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Reproductive Health Equity Act

Do you support Oregon's new abortion expansion law?

  • I'm pro-life. I would never support such a thing

    Votes: 9 22.5%
  • No, but I am pro-choice.

    Votes: 2 5.0%
  • Yes, but only citizens should be covered.

    Votes: 2 5.0%
  • Yes, I support it by all means.

    Votes: 27 67.5%

  • Total voters
    40
Status
Not open for further replies.
....If abortion was only legal in certain circumstances people would be forced into having children they don't want?

There's always adoptions. What if someone was infertile, but wants a child? Sometimes, there are situations where you are stuck between a rock and a saloon called "A Hard Place".
 
Yeah, I'm pro-choice because my mom was a teen parent and I've seen firsthand how damaging it can be to raise an unwanted child. I know for a fact that I would not be alive had my mother not been raised Catholic and had been allowed to get an abortion.

Not only that but I have multiple mental illnesses that were only worsened because I spent 5 years off medication because my ex-husband and I could not afford health insurance and made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. It actually led to me having a mental break down and effectively ended my marriage, so I firmly believe that everyone should have access to health insurance, regardless of status or income.
 
There's always adoptions. What if someone was infertile, but wants a child? Sometimes, there are situations where you are stuck between a rock and a saloon called "A Hard Place".

There's already a lot of kids in foster care still awaiting adoption. Doesn't help that adopting is super hard in America
 
There's always adoptions. What if someone was infertile, but wants a child? Sometimes, there are situations where you are stuck between a rock and a saloon called "A Hard Place".

There's no shortage of children up for adoption.

Yes, and sometimes there may be a very simple solution such situations. The average child already spends 3.3 years on average in care before being adopted.

Also, some people don't want to put their child up for adoption.
 
There's already a lot of kids in foster care still awaiting adoption. Doesn't help that adopting is super hard in America

That may be true, but no matter what decision you make in politics, something is going to suck. Take for instance, healthcare. If someone doesn't have insurance, they couldn't even afford healthcare. But if they are on Obamacare, they're not going to get accepted, because doctors aren't going to get paid for working on Obamacare patients. Of course, free healthcare may be a good idea to those who are in need, but it can create healthcare waiting lines, which is unethical. Another instance, the electoral college. Get rid of it, not all states will be represented during a presidential election, and it would lead to a one-party rule. Keep it, presidents that win won't refelect what's popular. There's always a poison in every situation in politics, but they have different flavors.
 
posted something but i read twice and realized my error and i don't know how to delete sorry for my mistake
 

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Yeah, I'm pro-choice because my mom was a teen parent and I've seen firsthand how damaging it can be to raise an unwanted child. I know for a fact that I would not be alive had my mother not been raised Catholic and had been allowed to get an abortion.

Not only that but I have multiple mental illnesses that were only worsened because I spent 5 years off medication because my ex-husband and I could not afford health insurance and made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. It actually led to me having a mental break down and effectively ended my marriage, so I firmly believe that everyone should have access to health insurance, regardless of status or income.

My heart goes out to you <3 I wish you all the best in your life.
 
today on bell tree forums: abortion

oh honey this is a very common discussion topic; these have been on TBT since the dawn of time.

Everywhere you go on the internet, there's always controversial topics. TBT is no stranger to political discussions either, and they have been on for a long time. But we did have a spike in political threads on TBT last year. It's already calming down.
 
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Looks like it's gonna be up to me to debunk/refute the common "pro-life" arguments or statements or whatever, here. Summarized for convenience.

1. "Why don't you just put them into adoption?"

Adoption is an alternative to parenthood, not to pregnancy.

And, children put up for adoption actually don’t have fantastic chances of being adopted. There is definitely a hierarchy of preference; white neurotypical male babies are adopted most frequently, followed by white neurotypical female babies. Black babies of [both sexes] are actually adopted so infrequently that some foster care systems have lowered the monetary requirement necessary to adopt - that’s right, they have the best intentions, but they have literally made black children worth less than white children. So if you’re black or half-black or hell, anything other than white and you put up your child for adoption, you're basically playing roulette with a child’s entire life and future.

In the United States alone, around half a million kids are in foster care in the US. A new child enters the system roughly every two minutes, and the average age of a foster child is ten. Once a child reaches 10, though, their chances at adoption drop significantly. Around 25,000 will age out each year.

Most of the children who are available for adoption out of the foster care system are not the (white, healthy) "babies/toddlers/small children" that people want. Race (not being white) and disability/illness are two huge factors that prevent a child from being adopted if they are able to be so. In the foster care system, 61% of kids are not white. And the vast majority have some form of disability of chronic health condition.


So yes, to clarify, this also means there in fact is a shortage of potential adoptive parents. Maybe many white, healthy infants are adopted quickly, but most babies born and go into the system are not white and/or healthy. Not to mention that many parents, if they have the money, will go through private adoptions instead.

Those are from 2006, but it hasn't gotten any better as time's moved on. Refer to: [x] [x]

More facts:


