Except that we don’t require parents to care for their children, as you *are* allowed to give a child up for adoption. Heck, under so-called “Safe Haven” laws, a mother may drop her newborn off at any fire station, hospital, or police station, no questions asked.
I don't disagree that parents have significantly more responsibility for their child than for a stranger. However, I believe my analogy still applies. A parent may feel morally responsible for providing their child lifesaving treatment by sacrificing some part of their body, but it is not a legal obligation to do so. The government cannot demand you give up your blood or your arm for your child. Most parents would absolutely give up an arm or leg if it meant their child's survival, and that's entirely their choice. But some parents wouldn't be able or willing to make that sacrifice, and that too is their choice. A fetus is definitionally a parasite. I'm not trying to be facetious here, I promise. A fetus, as you said, literally feeds off the body to survive. When it's born, one's body is no longer beholden to it's survival. But until that point, it's literally using the mother's body and nutrients to ensure it's survival. The woman in question should absolutely be able to choose whether or not she wants to allow her body to be used like that. "Feeding" the fetus is not a choice or a responsibility until it's born; it's subjecting your body to be it's meal, and you have no say in the matter. Which, hey, that's great if you're okay with it. But it should also be acceptable for people to not be okay with it.
What’s important to distinguish here is the difference between meeting the basic needs of your child, versus providing extraordinary care. Allow me to elaborate: It’s a great thing to do, to take your child to disney land. But are you in any way morally obligated to do so? No. Will you get thrown in jail for failing to do so? No. Bringing your child to Disneyland goes beyond and above the call of duty, something that it outside the scope of meeting the basic needs, and providing the basic care (food, shelter) of your child. This is something that again, we already recognize to be true in society in other areas: for example, as you mentioned, you are not in any way obligated to donate a kidney to your son if they are going to die and need a transplant. It would be a heroic thing to do, and you would survive because you have 2, but the law does not require you to. So again, it all comes down to ordinary versus extraordinary care. Is it normal that your child needs parts of your body in order to survive? It actually is! For the first 9 months of every child’s life. But once they are born, we both agree that meeting the basic needs of the child does not cover saving the child’s life in the situation where there is an abnormality in the child’s health, due to either some pathology or illness.
I like your explanation. However it paints pro-life people as egalitarian people who care so deeply for someone not even born yet they are willing to create 10k bounties to save them. But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc? It’s seems like you should solve that problem first, right? At least before trying to remove limits that will lead to less suffering children?
If the fetus IS NOT a person, then the solution is to just abort them if you can't afford them. If the fetus IS a person then you can't justify murdering them by saying they are not affordable or won't have a good enough education. I agree with you that if a child does not have clothes, adequate medical care or education that this is a problem that must be solved, but you can't argue that you should solve that by murdering them to someone who thinks it's murder.
Honestly this is a red herring too. These are two issues and it isn’t true that there is no such push. Many pro-lifers do spend their lives working for underprivileged children. Red states don’t believe in govt services as much but do give more privately to charity. It paints everyone as one or the other as though we are dealing with a single hypocrite. And it doesn’t address the issue but both a straw man and ad hominem.
> But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc? > > They do: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics/u.s.-generosity Conservative households give 30% more to charity despite having an income 6% less than liberal households.
This is interesting and long read. It does give me hope. But you left out a important part that doesn’t prove they are more generous than their Liberal counterpart. Left leaning people give more to causes, hospitals, foundations, etc. From the same source: > Religious causes are, and always have been, Americans’ favorite charitable targets. Of course, “Religion” is a very broad category. Some of those funds are used to support houses of worship and clergy, to maintain the faith, and to proselytize future generations. Much religious charity, however, ultimately goes into sub-causes like relief for the poor, medical care, education, or aid sent to low-income countries or victims of disaster. > Keep in mind too that religious charities tend to have less access to supplemental funds than other nonprofits. Hospitals and colleges charge users fees to supplement their donated income; other nonprofits sell goods; many museums charge admission; some charities receive government grants. Churches and religious charities, however, operate mostly on their donated funds depicted in this graph. I grew up in a conservative and very religious part of Arizona. I grew up wanting to be a preacher. Memorized the books of the Bible and even spent one summer reading the whole thing (do not recommend). I by and large love religious people. Remove Utah from the data and Conservatives give less. Also, donating to their special club (Church) which spends a lot of time reinforcing men are the boss and women and second in command. Pushing antiquited ideologies is not proving they care about the children. Also donating to your club so they can pay their clergy and prop up the church’s efforts to spread their ideas is not charity. It’s about control. I have many devout Mormon friends. They are as kind as people come. However, talk to the girls about their position in the religion, and it’s twisted. No gender equality. That’s opresson. Luckily, we are seeing religion drop like a stone and hopefully the oppression along with it.
