I don't favor abortion because it is, largely, an avoidable medical procedure which, as all medical procedures, carries risks and expenses and uses up medical resources. I don't favor any number of preventable healthcare issues in the same way. I do favor the use of birth control for the same reasons I favor science-based, medically supervised vaccination. with the associated risks to that, it's better than the consequences of not using it. Few if any such comparisons will fit in every detail but I think that's one that is close.
I do favor abortion being legal, safe and readily available, as I do every other necessary medical procedure.
I have no idea if a zygote or an embryo or a fetus is a fully human life, there is certainly nothing like consensus on that. Though there is the possibility of that being true and abortion perhaps being the taking of a human life. But I also believe that the state's "right" to determine what happens in the body of any person is limited, that the right of a woman to choose to be or not be pregnant is not something that the state can be rationally or justly held to have an interest in that is superior to the right of women to make that decision for themselves. And they will make that decision for themselves as the long history of illegal abortion, which continues in places where it is banned proves. Short of the impossible to achieve world in which only wanted pregnancies which are safe throughout happen, the less than imperfect reality we really live in is what the law should be based in.
Where in the world did you ever come up with the idiotic idea that there was something liberalish or leftist about favoring abortion be legal? Plenty of conservatives have had abortions or encouraged women to have abortions - including that most unlikely hero of the anti-abortion faction, Donald Trump, apparently - many used to favor the legalization of abortion, a number still do. And there are actually liberals who oppose legal abortion. I don't agree with them because I think there are far more realistic measures that don't have the state impinging on the personal autonomy of women. The right of the state to regulate what happens in our bodies certainly stops at the skin, in many cases considerably before then.
You know, I pointed out that men like you and, for example, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, countless TV and radio babblers and ranters who believe they have a right to say something about abortion that they think matches or surpasses a woman's right to self-determination in regard to her own body have a responsibility to badger their fellow men to avoid unwanted pregnancy, unwanted by both parties, not just by the men involved. The anti-abortion movement, so full of men, should have always focused on the role that men play in abortion, being the cause of pregnancies that lead to abortions, not to mention sex that leads to STDs and so much else that is totally relevant but never focused on in the discussion.
You focus on women when you should be focused on irresponsible, selfish men. I doubt there are many women who would not rather avoid an unwanted or impossibly difficult or dangerous pregnancy if they could avoid it and the more fraught consequences of those, I have known many men who screwed around who weren't concerned about that at all.
I can think of lots, and lots of laws that could be passed that wouldn't impinge on men's' rights to self-determination of what happens inside THEIR OWN BODIES for months, if not a lifetime, that could discourage them from engaging in sexual irresponsibility that would probably help to cut down on the number of abortions, legal or illegal. Many of them with stiff economic penalties and possible legal penalties for having produced an unwanted pregnancy of which they try to avoid the consequences that rightly belong to them. You seem to be able to contemplate a wide range of such penalties for women who, unlike the men, are already burdened with the far more drastic results of such pregnancies, so you can hardly complain that I propose such penalties for the men involved.
Using the law to make abortion illegal isn't any kind of ban on abortion any more than prohibition was a ban on drinking and making pot illegal is a ban on pot use. Your position is in favor of the abortions which will inevitably happen will be illegal, dangerous and exploitation by criminals, organized and singly and hypocrisy all around. Just like it was in the good old days when it was not uncommon for hospitals to deal with the results of such "pro-life" abortions on what was a routine basis. The "pro-life" faction is actually in favor of making abortion illegal, exploitative, dangerous and deadly. Many very real women will end up very much dead if they get their way, history proves that far more certainly than it proves their claims about the status of a fetus or zygote.
You decry abortions of "convenience", there is no more widespread resort to convenience in this matter than among men who find it so convenient to not be the ones who have to face pregnancy in their own bodies and lives.
You bring up the use of abortion to avoid having children with health problems or the frivolously undesired biological traits - worldwide, ironically enough for your position - that of sex selective abortion when a male child is desired. There are certainly better ways to try to discourage abortions for such reasons than to use the lives of women who decide they need to have an abortion for that purpose. Funding government support for children and their families is one which I haven't noticed conservatives, like you, have favored. Not to mention medical care for women who are pregnant.
Not to mention comprehensive education in the use of contraception and making it freely available, avoiding other problems that come with the inevitability of people having sex, not to mention making such things as genetic counseling universally available, as well as healthcare in general.
Men who want to have a say in this should harangue men on the role they play in abortion, not women. There has never been an abortion that wasn't the result of a man having sex that could lead to pregnancy.
You started by claiming that pro-choice politics drove you from the left to the right, why doesn't the massive hypocrisy of the right on such issues not drive you out of it?
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