  • A significant increase in the number of people placing children for adoption would soon exhaust the supply of would-be adopters. As of 2002, only 614,000 people under age 45 had ever completed an adoption. Only a minority of these people adopted American newborns. Most adopted from foster care, from a relative, from a new spouse with children, or from other countries. If every person who got an abortion last year placed the child for adoption instead, the backlog of those looking to adopt would be wiped out in less than a year.
  • Adoption is expensive. Not just to the adopters, who must pay between $10,000 and $25,000 in the US to adopt a newborn, but to those placing a child as well. While placing a child for adoption is usually free, lost wages, loss to education, and health risks from pregnancy must be paid for.
  • Pregnancy can have a wide variety of negative health consequences including anemia, UTI’s, hypertension, diabetes, morning sickness, hemorrhoids, yeast infections, placental previa, placental abruption, preeclampsia, depression, and anxiety, in addition to the significant physical danger presented by childbirth.
  • Deciding to put a child up for adoption doesn’t save pregnant people from having their lives endangered by pregnancy. It doesn’t make the pregnancy symptom-free so that the pregnant person never has to miss a day of work. It doesn’t allow the baby to teleport out of the uterus at the end of gestation, saving the pregnant person from the experience of childbirth and having to take time off work to heal.
  • Having a child taken back by a birth parent who changes their mind is unspeakably painful for would-be adoptive parents. One woman I talked to described it as “the closest thing I’ve experienced to the death of a child.” Another woman had a baby girl taken back from her fifteen years ago. She said it still stung.
  • Most important, many people just don’t want to be pregnant. They could have tokophobia, or they could have prescriptions for medications that are inadvisable to take while pregnant, or they could have a job that they would likely lose if they continued a pregnancy, or they could be in an abusive relationship and need to abort in order to protect themselves, or they could just not want a foreign entity growing inside of them for nine months. Adoption is an alternative to being a parent. It is not an alternative to being pregnant.

Now, lemme make it a little shorter.

Adoptees have a higher rate of abuse. There are a lot of sick people out there who are unfortunately vetted by the foster care system and the adoption agencies, and they end up with kids who then later end up tortured and murdered. They don’t do this to their biological children by the way, just the adopted ones.

The children who do not get adopted have crap chances at life in general, due to malnutrition, years of emotional and psychological neglect, and no few of them, having grown up in state care, end up committing crimes and then end back up in state care (re: prison). Obviously this doesn’t happen to every child, but it happens often enough that we have reliable figures on it.

I mentioned being neurotypical earlier. Luck hopefully hits the baby put up for adoption if they have autism, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia (which can occur as early as 6), or seizures (enter Dravet’s Syndrome, which strikes in the first year of life and by age 2, one sufferer was having 100 seizures AN HOUR). And let’s also talk about health; any sort of mitochondrial disease (which is harder to treat and diagnose than cancer), cystic fibrosis or cerebral palsy, or hell, even migraines because yes, children get migraines too! There is little-to-no help for children put up for adoption in these circumstances. Even at the best of times in the best of families, these are huge struggles. So imagine how it is for children without families.

I once heard it said that the true tragedy is not an aborted child, but an unloved one. Let’s face it, the aborted child never knows the difference. But the unloved one, the neglected one, that child is gonna suffer every day.

I’m not saying that children should never ever be put up for adoption because there are legit cases–physical abuse, unfit parents (drug or sexual abuse, poverty is not an excuse to take kids away)–but I hope this post makes it glaringly obvious that “put the baby up for adoption” is not the blanket answer that pro-lifers say it is.

Further reading: [x] [x] [x] [x]

2. "You shouldn't kill a potential life, it's basically murder."

No, it’s not. Murder is a legal term and it has qualifications. Murder is basically defined as "The unlawful killing of another human being without justification or excuse." Murder is unlawful and done without authority; which is why soldiers who kill combatants, people who kill in self-defense, and executioners aren’t legally considered murderers. Abortion is lawful and done under the authority of the pregnant person. Murder happens to another human being; and common law doesn’t see fetuses as another human being. You can’t murder something that isn’t sentient. Murder entails having malice; Abortion entails needs, wants, or desperation. People generally like to use "murder," because it evokes radically negative emotional responses. It’s an emotionally manipulative term and an appeal to emotions.

This sort of thought process involves some schooling on bodily autonomy.

Bodily autonomy, or otherwise known as bodily integrity, is a basic human right granted to people at birth that states that no one can use your body without your consent. It is why mandatory blood or organ donation does not exist - you, as a born person, have the rights to your own body and organs. Even corpses have this right, since you cannot harvest someone’s organs post-mortem if they expressed during their life that they didn’t want them to be harvested.

In order to have bodily autonomy, you must be born and be relatively self-autonomous - that you are self-sufficient and not using someone else’s body and organs to survive.

So, this does not mean that people living off of machines, people in comas or people who cannot physically take care of themselves do not have bodily autonomy. They are still autonomous because they have rights over their organs and are not infringing on anyone else’s body. The comatose and deathly ill are being willingly helped to survive and are not using anyone’s bodily organs directly to survive. Bodily autonomy does not mean "doesn’t rely on anyone to live," it means your rights over your own body.

Fetuses, however, do not have bodily autonomy. They cannot survive outside of the womb on their own, as their bodies cannot physically sustain themselves. They are literally directly relying on someone else’s organs to survive, and like my above point, this does not rely on newborns since although they rely on others for food/shelter, their bodies are running themselves and not on other people’s organs.

Also note: fetuses cannot feel pain until 30+ weeks gestation and are not aware and conscious. Abortions do not happen at this point except for medical reasons. Most recent and accurate study on this done by The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists - 2010:

Nociceptors first appear at 10 weeks of gestation in the fetus but they are not sufficient for the experience of pain in themselves. That requires that electrical activity is conducted from the receptors into the spinal cord and to the brain. Fibres to nociceptor terminals in the spinal cord have not been demonstrated before 19 weeks of gestation, although it is known that the fetus withdraws from a needle and may exhibit a stress response from about 18 weeks. At this stage, it is apparent that activity in the spinal cord, brain stem and mid-brain structures are sufficient to generate reflex and humoral responses but not sufficient to support pain awareness.
At the same time, completion of the major neural pathways from the periphery to the cortex, at around 24 weeks of gestation, heralds the beginning of a further neuronal maturation. The proliferation of cortical neurons and synaptic contacts begins prenatally but continues postnatally. Magnetic imaging techniques have recorded fetal auditory and visual responses from 28 weeks but it has not been possible to record directly when cortical neurons first begin to respond to tissue damaging inputs, although there is evidence of neural activity in primary sensory cortex in premature infants (around 24 weeks). It has been suggested that subcortical regions can organise responses to noxious stimuli and provide for the pain experience complete within itself but there is no evidence (or rationale) that the subcortical and transient brain regions support mature function.