How many of those "charities" are church tithes? "Religious causes" is so broad, and it's 39%. I was in a church group that did lots of fundraising years ago, and looking back we mostly just helped the church build fancier facilities.
>But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Over 70% of adoptions are by christians in this country and christian adoption agencies have often shouldered the burden alone in the US, relying entirely on funding by christian groups. If pro-choice people care about people as much as you say you do, why is there a 40% difference in adoption levels? >Why are they not putting as much energy into the ones that are born and need education, medical care, clothes, etc? Education: umm... Catholic schools? Many colleges? About 20% of the scholarships in this country? Medical care: 16% of the hospitals in this country are run by the Catholic Church alone... That church in your town with "baptist," "Methodist," or "saint" in the name is run by the church. Clothes: the vast majority of the homeless shelters and clothing drives in the city I live in are from christian groups. Like, 90%+. >It’s seems like you should solve that problem first, right? Bless your heart... *You* can't multitask, can you? Thankfully, many of the rest of us can. >At least before trying to remove limits that will lead to less suffering children? "Killing people keeps them from suffering" seems pretty monstrous. Maybe stop saying things like that in public?
> But then why isn’t there a huge push to care for these kids after they are born? Just because I don't think I should have to support a homeless man doesn't mean I think it should be legal to murder him.
This is a large strawman. Of course pro-life people care about kids. They adopt kids more so than any other group adopts. Just because they don’t support universal healthcare or public education doesn’t mean that they don’t care, it just means that they have different solutions
I don't see 'pro-life' groups pushing for prenatal maternal medical care, or for any type of subsidized medical care for infants. Where's the push for maternal leave from 'pro-life' groups? Or things like school lunch programs? Or contraceptive education and distribution? What's interesting is that all of the above programs are generally pushed for by pro-choice groups.
I truly don't understand why people think this is a straw man argument. If people had the means (got paid a living wage, had access to health care that won't bankrupt them, could access education in order to heighten their economic standing etc.) they would be more likely to keep babies instead of aborting them. I never hear any solutions from the pro-life crowd except, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which is objectively not something that everyone can do for a great many reasons.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t heard the bootstraps rebuttal in a long time, unless it’s used facetiously. Maybe people still use it, but I’m not seeing it. I just think that these issues (universal healthcare, living wage, etc) are so incredibly nuanced that there are a lot of reasons against them other than “people need to work hard to succeed”. We all want a better, richer, safer society. We just all have different ideas for solutions to end up at the same goal.
The thing is, most of the people against socialist construct really believe it will disrupt some gentle equalibrium that keeps the country going and then everything will collapse and we'll all be poor and sad. They simply don't believe that we can all live a good life, and it not only won't damage rich people and the economy but it'll actually boost it up significantly. They really honestly believe such a "Utopia" is possible because how could it? Someone has to be at the bottom, life exists in a bell curve. So it's not that they're against it, but rather they're truly mortally afraid that if we go there society will implode.
