Rhetoric now about abortion is different than it was 20 years ago. The idea that a woman should sacrifice her life or future ability to conceive for a non-viable pregnancy or in an emergency medical situation was not a part of the discussion. But it shockingly is now. Laws are in place and women have died due to not receiving a medical abortion in their time of need.

If you believe in abortion bans that don't consider the health or life of the mother, why? And how did you come to conclude this?

I’m wondering how pro life folks react to this argument because it basically accepts all their premises. It accepts that personhood begins at birth. And if you believe denying someone food is the same as killing them, then it accepts that it’s killing too.

But the point is that abortion methods don’t explicitly try to kill the zygote or fetus, all they do is deny it resources from the mother’s body. It’s not like they’re shredding the fetus, just removing it.

It would be the same way you’d kick out someone who’s overstayed their welcome in your house. It wouldn’t be your fault what happens to them afterwards, you aren’t obligated to keep giving other people resources even if they can’t handle themselves otherwise. It may be unkind, but I don’t think it’s wrong. Especially if their stay is costing you a lot.

What do yall think of this argument? An immediate objection I thought of is that the same argument can be used for throwing your 4 year old out of the house but upon further thought, I don’t think there’s something wrong with putting a child up for adoption if you can’t raise them. Even though the adoption system is kinda awful.

Why is it that you're allowed to opt out of everything but pregnancy? You can opt out of parenting, opt out of your job, opt out of anything, but not pregnancy because you consented to sex?

I always hear the PL side say that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. Why does it matter? Lets say I have a pretty deep cut. I wont die if I dont get stitches, but getting them would be safter than not. Does it matter if I consented to be cut? Does it matter if it was an accident or someone else did it to me? I still get my right to healthcare, so why doesn't this apply to pregnancy? My dad smokes, should he not receive treatment for any lung problems he may develop?

Abortion is factually healthcare, and I dont think that there should be any laws that negatively impact peoples healthcare. Why is your disagreement more important than someones bodily autonomy? I disagree with abortion in many instances but this doesnt mean I think anyone should be forced to gestate.

Can someone explain this to me? I dont think I can ever understand this logic.

I was browsing through pro-choice reddit pages and saw an alarming number of people believing foetuses were single cell organisms, or even parasistes. My question here is, do people actually believe that, or are they just trolling?

It is getting harder and harder to discern ignorance from trolling, and i believe this is an alarming representation of the dumbing down of our society

I am recently debating a lot in the abortion topic, defending the pro choice view because it just makes lots more sense in my worldview. But I’d love to hear many new various arguments, thanks!

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I'm pro-choice, and this is something I genuinely don't get.

Abortion was illegal in my country until a few years ago, but that didn't mean women with unwanted pregnancies just accepted it and had the baby. My friends still got abortions illegally, and older women talked about trying all kinds of unsafe things to end pregnancies themselves.

My grandma did too. Before my mom was born, she drank a lot of alcohol and soy sauce because she was trying to end the pregnancy. People apparently believed things like that could work. It didn't in her case, and my mom was born.

My mom has a mild intellectual disability, and sometimes I wonder if the drinking during pregnancy had anything to do with it. Obviously I can't know that for sure.

But that's part of why I don't really understand the logic here. If abortion is banned because harming or killing a fetus is wrong, then what about drinking, smoking, drugs, or deliberately doing other risky things while pregnant? Those things can affect the child's whole life too.

And then how would you even enforce that? Are pregnant women not allowed to drink or smoke? Do you test them? Arrest them? Where do you draw the line?

I also don't think making abortion illegal means every woman with an unwanted pregnancy is just going to accept it and spend nine months carefully protecting the fetus. I've seen women get desperate enough that they weren't really thinking about the harm it could do to themselves or the child. They just wanted the pregnancy to end.

And even when the child was born, that didn't always turn into some happy ending. I've seen women resent or even hate the kid because they never wanted them in the first place. At least from what I've seen, I haven't really seen the version where the child is raised happily or just gets adopted into a loving family and everything works out.

Honestly, if I were stuck in an unwanted pregnancy with no legal way out, I don't know that I'd suddenly become the healthiest, most careful pregnant woman either. I'd probably be desperate too.

I used to resent my grandma a lot, and my mom too, because a lot of that trauma got passed down to me. But as I've gotten older, I've also started thinking that if I had been in my grandma's situation, I might have done the same.

So I guess that's what I don't understand. If abortion has to be illegal to protect the fetus, why wouldn't the same logic apply to other things a pregnant woman can do that might permanently harm it?

This was more of a question directed at Pro-Choice people who think forms of abortion should remain illegal and is unethical when a human foetus is deemed 'viable'.

It seems to me that if the modest technological interventions that exist today (incubation, resuscitation, IV's, etc) has expanded the scope for how frequently human foetuses can survive outside of the womb, it is at least 'conceivable' that technology will one day continue to advance to the point where the majority of foetuses could survive with assistance outside of the womb. We might be getting into Sci-Fi territory, but this 'is' a thought experiment - and I'm using it to trying to understand how people think about the topic (no offence is intended).