Thus, although the cortex can process sensory input from 24 weeks, it does not mean that the fetus is aware of pain. There is sound evidence for claiming the cortex is necessary for pain experience but this is not to say that it is sufficient. Similarly, the interpretation of ultrasound images is problematic. It is important that ‘labelling’ a set of movements, such as ‘yawning’, with a functional or emotional purpose that is not possible does not imply such a purpose.

A further important feature is the suggestion, supported by increasing evidence, that the fetus never enters a state of wakefulness in utero and is bathed in a chemical environment that induces a sleep-like unconsciousness, suppressing higher cortical activation. Although this cannot be known with certainty, the observation highlights important differences between fetal and neonatal life and the potential pitfalls of extrapolating observations in newborn preterm infants to a fetus of the same gestational age.

I think an important point about bodily autonomy was made in the legal case of McFall vs. Shimp. In this case, a man was dying of bone cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant in order to survive. His cousin was found to be a match, but refused to donate the marrow. The man took his cousin to court and lost the case, because the court ruled that regardless of whether the man would die or not, life-and-death situations do not trump a person’s right to their own body and organs. From the court case:

"The question posed by the Plaintiff is that, in order to save the life of one of its members by the only means available, may society infringe upon one’s absolute right to his “bodily security”?
The common law has consistently held to a rule which provides that one human being is under no legal compulsion to give aid or to take action to save that human being or to rescue.
[…] In preserving such a society as we have it is bound to happen that great moral conflicts will arise and will appear harsh in a given instance. In this case, the chancellor is being asked to force one member of society to undergo a medical procedure which would provide that part of that individual’s body would be removed from him and given to another so that the other could live.
Morally, this decision rests with the Defendant, and, in the view of the Court, the refusal of the Defendant is morally indefensible. For our law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change the very concept and principle upon which our society is founded. To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual, and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn. This request is not to be compared with an action at law for damages, but rather is an action in equity before a Chancellor, which, in the ultimate, if granted, would require the submission to the medical procedure. For a society, which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concept of jurisprudence. [Forcible] extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind."

If you're still here and paying attention, you're probably wondering, "Why is McFall vs Shimp relevant?" Well, simply because a fetus is relying on the pregnant person’s body and organs for survival. Pregnancy can lead to many complications and risks to the pregnant person. If the person does not want to be pregnant, then the fetus is directly infringing on the pregnant person’s right to govern the use of their own organs.

As McFall vs Shimp and other legal precedents have stated, regardless of whether the subject will die or not, they do not have the right to use someone else’s body without their consent. This applies to fetuses, since fetuses are directly using someone else’s body. If the pregnant person does not wish to be pregnant anymore, regardless of the fetus’s death, the pregnant person’s rights to their organs comes first.

If every born person must follow the right to other people’s bodily autonomy, then fetuses must follow it too. Every person has the right to their own body, and like McFall vs Shimp said - "For our law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion to his body would change the very concept and principle upon which our society is founded." Exceptions cannot be made to basic human rights without weakening the very foundation of those human rights.

Now, I will address a misconception commonly had here. Many folks seem to think that pregnant people go through like, six months of pregnancy and then suddenly decide that they want an abortion willy-nilly when in reality, people that seek out later-term abortions usually do so because of health reasons, financial reasons (abortions are expensive and getting together the hundreds of dollars for one can take time for some people), a lack of accessibility (such as when the only abortion clinic in-state is a four hour drive away), or not realizing that they were pregnant until later in the pregnancy.

Even if an almost full term pregnant person decided that they were sick of being pregnant and wanted to end their pregnancy… inducing labor is an option. but regardless of intent or stage of pregnancy, because of bodily autonomy a pregnant person should be able to get an abortion for any reason at any time.

Bottom line, it doesn’t matter whether or not we assign a fetus "personhood," as it doesn’t really change whether or not a pregnant person should be forced to give up their bodily autonomy against their will. Like, no woman can just steal a man’s liver in the dead of night, even if she needed those organs to live. The elderly don’t get to just go around and harvest the kidneys of the young in back alleys. You can’t just, like, kidnap a person and drain all their blood, even if it is used for life saving procedures. Fully grown, autonomous people with rights and consciousness are not allowed to violate the bodily autonomy of others, even in deadly situations.

So… why would we let a fetus get an exception? Use another person's blood and uterus and stomach and everything else for months and altering their body irreparably, occasionally without their consent? Abortion is first and foremost an issue of consent and bodily autonomy, and any argument about personhood is a distraction from that.

So yeah, the whole "The body inside yours isn’t yours." argument is also invalid. Theoretically, even if the "body inside my body" isn’t mine, it doesn’t belong without my consent. I’m allowed to evict it, as it were, if it’s not me and it’s inside of me. To me, the whole "body inside your body" is only normalizing forced pregnancy.

3. "Every fetus in my eyes is still an unborn child, no matter what, and having an abortion at any stage is still morally impermissible."

Sort of ties into the previous ones, but it's a bit more specific and frustrating. Let's use all that we've learned and put it here.

For this moment, I’ll treat the fetus as an actual child. In the case of pregnancy-again, treating the fetus as a child, the child is biologically dependent on the pregnant person. The child must use the pregnant person’s blood and biological resources (and I’m not even getting into the horrible conditions that go along with pregnancy) to survive. If not, they will die. Many anti-choicers argue that it is morally impermissible to let a child die even if it actively uses the biological resources of another person. You also argue that the government must actively deny the choice of a pregnant person to terminate this pregnancy because the child is dependent on their body.