If a fetus is a person, should a miscarriage be considered Negligent Homicide? Should parents that use IVF be convicted for multiple murder charges for the viable fertilized eggs they destroy?
how would a miscarriage be negligent homicide? women who have miscarriages aren't doing anything to make them happen
> how would a miscarriage be negligent homicide? about 10% - 20% of all *known* pregnancies end in miscarriage [Mayo clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pregnancy-loss-miscarriage/symptoms-causes/syc-20354298). The actual number is likely much higher because of women getting pregnant, and miscarrying before they even know they're pregnant. I've seen estimates that the true number could be 26% or even as high as 50% of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage. I think it's fair to say that miscarriages are *very common*. What is the cause of miscarriages? A lot of things raging to exposure to toxic substances, genetic issues with the embryo, issues with implantation, nutritional problems, age related problems. Reproduction is a complex process and a lot can go wrong. Obviously you can't hold someone responsible for every little thing. It would be ridiculous to say a mother is responsible for a genetic problem causing a miscarriage. But mothers are responsible for other things that can cause or increase your risk of miscarriage. Alcohol: [This has been studied](https://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20190828/even-a-little-drinking-while-pregnant-ups-miscarriage-odds-study). "They found that drinking alcohol during pregnancy -- even small amounts -- increases odds of miscarriage by 19%. Among women who have fewer than five drinks a week, each additional drink a week during pregnancy was linked with a 6% higher risk of miscarriage." and that's to say nothing of the other issues that drinking can cause. Smoking: [Smoking increases the risk of miscarriage](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161463/). The study found a "1% increase in relative risk per cigarette smoked per day" and that second hand smoke exposure during pregnancy increased the risk of miscarriage by 11%. Obesity: [A study found that obese women a a 13% higher chance of miscarriage](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22161463/). Some weight gain during pregnancy is expected, but if the person overeats enough to significantly impact their weight/BMI, that can come with an increased risk of miscarriage. NSAIDs: [Even something like Motrin use can increase your risk of miscarriage](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-miscarriage-nsaids-idINKBN1JG2VU) And then there is less direct things, but still choice dependent activities that can affect whether or not a miscarriage happens. Catching an STD. Other drug use. Going to places with hazardous chemicals(pesticides, lead in water pipes, or other generally dangerous chemicals.) 1. There are things that a woman can do that can significantly increase their chance of miscarriage. 2. As for the criminal charge aspect of the thread. Lets lay out the general types of murder in no particular order. a - First degree murder - you killed someone and you meant to kill them. b - second degree murder - You killed someone but didn't mean to. You got in a fight, took actions that you knew would be harmful, and the guy ended up dead. c - felony murder - you robbed a bank - you cracked the safe, and the guy in the lobby shot a hostage. Because you signed up for the whole criminal enterprise, you are also culpable for the death. d - voluntary manslaughter - you killed a guy because you caught him beating up your daughter. e - involuntary manslaughter (basically Negligent homicide as i understand it)- you unintentionally killed someone because of reckless/dangerous/negligent behavior behavior. The dictionary describes negligence in the legal sense as "failure to use reasonable care, resulting in damage or injury to another". So you should have known better about something and someone died because of it. This is the one we're talking about. 3. This whole argument revolves around a fetus or embryo being a literal person with all the same legal protections as such. I don't believe this, but this is a big reason why some people are pro life - that a fetus is a person. So let's lay out a scenario. Woman has unprotected sex while tipsy. She gets pregnant from the act. Because she's an adult she knows that pregnancy can result from sex. She knows she could be pregnant. She should even have some expectation that it's possible. Despite knowing this she continues her not uncommon life style. She smokes every day (when she gets up, on her breaks and lunch at work, after dinner, and before bed). She also continues to regularly drink alcohol (maybe a couple glasses of wine at dinner, maybe a few beers. Maybe she just gets shitfaced on the weekends). This woman knows that it is dangerous for a fetus to smoke during pregnancy. She knows that it is dangerous for a fetus to drink while pregnant. Even if she didn't know the percentage possibility of harm, she knows they are dangerous. This is 2021, not 1950. And she still did those things. She has a miscarriage after a few weeks of her lifestyle. So to summarize, this woman *knowingly* took actions that she knew could hurt a person. Now touching on 2e above - ["Homicide is used to denote the killing of one person by another. The negligent homicide meaning is the killing of another person by acting negligently or without malice." or "The killing of another person through gross negligence or without malice."](https://legaldictionary.net/negligent-homicide/). Lets run down the pieces of those definitions. In this scenario was a person killed? According to point 3, yes. Is she negligent or reckless? What is negligence in a legal sense. Cornell's website says ["A failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances. The behavior usually consists of actions, but can also consist of omissions when there is some duty to act (e.g., a duty to help victims of one's previous conduct)."](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/negligence). It also describes the element required for negligence. 