What do you think about abortion

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I remain conflicted about abortion.
I was raised catholic, and was brought up believing it was a mortal sin; i.e. anyone involved would burn in hell for eternity.
I had friends of the family that were heavily involved with right to life, and who presumably had protested outside clinics.
When my then girlfriend, now ex wife fell pregnant (she has been using birth control pills on and off, and I had not kept up with whether we were safe or not, and she had been complacent - ironic considering she had been a nurse, and had studied midwifery), she blamed me and said that I had done it to her, and that she would need to have an abortion.
We had moved interstate from our home state to follow her career, and clearly career was more important to her than the life of the child inside her.

She had the abortion, I went with her to the clinic.
I had no say in it, and felt I had to be by her side as I should show loyalty and compassion.
For years I felt anxious and guilt that I had caused my girlfriend to fall pregnant and have an abortion, that I was responsible, and the guilt of it ate away at my soul, mind, existence or whatever.

Again out of loyalty, I felt I had to stay with her, marry her and have a child together, however once we had a child, she turned cold towards me, and the marriage was over before my child reached 1 1/2 years of age.
I had a terrible bout of depression that almost lead to my suicide; all contributed to by the conflict between us that began with that abortion.

Since this time I have softened in my understanding and acceptance of abortion; though only after a great deal of therapy and soul searching.
It should be available, should be safe, and should be legal.
What it should not be is an alternative to contraception, an excuse to not have a child for those that have the means and maturity to have a child, and should be considered only when other alternatives are not appropriate, or in the case of someone being pregnant due to rape.

Clearly counselling must be compulsory, as the burden of guilt and memory will haunt both the would be mother and father the rest of their lives.
Moreover, it should be compulsory in the case of couples in stable relationships, that the would be father of the child also attend counselling, with as well as separate to the would be mother, so that there is nothing left unsaid or unaccounted for before the decision is made and the action taken.
Had I been able to have counselling at the time my life would have been much easier.

Anything short of this is too extreme, abortion shouldn't be the easy option, but women who make this choice should not have to face the gauntlet of Christian right to lifers that try to ambush them as they go to the clinic to take this difficult and life changing step.

Wrt. 'the woman chose to have sex' argument, we humans choose risky behavior all the time. Every time we get into a car, we're risking a horrible, mangled death or dismemberment. Should we forbid medical interventions for anyone who 'chose' the cause of their injury? Should we disallow paramedics from picking up motorcycle accident victims from the side of the road, because they chose an even riskier mode of travel than average?

If a parent chooses to drive with their child in the car, should the parent be forced by the state to donate a chunk of liver, or a kidney, or a lung, to the child if a vehicle accident destroys the functioning of one of the child's organs?

We sort of already do this, though. In most jurisdictions I'm aware of, we're REQUIRED to purchase auto insurance. At least in my state if you don't show proof of insurance on demand by state or local police, you get fined as much as $1000. The insurance isn't really there to protect people who drive recklessly. It's there to protect those who minimize their risk on the road, obey the law, and are not at fault when those who choose to disregard the law get behind the wheel.

The unborn are in the unfortunate position of being unable to make choices and are at the mercy of those who do. Motorcycle accident victims at least get picked up from the side of the road by paramedics and get pieced back together at a hospital. Whether motorcycle accident victims are at fault or not, they at least have a fighting chance and they're required to have insurance that will pick up the tab or sue the at-fault party's insurance or the party himself. Refusal to get insurance after fines, or refusal to pay fines result in getting your license taken away. The unborn don't even get that advantage.

Perhaps by the logic in your reckless driver analogy we should require special licenses for people to have sex with insurance coverage REQUIRED against unwanted pregnancy. Victims would have to PROVE rape (easily done) and periodically PROVE compliance with contraceptives and other preventative measures in order to make claims against unwanted pregnancy. And in the case of rape, insurance companies would have the duty to go after the rapist to collect damages, and the state could charge the rapist with manslaughter if rape results in an abortion.


Western justice systems implement a modern-day version of lex talionis, or "eye for an eye." The Biblical principles upon which our system is based sets a valuation on the injury, whereas other, perhaps more common systems of justice in the ancient world weren't nearly that merciful. We may not be able to actually replace a "chunk of liver" et al, but at the very least we try to pay for it and hope we get enough in medical assistance to restore function at least to the point organs function well enough for the victim to survive and eventually heal over time--which is a lot better than a strict, literal interpretation of "eye for an eye" in which a person unwittingly caused injury and therefore must suffer the same injury. Bad enough that an accident caused injury that reduces the function of one person in society. It doesn't follow that we have to add to the number of victims by taking out another capable, functioning human being.