There are other realities in which people-fully developed, fully realized people-are highly dependent on the biological resources of others and will die without these resources. These people are on the organ wait list. These people are those who receive blood transfusions. If we are to deny a pregnant person the right to not have their biological resources be used by another person, then we should also be able to force people to give their blood and their organs against their will. It should be legal and ethically permissible to tie someone down and take their other kidney, take their blood, take part of their liver, part of their bone marrow, etc. This is only if you allow exceptions for abortions when the pregnancy will threaten the life and health of the pregnant person.

If you still don’t think abortion is morally permissible even if the pregnant person is going to die, then, using that exact same line of thought, it is morally permissible for the government to forcibly take vital organs from other people to those on the organ donation list, including the heart, their entire liver-I could go on.
In either case, you’ve used a line of reasoning that denies human rights. And don’t sit here and tell me that "pregnancy is totally different," because on a biological basis it’s really not.

The only differences (that I’m glad to point out) really do nothing to help your argument:

1. Pregnancy is much more taxing on the human body than something like donating blood (and if you’re really healthy, maybe even donating a kidney)

2. Pregnancy lasts 9 months with long term physiological effects, donating blood lasts 30 minutes tops with no long term physiological effects, donating a kidney is usually safe for the donor and the donor spends a couple of days in the hospital with about 4-6 weeks recovery and normally no long term effects (long term effects definitely can happen, but that’s tangential to the point I’m making).

Likewise abortion isn’t murder, it’s literally denying the use of your body to a second party and forcibly removing them from your body. Therefore abortion perfectly fits into the right to control your body because the right includes controlling who or what is using your body or organs.

4. "Why don't you just stop having sex?"

Sex is not consent to pregnancy.

Consent is continuous. Think about it like this: I may consent to putting my hand on a hot stove, but obviously I’m allowed to take my hand off to stop the burning and get my hand some medical treatment to help with the burning.

Sex may sometimes lead to pregnancy, but even if someone does consent to getting pregnant - pregnancy lasts 9 months. If someone initially consented to it but did not want to be pregnant anymore, they can revoke consent by getting an abortion (or inducing labor if it’s late enough in the pregnancy). Just as they can get medical treatment for their burnt hand even if they ‘consent’ to getting burnt, they can get medical treatment by getting an abortion even if they initially consented to pregnancy.

I can consent to something but then revoke consent. If I consent to have sex with someone but then decide I don’t want to anymore halfway through, I can revoke consent, and if my partner refuses to stop then it is rape. And consent to one thing is not consent to another thing, consenting to swimming is not consenting to drowning just because it is a possible outcome.

Even by using the logic that consenting to one action is consent to its consequences, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the right to treat those consequences. Abortion is expensive and painful and inconvenient, and it’s a fix to the consequence of being pregnant when you don’t want to be. Just like getting an STD is a consequence but we’re allowed to treat them with antibiotics, or if I get in a car crash by driving recklessly and break my leg I can fix the consequence of my broken leg with medical treatment.

Sex shaming isn't the answer, basically.

Every time you get into a car, no matter what protection you use, you risk getting injured in a car crash. Every time you go for a swim, you risk drowning. No one calls you irresponsible for it and no one would dream of denying you medical attention, even if you didn’t protect yourself, why do it with an unwanted pregnancy? The desire to have sex and the desire to have children are completely different and most people are far more ready to **** than to have a baby. If one got pregnant accidentally and wanted to keep the it, would you deny them medical attention because they were ‘irresponsible?’ Probably not, so why do it with abortion?

Extra clarifications:

If you're pro life, you're basically just anti safe abortions. They're gonna happen whether you like it or not. All you're doing is increasing unsafe abortions that can end up with more people dying and increase botched abortions.

1. Studies have shown that abortion rates stay the same whether abortion is legal or not. The only difference is that in countries where abortions are illegal, pregnant people are hurt and killed - between 60,000 and 80,000 pregnant people die each year due to lack of abortion access. this can also be shown before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was legalized in the U.S.

2. Abortion has been shown to be an overwhelmingly safe procedure when done legally - studies have shown it to be thirteen times safer than childbirth.

3. "Post abortion syndrome" is made up - there is no tie between abortion and depression.

4. Abortion does not cause breast cancer.

5. Those who're denied abortions are three times more likely to end up below the federal poverty line afterwards.

6. A study by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists took all of the most recent medical information and studies and came to the conclusion that fetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks gestation, and even if they *can* feel pain, evidence points to fetuses being sedated by chemicals in the amniotic fluid that keep them sedated.

...So why do I think the "pro life" agenda is such BS, anyway?

Well, first of all, it's not uncommon for their organizations to propagate inaccurate medical information or straight-out lie about abortion safety and risks. All you gotta do is look at pro life websites such as Abort73, which has several inaccuracies stated on it, including(but not limited to) claiming abortion causes cancer (disproved by the National Cancer Institute, as I've linked earlier), and that abortion is unsafe (Take a look at their citations, they cite data from the 1970′s that's clearly outdated as medical procedures have improved and changed since then. Invalid studies are also used.)

Other "pro life" organizations, including but not limited to "Students for Life" and "Operation Rescue" talk about "post abortion syndrome," while a study done by the American Psychological Association cited above has stated that PAS does not actually exist and that there's no correlation.

Also, those as involved as I am can may remember the whole "Planned Parenthood sells baby parts!" fiasco which was stated by sting videos from an antiabortion group called "The Center for Medical Progress." These videos were fabricated, all state investigations into Planned Parenthood about these allegations have cleared Planned Parenthood of any accusations and the makers of the videos have been indicted for using illegal means to obtain the videos.

Abortion is very often a necessary procedure used to remove a miscarried fetus that was unable pass naturally. Every time "pro lifers" pass laws restricting abortion, especially late-term abortion, it puts people in these situations at risk. When "pro lifers" pass laws criminalizing abortion, they are passing laws with the ability to criminalize someone for having a miscarriage.