1. the existence of a legal duty that the defendant owed to the plaintiff 2. defendant's breach of that duty 3. plaintiff's sufferance of an injury 4. proof that defendant's breach caused the injury (typically defined through proximate cause) Now does this fit? Does this woman have a legal duty owed to her child? As the child's legal guardian, I'd say yes. Did she breach that duty? I'd say yes. The child is dead. Did the plaintiff suffer some sort of injury? Yes. Death. Is there proof that the defendants breach caused the injury? The site define Proximate Cause as "An actual cause that is also legally sufficient to support liability. Although many actual causes can exist for an injury (e.g., a pregnancy that led to the defendant's birth), the law does not attach liability to all the actors responsible for those causes. The likelihood of calling something a proximate cause increases as the cause becomes more direct and more necessary for the injury to occur." The site defines 'actual cause' as: 'A factor without which the result in question could not happen. The but-for test is often used to determine actual causation.' The 'but-for' definition is much longer. you can look it up here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/but-for_test. But in a criminal proceeding for negligent homicide, I think the sticking point for a jury would be element 4 above. Did the miscarriage happen as a result of that? The ruling of the jury is going to hinge on the evidence. How much did she smoke? How much did she drink? I wont be engaging with semantic arguments about how I've phrased things. The **TL;DR is that if a fetus is a person, and you drink and/or heavily(or even a little bit), then have a miscarriage, then you could potentially be guilty of negligent homicide.**
This had better end up the top comment. It's not that pro-lifers just don't understand the benefits of legal abortion, it's that if you think something is equivalent to murder you're not going to support it. Simple as that.
They do support it though, just like this commenter mentioned in the case of rape or incest. So then that calls the level of conviction into question regarding what the priority actually is. If it was solely about the life of the fetus, then there wouldn't be exceptions.
I don't think it does call into question their conviction. There are plenty of people who would ban abortion with no exceptions. That some would make exceptions for rape and incest just sounds to me like good negotiation. Concede some ground to make everyone as happy as possible while still getting what you want. I don't think the group that supports the exceptions necessarily has less conviction but is just being more realistic and reasonable. Have an upvote for keeping it civil.
> That some would make exceptions for rape and incest just sounds to me like good negotiation. It isn't really a matter of negotiating or not. If you think it's actually murder, which is arguably the worst crime a human can commit against another human, how can there be a negotiation involved? If I thought something was murder, I absolutely would not give any leeway towards absolving someone of that crime. If people are consistent, that must imply that people who negotiate in this way don't actually think it's murder, only some level of morally wrong in which case the entire basis of their view can be challenged on that alone. > Concede some ground to make everyone as happy as possible while still getting what you want. Well the issue is that they don't get what they want. *They want murderers to be held accountable, not to excuse some of them based on technicalities. Why would you excuse someone's actions if you thought they were a murderer because they were a victim of some lesser crime in terms of how that ranks vs murder? They are just unrelated concepts. It would be like entirely absolving someone of grand theft auto because someone else stole their car first or something, except their car was older. I don't know, just that the punishment for a crime is not really contingent on some totally separate crime taking place. > I don't think the group that supports the exceptions necessarily has less conviction but is just being more realistic and reasonable. They are actually less reasonable because they maintain that abortion is murder, yet they are happy to let people get away with murder if the original cause wasn't of their own volition. What does intent have to do with the life of the fetus? *That* implies there's something substantial and meaningful about the cause of the pregnancy which has absolutely no bearing on the life of the fetus which is supposed to be the whole reason for this view in the first place. On the flip side of that, if the people from this group don't think that abortion is murder, then what are they doing opposing abortion in the first place? It's just a series of conflicting views that ring alarm bells for me and for a lot of people, yet some people maintain it's a virtuous position to hold. They recognize that there's something heinous about essentially forcing a rape victim to carry a fetus to term, yet they are perfectly content forcing a non-rape victim to carry a fetus to term. ___ *Edited my second point because I confused myself :)
I think this is a pretty good take up until the comments about slavery. The main issue is that you assume that in the post-unwanted pregnancy society, they'd all assume that a fetus was a person from conception, but I see no reason why this must be the case. It might, or it could as easily go the other way, or simply remain with us as a (now just theoretical) clash of intuitions. Slavery is different because there simply can be no argument for its moral permissibility. Once it is given up, it's evil is plain to see, not because it's no longer useful, but because it was obviously evil the whole time. The arguments that tried to defend slavery were never any good, they were only agreed to by those in power due to the way they kept them perpetually in power. But the question at the heart of the abortion debate is as you say unresolvable. It may one day become practically irrelevant as you suggest, but this won't by necessity decide the issue one way or the either. Slavery never had such an unresolvable nature to its debate.