On the other hand, no one can set a price on a human life. That's why I think abortion should be treated the same as murder. It meets a virtually identical definition (willful termination of life for no good reason). Note that not all forms of homicide meet a legal definition of prosecutable crimes, since it is possible to willingly kill for certain acceptable reasons. It's the relative rarity of "acceptable reasons" for abortion that is in view here.

Interesting how scraped knees and convicted murderers have more regard than the unborn. Even a convicted murderer on death row has in many cases a lengthy, mandatory appeals process that keeps them out of the chamber for years, even decades sometimes before the surviving victims of their crimes get justice. The unborn don't get advocates to appeal on their behalf other than pro-lifers, and they have about as much realistic standing to impose change as death penalty opponents.

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Erm, no it isn't? Rape is incredibly hard to prove because it often comes down to one person's word against another.

Sure we "can". By pushing chickens into gigantic factories, we managed that there can live much more chickens per square meter.

The thing is, if its still worth living. Right now in western europe lifestyle is ok, but space is already too less to have a good life quality. Its simply full of people and its simply sucks. I dont care if we would be technical able to press double the people in here, and they all would be able to live by theory, when even now the quality of living is already s**t due too to much people. I´d love it land would get cheaper again (which it isnt because of so many people having the same need) and I could buy myself my own forest, to have a place without meeting someone.

I dont care what earth is technical capable. There is no use to double the population, when they have to live a miserable life like factory chickens. I really dont get it, why politicians around here are always crying because of our birthrates decreasing: Thats real good news! More space for living quality.

Convicted murderers get more consideration than embryos because murderers have human rights. They are living, conscious beings and deserve to be treated with a degree of dignity. On the other hand, a foetus is not conscious. It is not comparable to a human and so destroying it is not comparable with murder, and it does not have human rights. If we were to treat foetuses as if they were humans, then we would need to first extend human rights to other conscious beings like pigs, dogs and chimpanzees- it would be ludicrous and totally misplaced to intrinsically protect clumps of cells ahead of conscious beings.

Erm, yes it is?

Actually, I take no issue with he-said/she-said when it comes to rape. It's one of the few ways women can exercise extraordinary power over men in a historically male-dominated society.

In order to prove rape, all a woman would have to do is document the incident. I mean, think about it...a man would be taking the same risk getting accused and convicted of rape by having unprotected sex with her as a woman would be in engaging in risky sex and becoming pregnant. It all evens out in the end. The woman goes to the hospital where evidence is collected/documented. Police are called, a suspect is named, he goes to court. Bada bing. Case closed.

Now, of course, the woman COULD have consented and lied about it and still no witnesses were around to attest to it. So that brings up the question of what the man was even doing there in the first place, isolating the woman so that had she needed help she couldn't have screamed to let anyone know a crime was committed. Of course, you could say a man could get away with drugging a woman so that she wouldn't even have known something wrong happened, but anyone who passes out from drugs could have blood tests to show drugs had been in her system without her knowledge. Then it's just a matter of narrowing down the number of suspects.

Any smart man knows the way around this, just like avoiding pregnancy, is to just not have sex. End of story. So even if a false accusation is made, there's no evidence to collect because A CRIME WAS NEVER COMMITTED. The only people who have any business having sex are people who can accept the risks and are prepared for the possibility of children resulting from it.

Which is why I think not only education/prevention strategies are in order (which we already have), but also requiring licensing for procreation. If only we had something like that...

Oh, wait...we do. We just don't use it for that purpose. It's called marriage. An agreement between two people to pool resources and share everything, including responsibility for any children that may result from the union. Could we require blood tests/mouth swabs to screen for pre-existing STDs and commonly known genetic predispositions that might show up in our progeny? You bet! My wife and I had to do that. Pre-marriage counseling? OK, our local chancery didn't require that, but our pastor did, the idea being to help us make sure our affairs were in order and that we could avoid many of the pitfalls young marrieds fall into. So we were straight on our finances, individual goals, children and how we plan to raise/care for them, in-laws, intimacy, and a number of other things. We're not rich at all...below the poverty line, actually. It has nothing to do with that, just everything to do with being on the same page as a couple. So having children won't really be an issue we have to worry about...not even in terms of money, because you don't get penalized by the rest of the society for having kids and being poor. A well-thought-out plan for marriage eliminates a lot of the issues surrounding children or planning for children. Rape isn't really an issue because if you trust someone enough to marry him or her, then you don't have to worry about sex being non-consentual...because the woman will be with a man who can be patient and wait for her consent and not be demanding, and the man will be with a woman he can trust not to make false allegations. If you can't handle the terms of the contract, don't get married. If you can't handle the prospect of having kids or the possibility someone might make false allegations, DON'T HAVE SEX!! !

But rape being easily proven...we're not talking about every woman on the planet getting raped on a regular basis and getting pregnant every single time. It is the relative rarity of that happening in exactly that way that should be in view. Not every woman who gets raped gets pregnant, and not every woman even gets raped. That would discourage the incidence of there even being justified abortions to be performed. Of course, if laws were tougher on the men doing stupid things like that, that might add an extra deterrent to the layer.

