Indeed yes.
And those who want to make abortion illegal need to make sure that women who get abortions are locked away in prisons for as long as murderers are because if abortion is murder then the punishment must be the same.
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Unbreaking American Hearts
- Thread starter ZooGirl02
- Start date
And those who want to make abortion illegal need to make sure that women who get abortions are locked away in prisons for as long as murderers are because if abortion is murder then the punishment must be the same.
So much this. Abortions are hardly desirable in and of themselves, even for those who insist on them as a right.
Thank you. But the world is full of heartbreak. I think this is a big part of why abortion is such a peculiarly volatile subject.
Tom
Well said. It's a very emotional topic. I don't really like to discuss it. I have my own sad stories about it.
I think murder is a bad word to use in the context of abortion debate because it is just too vague.
But here is a story. I can't verify it, it was posted on another forum years ago. Mary was arguing for expanded availability of late term abortion.
Mary was living with a great guy. He was funny, smart, rich, and faithful. But he wasn't interested in getting married, ever. Apparently his parents ugly divorce soured him on the whole thing.
Mary figured that if she got pregnant he would do the "right thing'. He was such a good guy. So she stopped using her birth control, without telling him. In a couple of months she was pregnant. He was thrilled at the prospect of being a daddy. He could well afford to take excellent care of his child. But he didn't change his mind about getting hitched. She tried everything to change his mind, for months. But no dice, by the time she gave up she had to go to another state to get the abortion.
She didn't want the baby if s/he didn't get her the ring and security, which is what she really wanted.
Personally I think that one was totally murder, although it was perfectly legal.
Tom
Alceste
Vagabond
Those are sad stories. I'm sorry for your friend and family. It is true that the closer a family gets to the delivery date, the harder a miscarriage hits them - they have started picking out names, bought some onesies, painted the nursery, etc. Everyone has a real sense of the imminent arrival of someone they can't wait to meet.
But the huge majority of miscarriages and abortions occur in the first trimester. When my friend's pregnancy recently failed that early, she was sad and we were all pretty sympathetic. Nobody grieved, though, because nobody was lost. Pretty much everybody advised her to keep trying.
That's quite different than someone who has lost a born child, or lost something they feel is a real person they can't wait to meet. Can you imagine walking up to a woman who just lost a born child and saying "Shucks, that's too bad, just keep trying! It'll work out sooner or later!"
You wouldn't say that, would you? I trust we would understand that the family would need time to grieve, and that having another child can never fill the hole left by the born child who died.
Not so with an embryo in early pregnancy. We know it isn't a person because we don't react in the same way when an embryo fails to thrive as we do when people die.
My cousin had miscarriages and no one acted like that. She certainly did grieve over it.
Some people don't care much when someone of any age dies. One of my uncle's died and I wasn't all torn up about it. Was he not a person?
Come on, Alceste. That's not a good argument. It's still an individual life that has been lost forever. We'll never know who that person could've been and they will never exist again.
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Alceste
Vagabond
Yeah, it is a good argument. You're just operating under a different set of assumptions about how people in general tend to react to miscarriages, or under a different definition of "grieving".
From what I've seen, the sadness people feel about first trimester miscarriages - particularly if they actually wanted a child - is similar to how we feel when a pet dies. It is not at all similar to how people feel when their child dies. We're talking about a few days or weeks of feeling kind of blue vs. totally crippling, incapacitating emotional agony that goes on for years.
That's because the child that dies is a living, breathing, unique person they've actually met and fallen in love with. A fertilized egg is only their idea of a possible future person, and when it miscarries that idea of a future person doesn't "die" - they never existed, except as a little bundle of unique DNA.
Dirty Penguin
Master Of Ceremony
But isn't that already the case?...Isn't abortion trending downward..?
I don't know. Is it?
Call me nuanced if you must, but is a downwards trend in abortion a good thing if it means more irresponsible people are just having the babies?
Prude Tom
Not only is the abortion rate declining, but the teenage birth rate is also.
Trends in Teen Pregnancy and Childbearing - The Office of Adolescent Health
I was born and raised Catholic. I graduated from 12years of Catholic education firmly convinced that the only important issue in the abortion debate was the woman's right to choose.