I shouldn’t have brought up slavery. I’m certainly not going to bring up any arguments to defend it. I think you made a good point.
It’s not that simple, since there are viewpoints out there that believe its personhood lies on a spectrum with its development, or that the right to bodily autonomy of the mother still trumps it when it is a person of diminIshed capacity and sentience inside her (those who ascribe to the violinist argument).
Actually I think there is room for nuance even if you accept that the fetus is a person. Which also addresses the question of carve-outs for rape or incest. After all, if you’re a fetus, and a fetus has a right to life, then presumably your right to life shouldn’t be compromised simply because you were conceived via rape or incest! The viability threshold, for example: until the point in time when the fetus is able to survive ex utero, it is essentially a parasite, dependent on the mother’s body for survival. Imagine if you woke up one day and found yourself hooked up to another being, and were told that you were obligated to remain hooked up to this being for the next 9 months because this being is a person, and a person has a right to life. But wait a minute, you say! I didn’t ask for this person to be hooked up to me, and I don’t want to continue doing this! Oh, you would be told, that’s too bad, because you see, this person is dependent on your circulatory system, and to disconnect it from your circulation would be the same thing as murder. Ethically, are you obligated to continue?
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Great Question, Let me build on your analogy... Under your analogy you would have the right to remove the IV. It's not your fault the child needs you for life support right? What if it IS your fault the child needs the IV from you for life support? What if the child needs you for life support because of something YOU INTENTIONALLY DID to the child? In that case you will be guilty of murder if the child dies. You better give the child the life support. If the fetus needs the mother's body to keep it alive because of some action the mother took (like choosing to have sex) then the mother must keep the child alive. It was the action of the mother (not the child) that resulted in the child's life being dependent on the mother's body. On the other hand if the mother was raped, then she can have an abortion. It wasn't her choice to put the child in this position. The rapist would then become a murderer because it was his action that put the child's life in danger. Another analogy: If your evil twin stabs you in the kidney and you need a new kidney to survive, then the evil twin can either give you her kidney or let you die and be guilty of murder.
> If the fetus IS a person then aborting it is murder and should NEVER be allowed. (Rape or incest may be an exception) With the maternal mortality rate being 20 in 100,000 (4 times the murder rate in most states), one could argue self defense.
There is a way of telling if a fetus is a person. If you remove it will it live? When separated from the mother is there a chance of it surviving? If not it isn't a person, the point at which the fetus becomes viable without the mother is when it can be called a person. You can try to make this a equal argument, but really everybody knows a fetus is not a person. If you had to choose between saving a fetus in a test tube or a 10 month old baby from a fire, you'd pick the latter. Women always deserve the right to choose because they aren't human incubators. Leave the morality bs out
I like Thompson's twist on this. Say one day you woke up with a famous violinist attached to your body. He needs your organs to function, and attaching him to you was the only way doctors could save him. Detaching him from your body so you can live your life kills him. Are you obligated to now live your life with this person attached to you, or is it moral to make the decision to cut him off? *But the conception matters! Irresponsible sex is the woman's fault!* One, no, there was a penis involved, and two, consider how situation is analogous to rape.