They might pretend they don’t want to attack people who have had miscarriages - or they might just truly be ignorant to what their laws actually do - but no matter what, pro-“life” laws can and do hurt those who are suffering from miscarriages.

Also... may I put up a little mention that the whole pro life "movement" is connected with terrorism/terrorist attacks? According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[12] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats,[13] and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers. So, even if you only count the terrorist attacks in which damage was done. You’re looking at 587 successful terrorist attacks from pro-lifers (not included death and anthrax threats).

That's not even all of 'em, either.

Lastly, crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) are pro-life organizations whose goals are to keep people from having abortions. They do this through a number of tactics including harassment, misinformation, and downright lies. According to the NAF, there are roughly 4,000 CPCs in the United States and only 2,000 abortion clinics. That means that it is likely there is one in your community, or in one close to you. It is important to note that most of the time these places do no provide medical services and are not staffed by medical personnel although they do sometimes offer free pregnancy tests and/or ultrasounds.

Miscellaneous addressing:

I don’t understand the "some people regret it" angle as an argument against legal abortion, for a few different reasons:

  • There’s people who regret carrying to term and choosing adoption, and there’s people who regret carrying to term and becoming parents. Are those choices suddenly wrong too?
  • Part of being an adult in a free society is that we’re allowed to make - and live with - our own choices. It’s up to the person in question to weigh out options, make the choice they feel is best, and hopefully be happy and satisfied with the outcome. Sometimes we make the right choice and sometimes, in retrospect, we don’t. This doesn’t just apply to pregnancy, but to every decision in life, big or small. It’s infantilizing to tell people that their liberty and freedom has to be diminished in order to prevent them from making choices they might regret.

Also, abortion access isn’t just in the best interests of parents, it’s also in the best interests of the children. Children who are the result of unwanted pregnancy are more likely to be abused. Preventing unwanted pregnancy thus helps reduce child abuse. Abortion is a last-resort way of preventing unwanted pregnancy. Because when you have access to abortion, and unexpected pregnancy resulting in a baby changes from a mistake that the parents had no choice about following through with to a chosen addition to the family who happened to come at an unexpected time.

Pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood immediately transforms from an unwanted, dangerous, and burdensome social obligation to a choice each pregnant person gets to make. Give a person control, and even if their decision is to go through with a thing they’re uneasy about, they will be happier with that choice than they would’ve been if coerced, and a parent who is happier with their parenthood is a better parent.

I’m pro-choice, which really means I’m pro-bodily autonomy. That means I support these things:

  • Not being forced to stay pregnant
  • Not being forced to have an abortion
  • Being able to get sterilized without hassle or shame
  • Not being forced to get sterilized
  • Affordable care for carrying a pregnancy to term
  • Respecting patients’ right to consent during childbirth
  • Access to affordable contraception
  • Comprehensive sex education
  • Not being forced to have sex without contraception
  • Freedom from all rape and sexual assault
  • Compassionate treatment of sexual assault victims and justice in the courts
  • Wearing whatever clothing you want without harassment
  • Access to affordable gender confirmation surgery and hormones for trans people
  • Ending infant circumcision and genital mutilation
  • Respecting patients’ right to consent to all medical treatment
  • Death with dignity for the terminally ill
  • Elimination of torture as an interrogation technique
  • Ending domestic violence and all other violent crime
  • Ending sex, organ, and surrogacy human trafficking
  • Sex workers legally working in safe, violence-free environments
  • Consent for all interactions involving your body

Your body, your choice.

Also, I don't devalue human life. I am as pro choice as it gets, but I also value life more than any pro lifer I have had the displeasure of meeting. In my experience pro choicers value life more than pro lifers do, because we value the lives of people already here, who can suffer.

That's all I've got to say.

"Preventing [women] from accessing safe abortion care, limiting the methods that decrease the abortion rate, and making it harder for [mothers] to survive and their children to thrive: Why do the people who support these policies get to call themselves “pro-life” again?" --Jill Filipovic, "We Aren’t Afraid of Life, Sarah Palin"

(Also, more relevant to the thread: It’s been shown that tax-funded birth control and sex ed programs actually save the government money because paying for education and safe sex practices is cheaper than paying for pregnancy and childbirth costs. Paying for abortions instead of pregnancy/childbirth would definitely be cheaper as well. Do your research.)
 
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Looks like it's gonna be up to me to debunk/refute the common "pro-life" arguments or statements or whatever, here. Summarized for convenience.

1. "Why don't you just put them into adoption?"

Adoption is an alternative to parenthood, not to pregnancy.

In the United States alone, around half a million kids are in foster care in the US. A new child enters the system roughly every two minutes, and the average age of a foster child is ten. Once a child reaches 10, though, their chances at adoption drop significantly. Around 25,000 will age out each year.

Most of the children who are available for adoption out of the foster care system are not the (white, healthy) “babies/toddlers/small children" that people want. Race (not being white) and disability/illness are two huge factors that prevent a child from being adopted if they are able to be so. In the foster care system, 61% of kids are not white. And the vast majority have some form of disability of chronic health condition.


So yes, to clarify, this also means there in fact is a shortage of potential adoptive parents. Maybe many white, healthy infants are adopted quickly, but most babies born and go into the system are not white and/or healthy. Not to mention that many parents, if they have the money, will go through private adoptions instead.

Those are from 2006, but it hasn't gotten any better as time's moved on. Refer to: [x] [x]

2. "You shouldn't kill a potential life, it's basically murder."

No, it’s not. Murder is a legal term and it has qualifications. Murder is basically defined as "The unlawful killing of another human being without justification or excuse." Murder is unlawful and done without authority; which is why soldiers who kill combatants, people who kill in self-defense, and executioners aren’t legally considered murderers. Abortion is lawful and done under the authority of the pregnant person. Murder happens to another human being; and common law doesn’t see fetuses as another human being. You can’t murder something that isn’t sentient. Murder entails having malice; Abortion entails needs, wants, or desperation. People generally like to use "murder," because it evokes radically negative emotional responses. It’s an emotionally manipulative term and an appeal to emotions.