Then we got pregnant. I was 20, she was 19. She'd always been regular as a clock, so at first we just thought it was unusual. But after a week or so, not so much. What should we do? Get married? Drop out of school and get a job? Get an abortion? How do we deal with our very conservative families? By 6 weeks we knew we had to pick something and do it. But we weren't much closer to a decision.
Then she had a violent period. We both knew what had happened. God, if there is one, aborted our baby. For better or worse, the decision was out of our hands.
For weeks and months afterwards I thought about this. I could not rationally escape the truth, what I had wanted was for my child to be dead. I knew that s/he was mine, I had no question about that. But I didn't want to deal with the reality of the choices I had made. That was not just a clump of cells, that was my kid. It was a new human being that had a right to a healthy childhood. Realizing the truth of the situation made me (as a20 yo) rather a hardcore antiabortionist, which the Catholic Church never managed to do. I've seen a lot since then, and have developed much more nuanced views on the subject. Some abortions are absolutely necessary. But some are the attempt to unchoose a choice already made, at the expense of a human being.
That's why I am all about people exercising choice before they are parents, after that they have chosen some responsibility.
Tom
Then we got pregnant. I was 20, she was 19. She'd always been regular as a clock, so at first we just thought it was unusual. But after a week or so, not so much. What should we do? Get married? Drop out of school and get a job? Get an abortion? How do we deal with our very conservative families? By 6 weeks we knew we had to pick something and do it. But we weren't much closer to a decision.
Then she had a violent period. We both knew what had happened. God, if there is one, aborted our baby. For better or worse, the decision was out of our hands.
For weeks and months afterwards I thought about this. I could not rationally escape the truth, what I had wanted was for my child to be dead. I knew that s/he was mine, I had no question about that. But I didn't want to deal with the reality of the choices I had made. That was not just a clump of cells, that was my kid. It was a new human being that had a right to a healthy childhood. Realizing the truth of the situation made me (as a20 yo) rather a hardcore antiabortionist, which the Catholic Church never managed to do. I've seen a lot since then, and have developed much more nuanced views on the subject. Some abortions are absolutely necessary. But some are the attempt to unchoose a choice already made, at the expense of a human being.
That's why I am all about people exercising choice before they are parents, after that they have chosen some responsibility.
Tom
Alceste
Vagabond
Was it a boy or a girl? Children are almost always one or the other.
Don't know. At 4 weeks it's tough to tell, especially when you are still considering "the options", not rejoicing.
But you are right. My child was either a boy or a girl, not an "it".
Tom
Alceste
Vagabond
Actually, at 4 to 6 weeks, it wasn't. Gender can not be identified in a developing fetus until about 16 weeks. Before that a fetus is neither.
I was in the same situation as you were a couple decades ago, and I didn't want to start a family either. I opted not to leave such am important decision to chance.
I terminated the pregnancy with an injection at about 5-8 weeks. I can assure you, and your old girlfriend would also be able to do so, that when the "heavy period" arrived (the one God gave your girlfriend and my doctor gave me) there was nothing anybody would ever think of calling a "child" in the mix.
I don't want to get macabre with these graphics, but I think it's important to distinguish between a "child" and a "potential future child" in order to approach this subject reasonably.
I try to live in the present, and attempt to perceive things as they are. Not as they may become, for better or worse.
Actually, at conception s/he had a gender. Hard to tell which, but that's just because of our human limitations.
That was my child. Whatever the gender, from the minute of conception that child was my progeny. A unique human being, on the chancy trajectory of life.
I understand that chanciness. What I oppose is parents trying to unchoose.
Tom
That was my child. Whatever the gender, from the minute of conception that child was my progeny. A unique human being, on the chancy trajectory of life.
I understand that chanciness. What I oppose is parents trying to unchoose.
Tom
Alceste
Vagabond
If your girlfriend's miscarriage looked anything like mine, it wasn't a "child." It was a first trimester miscarriage. I didn't see anything in the mess that was distinguishable from anything else. Like, for example, a body. And I was looking.
We never chose to start a family at 19. We had a birth control failure. We didn't "unchoose" a pregnancy, we simply continued to choose not to start a family at 19. Quite a sensible decision, IMO, and one I would not hesitate to recommend to anybody else in our position.
Yes...