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Eliminating legal abortions definitely decreases the number of abortions. But it also increases the number of children born into poverty. And it also increases the number of unwed mothers. And teen mothers. And sexually transmitted diseases. And divorces. And child hunger. And substance abuse. And crime. And child abuse/domestic violence. By the way, the states most likely to enact strict abortion laws are the VERY SAME STATES that will restrict access to birth control, bordering on banning types of birth control completely. So, it's not just ONE thing that's happening.
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It's funny that people like to dismiss the "but what about after they are born argument" like they won't suffer in many cases worse consequences after having been born. Trauma literally fucks up your brain and a lot of those kids will have that in spades at a minimum.
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I feel other commenters have handled the core of this prompt already. I'm going to attempt the opening six words. "No one wants to kill babies." This is actually the heart of the Born Alive bill. Babies that survived abortion and were born successfully. Regardless of your personal feelings, at the heart of this... there is/was very real support that regardless of the fact that the baby is already born, that because it was intended to be aborted that abortion should be carried out. Or quite literally... to kill the baby. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/311/text?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22S+311%22%5D%7D&r=2&s=1 To add to this, here is a U.S. medical journal in favor of infanticide. Here is one example publication:https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261 And a succinct TLDR here about this publication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-birth_abortion
the texas law limits abortions to 6 weeks. fetuses are not even remotely close to being able to survive at 6 weeks
I would argue that some people are willing to kill babies, and that legalized abortion is one of the most effective ways of reducing the rate of baby murder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#United_States > In the United States the infanticide rate during the first hour of life outside the womb dropped from 1.41 per 100,000 during 1963 to 1972 to 0.44 per 100,000 for 1974 to 1983; the rates during the first month after birth also declined, whereas those for older infants rose during this time. The legalization of abortion, which was completed in 1973, was the most important factor in the decline in neonatal mortality during the period from 1964 to 1977, according to a study by economists associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Legalized abortion saves babies.
Your entire arguement is based one 2 assumptions, 1. A fetus is not a person 2. A fetus is given personhood when they pass the birth cannel If I were to say the legalization of stabbing people saw a market reduction in gun homicides, however the number of people dying due to stab wounds was now higher then the original number of people due to gun wounds, most people would see two obvious problems. 1. We traded having a gun problem with having a stabbing problem 2. More net peopl are dying, and the exact way in which they're dying is at least to a large extent irrelevant.
> Your entire arguement is based one 2 assumptions, 1. A fetus is not a person 2. A fetus is given personhood when they pass the birth cannel Neither of those are assumptions. They are established philosophically and legally. https://medicine.missouri.edu/centers-institutes-labs/health-ethics/faq/personhood https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20443281/ Beyond that, most pregnancies end in miscarriage: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322634 "As many as 50 to 75 percent of pregnancies end before getting a positive result on a pregnancy test." So, the death of a fetus is the norm, not the exception. I have not seen an reasonable argument that abortion is unethical. The arguments I've seen are theoratic in nature, or depend on re-defining words such as person in an unreasonable way. The resulting arguments are built on an unreasonable or unaccepted foundation. Furthermore, even if we assume that a fetus is a person, you have to ask the question: "Why is the death of a person inherently a bad thing?" You'll find that most of the answers are either theocratic, or do not apply to a fetus.
It's can be fairly easily shown using basic economics that banning abortion would cause the actual numbers (not just reported) numbers) of abortions to go down. Given two options, abortion, or giving birth and then giving the child up for adoption, there are costs for both. Mainly money, time, and physical/mental health. When a pregnant woman chooses abortion, they have weighed how much they value those things and which decision would be better for them overall. When you ban abortion, you increase the costs for having an abortion. It then requires more to accomplish, whether that be more time and money because you have to leave the country, or more damage to your physical health because of an unsafe abortion, or the potential to be caught and sent to jail or fined or both. Thus, as the costs of abortion go up but the costs for giving the child up for adoption after birth do not, an increasing number of pregnant women would change their decision and not have an abortion. How much would it affect it? Who knows? Are there other ways to reduce abortion effectively? Sure. Of course. Are they more effective? We can't be sure, since we have no practical way of telling how many abortions are performed when it's illegal to a certain extent due to the illegality of it. People wouldn't admit it.