This sort of thought process involves some schooling on bodily autonomy.

Bodily autonomy, or otherwise known as bodily integrity, is a basic human right granted to people at birth that states that no one can use your body without your consent. It is why mandatory blood or organ donation does not exist - you, as a born person, have the rights to your own body and organs. Even corpses have this right, since you cannot harvest someone’s organs post-mortem if they expressed during their life that they didn’t want them to be harvested.

In order to have bodily autonomy, you must be born and be relatively self-autonomous - that you are self-sufficient and not using someone else’s body and organs to survive.

So, this does not mean that people living off of machines, people in comas or people who cannot physically take care of themselves do not have bodily autonomy. They are still autonomous because they have rights over their organs and are not infringing on anyone else’s body. The comatose and deathly ill are being willingly helped to survive and are not using anyone’s bodily organs directly to survive. Bodily autonomy does not mean "doesn’t rely on anyone to live," it means your rights over your own body.

Fetuses, however, do not have bodily autonomy. They cannot survive outside of the womb on their own, as their bodies cannot physically sustain themselves. They are literally directly relying on someone else’s organs to survive, and like my above point, this does not rely on newborns since although they rely on others for food/shelter, their bodies are running themselves and not on other people’s organs.

Also note: fetuses cannot feel pain until 30+ weeks gestation and are not aware and conscious. Abortions do not happen at this point except for medical reasons. Most recent and accurate study on this done by The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists - 2010:

Nociceptors first appear at 10 weeks of gestation in the fetus but they are not sufficient for the experience of pain in themselves. That requires that electrical activity is conducted from the receptors into the spinal cord and to the brain. Fibres to nociceptor terminals in the spinal cord have not been demonstrated before 19 weeks of gestation, although it is known that the fetus withdraws from a needle and may exhibit a stress response from about 18 weeks. At this stage, it is apparent that activity in the spinal cord, brain stem and mid-brain structures are sufficient to generate reflex and humoral responses but not sufficient to support pain awareness.
At the same time, completion of the major neural pathways from the periphery to the cortex, at around 24 weeks of gestation, heralds the beginning of a further neuronal maturation. The proliferation of cortical neurons and synaptic contacts begins prenatally but continues postnatally. Magnetic imaging techniques have recorded fetal auditory and visual responses from 28 weeks but it has not been possible to record directly when cortical neurons first begin to respond to tissue damaging inputs, although there is evidence of neural activity in primary sensory cortex in premature infants (around 24 weeks). It has been suggested that subcortical regions can organise responses to noxious stimuli and provide for the pain experience complete within itself but there is no evidence (or rationale) that the subcortical and transient brain regions support mature function.

Thus, although the cortex can process sensory input from 24 weeks, it does not mean that the fetus is aware of pain. There is sound evidence for claiming the cortex is necessary for pain experience but this is not to say that it is sufficient. Similarly, the interpretation of ultrasound images is problematic. It is important that ‘labelling’ a set of movements, such as ‘yawning’, with a functional or emotional purpose that is not possible does not imply such a purpose.

A further important feature is the suggestion, supported by increasing evidence, that the fetus never enters a state of wakefulness in utero and is bathed in a chemical environment that induces a sleep-like unconsciousness, suppressing higher cortical activation. Although this cannot be known with certainty, the observation highlights important differences between fetal and neonatal life and the potential pitfalls of extrapolating observations in newborn preterm infants to a fetus of the same gestational age.

I think an important point about bodily autonomy was made in the legal case of McFall vs. Shimp. In this case, a man was dying of bone cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant in order to survive. His cousin was found to be a match, but refused to donate the marrow. The man took his cousin to court and lost the case, because the court ruled that regardless of whether the man would die or not, life-and-death situations do not trump a person’s right to their own body and organs. From the court case:



If you're still here and paying attention, you're probably wondering, "Why is McFall vs Shimp relevant?" Well, simply because a fetus is relying on the pregnant person’s body and organs for survival. Pregnancy can lead to many complications and risks to the pregnant person. If the person does not want to be pregnant, then the fetus is directly infringing on the pregnant person’s right to govern the use of their own organs.

As McFall vs Shimp and other legal precedents have stated, regardless of whether the subject will die or not, they do not have the right to use someone else’s body without their consent. This applies to fetuses, since fetuses are directly using someone else’s body. If the pregnant person does not wish to be pregnant anymore, regardless of the fetus’s death, the pregnant person’s rights to their organs comes first.

If every born person must follow the right to other people’s bodily autonomy, then fetuses must follow it too. Every person has the right to their own body, and like McFall vs Shimp said - "For our law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion to his body would change the very concept and principle upon which our society is founded." Exceptions cannot be made to basic human rights without weakening the very foundation of those human rights.

Now, I will address a misconception commonly had here. Many folks seem to think that pregnant people go through like, six months of pregnancy and then suddenly decide that they want an abortion willy-nilly when in reality, people that seek out later-term abortions usually do so because of health reasons, financial reasons (abortions are expensive and getting together the hundreds of dollars for one can take time for some people), a lack of accessibility (such as when the only abortion clinic in-state is a four hour drive away), or not realizing that they were pregnant until later in the pregnancy.

Even if an almost full term pregnant person decided that they were sick of being pregnant and wanted to end their pregnancy… inducing labor is an option. but regardless of intent or stage of pregnancy, because of bodily autonomy a pregnant person should be able to get an abortion for any reason at any time.

Bottom line, it doesn’t matter whether or not we assign a fetus "personhood," as it doesn’t really change whether or not a pregnant person should be forced to give up their bodily autonomy against their will. Like, no woman can just steal a man’s liver in the dead of night, even if she needed those organs to live. The elderly don’t get to just go around and harvest the kidneys of the young in back alleys. You can’t just, like, kidnap a person and drain all their blood, even if it is used for life saving procedures. Fully grown, autonomous people with rights and consciousness are not allowed to violate the bodily autonomy of others, even in deadly situations.

