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[Abortion] - it's good as hell, y'all
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Then stop making definitive statements about their contents as the basis for accusations?
An increasing chance that pregnancy will kill you seems very relevant to the choice of whether to carry it to term.
No?
"Judgments exist, therefore stop making judgments" does not make sense. If someone thinks my interpretation is wrong, they're free to believe that.
This is insane to see written in an abortion "debate" thread.
That's literally the whole point, but it's easier to argue against the strawman of "patriarchy trying to keep women barefoot and pregnant" so you all carry on in your little echo chamber I guess.
I find them equally easy to argue against, personally.
Fetuses very clearly aren't a human life for most of pregnancy and women should have inviolable right to decide what happens within their body.
There's a moral and coherent pro-choice view that still views a fetus as a human life
Many of them are dying from easily treatable complications and are being let down by a lack of care.
As someone who has given birth in the US, I have compared my experience with my UK friends and relatives and the amount of care I received after birth was astonishingly lacking compared to theirs. I mean, it was terrible. And I was insured and I am a white woman, so goodness knows how neglected others are.
They may not have had specific information about their health situation, but anyone missing a period can look up the stats and see that things are bad and getting worse, which should factor into the decision-making process.
This happened to friends of ours. They estimated the baby, if born, would have a few years to live tops, assuming a massive amount of medical work done just to try and stabilize her. Everything about the whole ordeal was traumatic and really sad. Nobody has late-term abortions for non-serious reasons.
Eh, accepting that "when does life begin" is the crux of the argument is to start from a compromise passion. If you believe that, you're welcome to argue it, but my intention with the thread wasn't particularly to entertain arguments against abortion so much as about the current state of politics, what the root causes of the problem are, and what might be done - hence the title.
Many of these complications are issues that only present themselves immediately after birth, such as post-eclampsia
Here’s an example of a neo-natal nurse who died from post-eclampsia
The UK and Europe in general have exceptional post-partum care for mothers
Many instances of maternal death aren’t foreshadowed by worsening health or bad pregnancies
Well, maternal death is still statistically rare enough that I very much doubt it’s a big enough factor
Right, which is an argument for people who don't necessarily present as having any specific health issues to consider pregnancy more risky than they might if they lived in a country with a functioning healthcare system.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Enough women know people who have had injuries and complications from birth and pregnancy that they are very much a factor, even if outright death is rare. It's a running joke on pregnancy forums that as soon as you get pregnant other women will give you unsolicited accounts of their horrific birth injuries and 3 months bed rest and how they were "never the same downstairs" afterwards.
Did you know your vagina can and usually does rip open during birth?
That women's bodily autonomy trumps all. You can't force someone to use their body to support another human's life against their will.
The part I am wondering about is how much of a difference that makes in the percentage of women getting an abortion in the US vs another country like the UK, though.
Like I understand that women get abortions because pregnancy and childbirth is risky and dangerous, I just wonder how many look at the maternal death rates and have that specifically factor into their decision based on location. Whether someone getting an abortion in the US because of the risk factor would have been happy to go ahead and have the baby in the UK.
But it does put a damper on the notion that abortions should be considered celebratory.
If you believe human life starts at conception then yeah, abortion is an evil that must be allowed to avoid a greater evil. Akin to letting someone die of renal failure because its worse to take organs from people against their will.
In the case of the ones being controlling asses, probably the same group of fuckers that insist that a rapist gets visiting rights on kids born because of their rape (which I recall is a thing in many states). So is it any wonder than many women who are victims, opt to get the child aborted because controlling assholes have pretty much created scenarios where the women cannot get the rapist shit out of her life, if she carries a kid to term.
The point was mostly that it's not a result of a lack of access to abortion, it's just general bad healthcare in the US.
As long as men are on the hook for child support for a kid they may not have wanted, they should be involved in the discussion to at least some degree. Both people had sex knowing a kid was a possibility, both should have a say in what happens afterwards. Admittedly this does get tricky when they have opposing view points.
The woman wanting to keep it, but the man not is an easy answer. She gets to keep the kid, he isn't responsible for supporting her/it. It was her choice, she has to deal with it.
The man wanting to keep it, but the woman not wanting to though is a difficult question. Obviously its the woman's body and she shouldn't be forced to give birth to a kid she doesn't want. But at that same time, you are terminating the man's child against his wishes. Assuming we are no longer holding the man responsible for a kid he doesn't want, the best solution here is currently that she doesn't have to keep it. Otherwise there are no good solutions here until technology allows for artificial wombs.
So, if we accept that sentience doesn't occur at the time of birth, we get into other questions. Such as, women's autonomy. Who gets to make that moral decision of whether to preserve a sentient fetus (Edit: and whether the fetus yet counts as sufficiently sentient that preserving it is the moral decision), and should the government be involved? Or, as I suspect most here would argue, is that moral judgment the woman's decision to make?
But I'd argue that even before we get to that point in the argument, the act should already be legal and available for purely pragmatic concerns, i.e. it's counterproductive to try to restrict abortion even to the stated goal of reducing the number of abortions, let alone all the damaging aspects to individual women involved and society as a whole. Like, if you actually look at the data, and you compare it with other conservative positions, it's as-stated-in-the-OP extremely obvious that banning abortion is not about preserving sentient life to the people who are in favor of it.
Wether you like it or not, the issues are intertwined. You can't have it both ways and say a woman shouldn't have to spend 9 months for a kid she doesn't want but a man should have to spend 18 years paying for a kid he doesn't want. Both are taking autonomy away from a person.
I'm not saying women shouldn't be able to get abortions, but this is an issue that needs to be dealt with concurrently.
Does it actually? Is it actually an issue that crops up much if ever?
Money doesn't have anything to do with autonomy in the way you're thinking. Women don't necessarily have autonomy this way either. If both parents are present and one says they want to take full custody of the kid (unmarried man let's say), the other parent still has to pay support regardless if they're man or woman.
The reason women can use abortion for "I don't want to pay for it" is because it's a side effect of their bodily autonomy, not necessarily a reason.
Given the blurriness of this line, it seems to me that we should try as hard as possible to reduce the need for an abortion.
It boggles my mind how often the people railing against abortion are the same people railing against contraception.
I agree that the best means of preventing pregnancy is abstinence - but I'm also a realist. People are gonna do the sex. Might as well just accept that and try to mitigate the damage.
Yes, there are lots of deadbeat dads out there, and alt-right guys fucking love this argument.
If the argument was purely financial, abortion would be wrong. It's wrong to destroy a potential life in order to save yourself some dough. But on the woman's side, there's a lot more on the line than a few hundred dollars a month - her health and even life are at risk. Birth is agonizing even if it goes perfectly. This is why surrogacy is such a difficult moral topic.
it's because it's thought of as a punishment for women for not keeping their legs closed properly like them and their families
The issue is that this is treating either the child as a commodity that the man has ownership of. Until the child is born, you are still talking about what is functionally a part of the woman's body, and she should have control over it.
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I'm saying I'm not sure the number of times where the father was demanding an abortion so he wouldn't have to pay child support and the woman refused is so large as to be meaningful, especially in cases where the situation even existing couldn't have been easily prevented by the man.
I don't think that preserving life (or preserving sentient life) is a solid basis for moral judgments.
We really should be focusing on preventing suffering.
Yes?
https://family-law.freeadvice.com/family-law/child_support/one_parent_support.htm
I'm not sure where to look up exact numbers for women forcing child support from unwilling fathers though, given you are going to get intermingling with divorcee children, which is going to taint the pool for this argument.