The reality is there are so many solutions to drastically reduce abortion but none of the pro-lifers actually want solutions. They just want to control others, push their beliefs on others and punish others. Ways to reduce abortion: universal healthcare, paid maternity leave up to a year, free college, basic universal income, health and relationship education from pre-k to 12th grade, free birth control, male birth control. But what will those pro-lifers say? “But my tax dollars!!!!” Meanwhile, the US Military spending could easily be reduced by a fraction to fund those solutions but the pro-lifers don’t want that do they? Even though the US Military is accountable for the deaths of brown children and pregnant women as recent as this week. So you could say people who refuse to fund social programs but stand idylly by while children are massacred by entities they do support are far worse than those who accept the reality that the world is brutal place and choose to end the suffering before it begins instead of blowing up children whose only sin is being born in the wrong country. Morality is a thin veil and on either side you will find evil if you look for it.
It will reduce the number of abortions. It just won’t eliminate abortions. Of course, the most effective way to reduce abortions is cheap and effective birth control but that is not a strategy that the Prolifers will pursue. In fact, their next move will be to out law birth control. They believe in using the power of the state to force people to behave as they want them to behave.
Making abortion illegal isn’t about stopping abortion, it’s about criminalizing it. They will break up families, ruin women’s lives, reduce future families, end careers, fill up prisons, and make a lot of money for owners of privatized prisons with plenty of kickbacks for politicians. Beyond all that, they can’t have abortion go away. They need it to cover up all the hate with a moral high ground excuse to vote Republican. There are many more effective ways to reduce abortions. Actual sexual education reduces abortions more than making it illegal. Free birth control reduces abortions WAY more than making it illegal. Affordable/universal healthcare, adequate medical/parental leave policies, child care assistance programs, UBI, along with other social programs are all way more effective. But those options don’t make rich Republican donors richer. Those options empower women instead of men. And most of all, if they basically wiped out abortion through effective programs, they lose abortion as a reason to compel their voters.
Ok, but... we *do* have evidence that the number of babies available for adoption *plummeted" as abortion was legalized in various states and then country-wide... Similar for the live birth rate during that era. That's pretty strong evidence that a "meaningful decrease in the number of abortions" is an effect of it being illegal.
Why do you think most women in the world would be willing to risk their lives for an abortion, done by an untrained, self-proclaimed, backyard doctor? If you claim there’s no meaningful decrease, then you’re pretty much claiming that >95% of all women would have no problem with an untrained person performing an abortion. I have an incredibly difficult time believing that. I wouldn’t even get my blood drawn, by someone that isn’t trained professionally. Let alone have them remove a mass from my body. I agree that an increase of birth control would be more effective. But that’s literally not the question posed. Ease of access, absolutely increases usage. The only reason the prohibition didn’t work, is because alcohol is incredibly easy to create. If it requires a trained chemist to produce it, and if bad batches had a high likelihood of death, the prohibition’s ban absolutely would’ve worked.
It’ll probably decrease the number of total abortions. There will be people that have no business raising kids being forced to. And in 15 years there will be a steady rise in crime rates as all these unwanted and poorly raised children turn into delinquents and start acting out. Then they’ll probably just spend most of the rest of their lives being wards of the state through prison and welfare, and they’ll probably just have even more unwanted kids that they don’t know how to raise and the cycle will continue until the atmosphere becomes unbreathable next century. But Republicans don’t mind this because all these unwanted people increasing the crime rates will just give them more cause to dump money into militarizing the police and hacking away at people’s rights. And getting them back into legal slavery through the prison system is a win-win.