If it was up to me, every murderer and rapist would get killed.

... However, I don't trust any legal system in any country to be 100% all of the time.

Just a single person killed unjustly. Just one, would be too much for my conscience. Hence why I cannot endorse the death penalty.

I dunno.

I would dare to speculate that maybe, MAYBE, women don't plan to get raped? So I guess that women would have to document every moment of their lives to make sure that just in case they are raped. They would have document to prove that it was rape. Sounds very practical.

You are missing a small detail, and it is that plenty of times you are raped by someone you know. And reporting the rape (even with proof) is emotionally taxing and risky. But any delay on this decision would make an abortion more risky, which is bad.

Another thing is that, we don't live in a perfect world. Being a rape victim still puts the judgment of society on you almost as much (if not more) as on the rapist. Check no further than Staneunbelle.

You also should think about the increasing rates of rape with knockout medication. As long as a condome is used, a rape can only be proofed when the criminal is brutal too. In any other case, the hospital can only proof that there had been a sexual activity. Specially when the woman is shocked and mentally weird the first day, so that knockout medication decrease pretty fast in a persons blood, I think after 24 hours you cant proof it anymore. Additional there will be woman who will try to wipe it out of memory, get rid of it as fast as possible so they are no longer forced to think about it. When 4 weeks later menstruation isnt coming, there can be no evidence found.

The big thing in your theory you forget: As it is right now done in countries that still forbid abortion - if its forbidden, then you simply go to an illegal doctor. All your theory, doesnt prevent any abortion, it only prevents the legal abortion. That is no theory but simply fact and reality.

Convicted murderers get more consideration than Alzheimer's patients because murderers have human rights. They are living, conscious beings and deserve to be treated with a degree of dignity. On the other hand, an Alzheimer's patient is not conscious. It is not comparable to a human and so destroying it is not comparable with murder, and it does not have human rights. If we were to treat Alzheimer's patients as if they were humans, then we would need to first extend human rights to other conscious beings like pigs, dogs and chimpanzees- it would be ludicrous and totally misplaced to intrinsically protect clumps of cells ahead of conscious beings.

My "theory," if you can call it that, doesn't seek to prevent abortion. It only seeks to limit it.

Sorry, but screw your head on. We have these ideas called "right to a fair trial", "right to be presumed innocent", and so forth. You have said you don't like abortion, but think it can be justified in the case of rape, so you're throwing our justice system out the window?

See above. I don't think "going to prison for a crime you didn't commit" is comparable to "becoming pregnant".


People usually have sex in private, so it should not be unusual for there to be no witnesses. But just because nobody knows you're having sex doesn't mean you can't get the attention of neighbours or flatmates (it depends on your housing arrangements, of course).



The woman might not discover that she's pregnant for many months, at which point the drugs may well have left her system.

In any case, I think you may not have thought about how hard "narrowing down the suspects" could be.


The smart way around it would be to avoid making ill advised suggestions that make little sense.


Or those who are prepared to have an abortion if their contraceptives fail.

One minute you want abortion to be illegal in most cases, the next you want people to have a license to procreate?

Yeah, that isn't going to work.


To be honest, I only persisted this far because I was under the impression that you were female (due to your username).

Marriage is not a "license to procreate", because marriages are issued to infertile people, the elderly, and homosexuals. They remain valid if a couple stops having sex, or one of them becomes infertile.

Genetic testing will result in one of two things:

1) Many (human) embryos being destroyed because they have a genetic disorder
2) Large swathes of people not being allowed to reproduce with their partner of choice, or at all. This would be a severe restriction of liberty and would cause a great deal of unhappiness.


Marital rape is still a crime. Just because someone is generally willing to have sex with someone doesn't mean they are always willing.

And? Is abortion limited, when the absolute number of abortions stays the same, and only the number of illegal and legal abortion are changing?

Not necessary. Just ONE moment of their lives. You don't have to plan on being raped in order to respond to being raped after the fact.


Procedures already exist to do that in a hospital setting.


Irrelevant.


Reporting any crime is emotionally taxing and risky. But if we lived in a world in which abortion had to be justified, which in my opinion should be the case every time, taking one day out of your schedule to report a serious crime at the first opportunity is something a woman couldn't afford not to do. At the very least a Plan B contraceptive could be given and she could also have followups in the next several weeks to see whether pregnancy had resulted and to detect transmission of a STD. It's in a woman's best interest to report it.


Agreed. Which means all women would need to be aware of how important it is to report the crime and go through the process as quickly as possible.


Depends on the society. In some areas, having an abortion puts you at greater judgment of society than being a rape victim, not to mention you might be committing the argumentum ad populum fallacy.