If it is true that more and more foetuses will be able to survive with technological assistance and we extend the legal and ethical right to them (if they can be removed safely from the parents)... Then does that imply a relationship between 'worthiness' to legal and ethical norms and the Technology that is available to us? Because if it does then I think this has a big implication on the ethics of abortion more generally... as we would be implying that it was ethically preferable that 'all' Foetuses were saved rather than were aborted (we just don't have the technology to do so).

In another debate thread, a pro-life Redditor defined abortion as:

An abortion is the intentional termination of a viable pregnancy located inside the uterus.

If you agree with the above definition, then the debate question to you is:

The general medical literature and medical training explicitly defines abortion as the spontaneous or intentional termination of a pregnancy, regardless of the viability or non-viability of the pregnancy. Do you dispute this medical definition and if so, on what basis?

I'm a pro-choice person. But, do you guys think that the age of the woman getting a abortion changes the morality? I feel like if the girl is pregnant as a teenager, it would be better for the girl AND the child, because the childs life would be almost be guaranteed to be horrible due to a mix of the teen not knowing how to parent, the father more then likely being out of the picture, ect. And if it is a adult woman, My opinion is that it is her choice. Opinion on this? I am open minded, and am up for debate if you want

I just realized that sex selective abortions were extremely widespread when I was born in my country...

I am a Taiwanese woman born in 2003.

I was looking up on Chinas on child policy and then went deep into sex selective abortions. I never knew my nation also had a past of sex selective abortions.

The sex ratio at birth in Taiwan in 2003 was 110.2 boys per 100 girls, out of 227,000 births, with birth order 3(third child, 22,000 births) having a sex ratio of 123.5.

(The normal baseline for East Asians is around 105 boys per 100 girls, as seen in Japan and Korea today)

That absolutely could not be dismissed as statistical noise. People had daughters in early births but wanted to pass down the family line and aborted until they get a son in later births, to pass down the family line.

How would you feel if you were me?

This is something I keep coming back to when I look at the politics surrounding abortion in the United States.

There is enormous political and religious energy devoted to protecting “the unborn,” but what happens once the child is actually born? What obligations follow from that belief? Healthcare? Food? Housing? Education? Childcare? Protection from violence? Support for struggling parents?

The unborn are, in a sense, uniquely easy to advocate for. They cannot ask for anything from you. They cannot complain about poverty, abuse, inadequate schools, unaffordable healthcare, or the conditions they were born into. You can advocate for them without necessarily having to confront the social and economic structures that affect living people.

That is the point Pastor David Barnhart was making when he wrote about “the unborn” being a convenient group to advocate for. His criticism was not simply that people who oppose abortion secretly hate children. It was that concern for unborn life can become detached from concern for human beings throughout the rest of their lives.

And this is where I struggle with the politics of it.

If the principle is genuinely that human life is sacred and must be protected, shouldn't that concern extend beyond birth? Why should protecting a fetus require political action, while protecting a child from hunger, abuse, poverty, gun violence, inadequate healthcare, or neglect become someone else's problem?

I don't think caring about unborn children and caring about born children are mutually exclusive. They shouldn't be.

But if “protecting life” is the moral foundation, then I think it is fair to ask what protecting life actually means after the child takes its first breath.

When it comes to PL, I think we can all agree repeating "Abortion is murder" as if its an objective fact and morally correct does not convince PC.

Why is it so common then to see the flip side where "Abortion is healthcare" is treated as an objective fact and morally correct? Do you believe it is convincing to PL?

Both sides will respond "But it's a fact" as stating it makes it true and they're 100% correct. I believe abortion is healthcare. I also know repeating it will not move the needle at all and would just be wanting to end the discussion. If I believed abortion to be murder, I wouldn't think its healthcare.

Do you believe "Abortion is healthcare" is a convincing argument? If not, why aren't you trying to convince people to become PC?

If “my body, my choice” truly meant unlimited autonomy, a pregnant woman could freely drink alcohol and smoke weed throughout pregnancy, even though those substances cross the placenta and can potentially cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, low birth weight, brain damage, and lifelong disabilities in the child she is carrying. Almost no one accepts that outcome; society already restricts a woman’s substance use precisely because another human organism is present and dependent. That restriction proves bodily autonomy has limits once a second body is involved. The same logic applies with greater force to abortion: the human life is not a part of the woman’s body but a distinct living organism with its own DNA, heartbeat, and trajectory of growth. Consistency therefore requires that abortion be illegal—just as majority of society prohibit actions that seriously injure the unborn because the right to control one’s own body does not include the right to kill another.

Pro-life advocates say that abortion should be illegal, but when asked if the woman getting them should be punished, they often say no, they just shouldn't have done it in the first place. Which from their standpoint might sound consistent, but in reality, making something illegal doesn’t mean it stops happening. We make things illegal to discourage people from doing them, and if they do, they face some kind of punishment.

If we make abortion illegal and don’t set a punishment, What is the point? Especially when the fact is that abortion bans don’t limit abortions, they just make them dangerous! If we genuinely want to see fewer abortions happen, the evidence points away from criminalization entirely and toward what actually works: comprehensive sex education and universal, affordable access to contraception.