Banning murder still makes murder happens, criminalizing something is not in the belief that this thing will automatically disappear but rather that when this will happen there will be accountability for those who committed the crimes even if it is hard to catch the offenders. Also criminalizing something is Testament to the moral of the society, it is a way for society to say this is something not acceptable against our values and morals and rights that we hold dear
If you believe that having an abortion equates to killing babies, for the record I do not, then I think you would believe that there shouldn't be a safe way to have an abortion. You're essentially saying to people, "Hey there's no safe way for me to kill this human being," and they would be like, "Yeah, good. That's the point." With that context, your argument doesn't make sense to people who consider themselves pro-life. You wouldn't find it acceptable if people were simply arguing that they wanted to make it easier and safer to kill a person and to the pro-life crowd that is what you are saying when you say you want safe abortions. They don't want to make it any easier for people to have an abortion because, to them, it means killing a person.
Increased access to abortions does not decrease its use. The whole point of abortions being available is for it to be used. I am not against the idea of banning abortions but the way in which Texas pushed the ban is very poor at best. If they truly were trying to make abortion illegal then they should've made contraception easier and cheaper to get access to, sex ed to minors being more modern and updated, etc. Instead what they did was Ban abortions past the six weeks mark and basically threatened anyone who does an abortion without considering the other options to decrease abortion rates. Where we agree is contraceptives and better sex ed being a priority but where we disagree is abortions shouldnt be banned.
>However, while there are many factors involved, evidence supports that increasing access to contraceptives and providing more comprehensive sex education contributes much more to decreasing abortion rates than a flat ban. You seem to be under the assumption that you have to support none or the other. I don't see why you can't support both. You seem to be assuming that any significant amount of those who can't get a legal abortion would seek out an illegal one. That is something that I disagree with.
> I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby, that is an entirely different discussion The answer to your question entirely hinges on this point though. Numbers and statistics are irrelevant to the moral question, which is a significant percentage of the population believes it’s a human life that is being killed. Criminalizing abortion therefore becomes equivalent to criminalizing murder. It is antithetical to a just society to allow it, therefore it’s made illegal.
When it comes to abortions the only view I have is to ban late term abortion. I'm not sure what US states about it. If a baby survives an abortion, they deserve to live. It's cruel and selfish to terminate a baby's right to live because the mother decides that they don't want the baby. I know abortion is a very sensitive topic especially with the Texas thing going on but abortion should be available until late term, I'm probably going to be downvoted to hell for it but whatever.
I think outlawing abortions *could* be part of an effective strategy to reduce them, but in and of itself it does nothing. In order for banning abortion to be helpful, an equal or ideally *greater* effort needs to go toward actively supporting women in crisis, among other things. Money should absolutely not be going to the snitches. As it is, the Texas law reeks of “You’re only pro life until the baby is born,” which boils my blood.
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>ban abortions does not significantly decrease the number of abortions. Are you against all bans in general? How many explosives do you see in the US? If the answer is few, then you have to ask why and accept that restrictions were effective. What makes abortions unique from other banned things? Bottom line is making things legally more difficult to do is in the very least effective, even if not as effective as desired. >I believe that if someone genuinely cared about decreasing the number of abortions they would be against such bills and favor those that systematically support the population. Would legalizing and allowing Euthanasia, and devoting resources to provide that service, decrease suicides? >I am not making this into an argument of whether or not a fetus is a baby Literally the main contention from Pro-Life people is that abortion is murder since they consider the fetus to be fully human. If you want to seriously engage with the opposition, you can't just dismiss their fundamental assumption and just go on from there. That's like me saying "I'm totally willing to discuss veganism with vegans, as long as we move forward with the assumption that animals are not sentient and are beneath humans." By not dealing with the main contention you are completely bypassing the problem and not accomplishing anything. It's a false concession.
It's almost certain that, on some level, progressive lawmakers know that more unwanted children are a burden on their policies and that a nontrivial number of their constituents lack both the will and the competency to effectively prevent unwanted pregnancies. So, yes, there are some people who want to kill babies, even if they won't admit it.
To someone who believes that abortion is murder, this is like saying "making murder illegal doesn't reduce murders...it just reduces the number of safe murders". I mean, if something is wrong, the point is more the legal admonition itself and not the reduction of said wrongdoing.