So… why would we let a fetus get an exception? Use another person's blood and uterus and stomach and everything else for months and altering their body irreparably, occasionally without their consent? Abortion is first and foremost an issue of consent and bodily autonomy, and any argument about personhood is a distraction from that.

So yeah, the whole "The body inside yours isn’t yours." argument is also invalid. Theoretically, even if the "body inside my body" isn’t mine, it doesn’t belong without my consent. I’m allowed to evict it, as it were, if it’s not me and it’s inside of me. To me, the whole "body inside your body" is only normalizing forced pregnancy.

3. "Every fetus in my eyes is still an unborn child, no matter what, and having an abortion at any stage is still morally impermissible."

Sort of ties into the previous ones, but it's a bit more specific and frustrating. Let's use all that we've learned and put it here.

For this moment, I’ll treat the fetus as an actual child. In the case of pregnancy-again, treating the fetus as a child, the child is biologically dependent on the pregnant person. The child must use the pregnant person’s blood and biological resources (and I’m not even getting into the horrible conditions that go along with pregnancy) to survive. If not, they will die. Many anti-choicers argue that it is morally impermissible to let a child die even if it actively uses the biological resources of another person. You also argue that the government must actively deny the choice of a pregnant person to terminate this pregnancy because the child is dependent on their body.

There are other realities in which people-fully developed, fully realized people-are highly dependent on the biological resources of others and will die without these resources. These people are on the organ wait list. These people are those who receive blood transfusions. If we are to deny a pregnant person the right to not have their biological resources be used by another person, then we should also be able to force people to give their blood and their organs against their will. It should be legal and ethically permissible to tie someone down and take their other kidney, take their blood, take part of their liver, part of their bone marrow, etc. This is only if you allow exceptions for abortions when the pregnancy will threaten the life and health of the pregnant person.

If you still don’t think abortion is morally permissible even if the pregnant person is going to die, then, using that exact same line of thought, it is morally permissible for the government to forcibly take vital organs from other people to those on the organ donation list, including the heart, their entire liver-I could go on.
In either case, you’ve used a line of reasoning that denies human rights. And don’t sit here and tell me that "pregnancy is totally different," because on a biological basis it’s really not.

The only differences (that I’m glad to point out) really do nothing to help your argument:

1. Pregnancy is much more taxing on the human body than something like donating blood (and if you’re really healthy, maybe even donating a kidney)

2. Pregnancy lasts 9 months with long term physiological effects, donating blood lasts 30 minutes tops with no long term physiological effects, donating a kidney is usually safe for the donor and the donor spends a couple of days in the hospital with about 4-6 weeks recovery and normally no long term effects (long term effects definitely can happen, but that’s tangential to the point I’m making).

Likewise abortion isn’t murder, it’s literally denying the use of your body to a second party and forcibly removing them from your body. Therefore abortion perfectly fits into the right to control your body because the right includes controlling who or what is using your body or organs.

Extra clarifications:

If you're pro life, you're basically just anti safe abortions. They're gonna happen whether you like it or not. All you're doing is increasing unsafe abortions that can end up with more people dying and increase botched abortions.

1. Studies have shown that abortion rates stay the same whether abortion is legal or not. The only difference is that in countries where abortions are illegal, pregnant people are hurt and killed - between 60,000 and 80,000 pregnant people die each year due to lack of abortion access. this can also be shown before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was legalized in the U.S.

2. Abortion has been shown to be an overwhelmingly safe procedure when done legally - studies have shown it to be thirteen times safer than childbirth.

3. "Post abortion syndrome" is made up - there is no tie between abortion and depression.

4. Abortion does not cause breast cancer.

5. Those who're denied abortions are three times more likely to end up below the federal poverty line afterwards.

6. A study by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists took all of the most recent medical information and studies and came to the conclusion that fetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks gestation, and even if they *can* feel pain, evidence points to fetuses being sedated by chemicals in the amniotic fluid that keep them sedated.

...So why do I think the "pro life" agenda is such BS, anyway?

Well, first of all, it's not uncommon for their organizations to propagate inaccurate medical information or straight-out lie about abortion safety and risks. All you gotta do is look at pro life websites such as Abort73, which has several inaccuracies stated on it, including(but not limited to) claiming abortion causes cancer (disproved by the National Cancer Institute, as I've linked earlier), and that abortion is unsafe (Take a look at their citations, they cite data from the 1970′s that's clearly outdated as medical procedures have improved and changed since then. Invalid studies are also used.)

Other "pro life" organizations, including but not limited to "Students for Life" and "Operation Rescue" talk about "post abortion syndrome," while a study done by the American Psychological Association cited above has stated that PAS does not actually exist and that there's no correlation.

Also, those as involved as I am can may remember the whole "Planned Parenthood sells baby parts!" fiasco which was stated by sting videos from an antiabortion group called "The Center for Medical Progress." These videos were fabricated, all state investigations into Planned Parenthood about these allegations have cleared Planned Parenthood of any accusations and the makers of the videos have been indicted for using illegal means to obtain the videos.

Abortion is very often a necessary procedure used to remove a miscarried fetus that was unable pass naturally. Every time "pro lifers" pass laws restricting abortion, especially late-term abortion, it puts people in these situations at risk. When "pro lifers" pass laws criminalizing abortion, they are passing laws with the ability to criminalize someone for having a miscarriage.

They might pretend they don’t want to attack people who have had miscarriages - or they might just truly be ignorant to what their laws actually do - but no matter what, pro-“life” laws can and do hurt those who are suffering from miscarriages.