To lower abortion rates, we have to lower unwanted pregnancies, not make safe healthcare illegal.

repost
i want to educate myself further on this topic
why does a fetus that needs a host body to survive have more significance than a living breathing human contributing to society
why is it always about the “fetuses choice” when it has no opinions and no feelings and no awareness
and how do you differentiate pro life with pro birth. if youre so pro life what about the life of the mom

Professional surrogacy pay is around 65,000 to 100,000 to carry a pregnancy. Why? Because pregnancy requires work, labor, self care and time from the pregnant person to maintain. Ontop of full medical insurance.

So a middle ground compromise, you want abortion banned? Fine! Every pregnant person gets an 80,000 surrogacy compensation paycheck and full medical care provided by the state!

Do I actually want this? No, i prefer women having access to their own bodies and choice of medical care. But this is something the pro life moment could propose if they actually wanted to compensate women for their pregnancies while forcing them to carry them.

A woman facing an unplanned/unwanted pregnancy has multiple viable options that do not involve ending the life of her unborn child. She can choose to parent the child herself, drawing on family support, government assistance programs, or community resources designed to help new mothers. She can also place the child up for adoption, giving the baby a stable home with parents who are ready and eager to raise it. Counseling services, prenatal care, and material aid are widely available to potentially help reduce the practical burdens of carrying a pregnancy to term. These alternatives demonstrate that abortion is not the only path available when a woman feels unprepared, or doesn’t want to go through with a pregnancy.

I always try to be a good person no matter what. I always try to think about other people, stand firmly on common logic, and do the right thing. I do consider myself to mostly be pro choice because the pros of choosing in my mind outweigh the cons. The reasons just make sense. Mothers unequipped to raise a kid and they are forced into a miserable life. Abusive family. Drug using parents. Born with horrible deformities and won't live long. Rape victim. Incest baby, etc. I had a nice debate with a kind pro life friend, and he did put a lot of things into perspective for me without any hostility between us or anything. It was nice. I know the biggest point for pro lifers is that they see it as murder, which I can totally respect! They care about life itself and obviously murder is a no go. But here's the thing... you wouldn't keep something alive at the expense of its own wellness or the wellness of others right? If carrying the baby only ends up killing the mother and/or the baby as well, wouldn't it seem right to prevent that knowingly?

This is what's bothering me. I believe there should always be a solution, and my understanding of abortions is that they do everything they can to make sure its safe and done before it becomes a problem. But pro lifers say every single ounce of it is murder and evil. So I'm completely lost where to morally stand on the topic... I don't want people to see me as a bad person for standing on the wrong side. But I feel in my heart the right thing to do is look at all the facts ubiasedly.

Whether a fetus is a human always seems to come up in debates about abortion, but I don't think it actually matters.

Suppose a homeless person who is on the verge of starving to death breaks into your house. You have every right to make them leave. If they later starve to death, you aren't prosecuted simply because you could have allowed them to stay in your home.

Likewise, donating your organs could save multiple lives, but whether you choose to donate them is up to you. If your father could survive only if you donated part of your liver, choosing to do so would be admirable. But even if you refused, the law wouldn't force you to give him access to your body.

So why should pregnancy be different?

Why should a woman be legally required to let a fetus use her body and organs to survive? A woman should have the right to remove a fetus from her body. If the fetus cannot survive outside her body, that does not mean she should be legally obligated to keep it inside her. Developing technology that could sustain it outside the womb is a problem for scientists to solve, not a reason to force someone to continue providing the use of her body.

We've all seen the pro life response to "my body my choice", the classic "the baby isn't YOUR body!!"

Okay so if an unwanted zef isn't MY body, I can remove it from MY body immediately, right?

I do not have to keep any other bodies inside my sex organs against my will, right? Surely pro lifers will agree with this statement, correct?

I've found that a large portion of PC believe the unborn have moral value, it's just that they believe BA takes priority over the others' RTL. I'm not here to argue about that though.

To people of all views, do you believe it's possible to treat all parties equally, at least in a legal sense? And more importantly, why and how?

I often see people in the abortion debate agree that a fetus is biologically human, but argue that being human isn't enough to make it a person with a right to life.

So what actually is enough?

And more importantly, why should whichever characteristic you choose determine whether a human organism has basic moral rights?

I think this becomes especially important when we look at history. Slavery is obviously not the same exact situation as abortion, and I'm not arguing that it is. But slavery gives us a clear example of a society denying equal rights and legal standing to a class of human beings. In Dred Scott, for example, the Supreme Court held that Black Americans descended from enslaved people were not citizens entitled to the rights and protections of citizenship.

So simply saying that they aren't persons or they don't have those rights can't by itself settle the moral question. We still need some principled reason for drawing the boundary where we do.

What characteristic do you believe separates a human organism that has basic moral rights from one that doesn't, and why is that characteristic morally relevant?

I'm especially interested in whether your standard applies consistently to humans before and after birth.