Also... may I put up a little mention that the whole pro life "movement" is connected with terrorism/terrorist attacks? According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[12] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats,[13] and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers. So, even if you only count the terrorist attacks in which damage was done. You’re looking at 587 successful terrorist attacks from pro-lifers (not included death and anthrax threats).

That's not even all of 'em, either.

Lastly, crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) are pro-life organizations whose goals are to keep people from having abortions. They do this through a number of tactics including harassment, misinformation, and downright lies. According to the NAF, there are roughly 4,000 CPCs in the United States and only 2,000 abortion clinics. That means that it is likely there is one in your community, or in one close to you. It is important to note that most of the time these places do no provide medical services and are not staffed by medical personnel although they do sometimes offer free pregnancy tests and/or ultrasounds.

Miscellaneous addressing:

I don’t understand the "some people regret it" angle as an argument against legal abortion, for a few different reasons:

  • There’s people who regret carrying to term and choosing adoption, and there’s people who regret carrying to term and becoming parents. Are those choices suddenly wrong too?
  • Part of being an adult in a free society is that we’re allowed to make - and live with - our own choices. It’s up to the person in question to weigh out options, make the choice they feel is best, and hopefully be happy and satisfied with the outcome. Sometimes we make the right choice and sometimes, in retrospect, we don’t. This doesn’t just apply to pregnancy, but to every decision in life, big or small. It’s infantilizing to tell people that their liberty and freedom has to be diminished in order to prevent them from making choices they might regret.

I’m pro-choice, which really means I’m pro-bodily autonomy. That means I support these things:

  • Not being forced to stay pregnant
  • Not being forced to have an abortion
  • Being able to get sterilized without hassle or shame
  • Not being forced to get sterilized
  • Affordable care for carrying a pregnancy to term
  • Respecting patients’ right to consent during childbirth
  • Access to affordable contraception
  • Comprehensive sex education
  • Not being forced to have sex without contraception
  • Freedom from all rape and sexual assault
  • Compassionate treatment of sexual assault victims and justice in the courts
  • Wearing whatever clothing you want without harassment
  • Access to affordable gender confirmation surgery and hormones for trans people
  • Ending infant circumcision and genital mutilation
  • Respecting patients’ right to consent to all medical treatment
  • Death with dignity for the terminally ill
  • Elimination of torture as an interrogation technique
  • Ending domestic violence and all other violent crime
  • Ending sex, organ, and surrogacy human trafficking
  • Sex workers legally working in safe, violence-free environments
  • Consent for all interactions involving your body

Your body, your choice.

Also, I don't devalue human life. I am as pro choice as it gets, but I also value life more than any pro lifer I have had the displeasure of meeting. In my experience pro choicers value life more than pro lifers do, because we value the lives of people already here, who can suffer.

That's all I've got to say.

"Preventing [women] from accessing safe abortion care, limiting the methods that decrease the abortion rate, and making it harder for [mothers] to survive and their children to thrive: Why do the people who support these policies get to call themselves “pro-life” again?" --–Jill Filipovic, “We Aren’t Afraid of Life, Sarah Palin”

I applaud you my friend this is my mindset in a post whoaaaa :O

EDIT: out of curiosity did you write this post here or for an assignment of some sort because it's very detailed and well written.
 
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I applaud you my friend this is my mindset in a post whoaaaa :O

EDIT: out of curiosity did you write this post here or for an assignment of some sort because it's very detailed and well written.

I put this stuff together pretty often. What's on there has already been saved to word docs on my computer from two years back, but for the convenience of this thread I organized it, coded it, and added on some more stuff.

Thanks for the compliment. :)
 
@Goshi o.o thanks for the documentary...

But seriously, you care THAT much to type up so much just about abortion? That's crazy.
 
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I logged back in here after months to give props to Goshi 'cause holy ****

Get bodied @pro-lifers
 
Despite that long post pointing out the facts, I am not changing my opinion on abortions. Even if they don't think an unborn fetus isn't considered a human, it's still a human to some, and not part of the woman's body either. It spends the first nine months developing in the woman's body, then once it's out, it's already viable, but still needs to develop (bone fusion, brain development etc.). I may see what you believe on the whole issue, and you may have a lot of evidence to back it up, but I still choose to believe that abortion is murder, taxpayer-funded abortions is government interference with religion, and that abortion rights should be limited. Whether or not I know more about the issue, I'm set in stone on my side.
 
Despite that long post pointing out the facts, I am not changing my opinion on abortions. Even if they don't think an unborn fetus isn't considered a human, it's still a human to some, and not part of the woman's body either. It spends the first nine months developing in the woman's body, then once it's out, it's already viable, but still needs to develop (bone fusion, brain development etc.). I may see what you believe on the whole issue, and you may have a lot of evidence to back it up, but I still choose to believe that abortion is murder, taxpayer-funded abortions is government interference with religion, and that abortion rights should be limited. Whether or not I know more about the issue, I'm set in stone on my side.

Same, I'm not letting a chapter book full of the history of abortion let my opinion drown.

:cool:
 
Same, I'm not letting a chapter book full of the history of abortion let my opinion drown.

:cool:

But pro-lifers should still read Goshi's post, to see more on why they think abortion should be legal. They can still be set in stone like I am, but they shouldn't run or hide from this.
 
@Goshi o.o thanks for the documentary...

But seriously, you care THAT much to type up so much just about abortion? That's crazy.

"How dare you care and take the time to type up an informative post about a topic that is used to shame girls + women and often puts their lives at stake" - some kid who can't bare the thought of saying "sex"
 
@Goshi o.o thanks for the documentary...

But seriously, you care THAT much to type up so much just about abortion? That's crazy.

No offense, but from that reply alone it kind of shows how little you recognize how this effects people.

But, to answer your question, yes. I do care very much.

I logged back in here after months to give props to Goshi 'cause holy ****

Get bodied @pro-lifers

:cool:
 
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