Quote:
Originally Posted by manny_santos
With respect to the pro-life/anti-abortion groups, a lot of the opposition to those groups on university campuses has come from an idea that people who hold those views "hate" women and just want to oppress them.
The trouble is, a lot of these groups today are comprised heavily of women. And having talked to some of them, I've found their intentions have nothing to do with hate or oppression. You can't convince the SJWs of that though; the popular notion of elderly male Knights of Columbus members protesting against abortion in the 1980s is still what they (JT included) think the anti-abortion movement is comprised of. Most of those men are long dead.
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The pro-choice/pro-life debate is one that I have not thought much about, but actually there are many things to consider and many points of view.
The orthodox stance is that pregnancy is a woman's health issue, therefore the choice must be left up to her. This is tempered only by the cut-off date whereby the foetus starts to be considered alive (a person) and abortions are only allowed if there is a very real danger to the mother. Since I'm no doctor, for the purposes of this argument I will assume that the demarcation between a foetus being pre-life and life is valid. The late term abortions in turn seem to be justified on utilitarian grounds, because the mother is a grown productive individual deemed more valuable than a "potential" person.
From a traditionalist point of view, abortions are seen as pre-empting the will and creation of God. This argument does not hold any merit in the world of reason. Otoh, I consider God to be a fabrication created by humans to serve a variety of critical purposes and the values attributed to God to have evolved and proven adaptive. This would suggest that if "God" forbids abortions, there must be a real adaptive reason for it. Imo, it's easy enough to guess what that might be. Anybody with a background in anthropology will tell you that society is nothing more than an organised reproductive scheme and rules tightly controlling reproduction are central to all traditional cultures. This is most likely so because if individuals in a traditional society didn't at least seem to be following the "rules", paternity would frequently come into question, male competition within society would go up and social cohesion would go out the window. The group would then be left open to conquest by a more cohesive group. Does this scenario still apply to todays society though? I think not because paternity tests are routine, suspicions can be put to rest for better or worse.
Should a potential father not have a say in the matter though? This is a tough one but his rights cannot trump hers as she actually assumes the risks of carrying the child. Maybe technology will soon provide the answer for men who want a child without a woman needing to assume much risk or responsibility.
Why kill a foetus when women could just take the pill or use contraception? Pills have side effects, condoms and other methods can fail and circumstances can change after a pregnancy was initially planned. Abortions should be available as an additional option. Perhaps they should not be provided for free, but I think the reason they are has a lot to do with paying for a procedure today which eliminates the need for ongoing social assistance tomorrow (but I digress).
The final issue I want to broach is the effect that widely available abortions have had on society as I suspect this is what's really behind arguments to ban them. Our society has changed dramatically in a short time. Even fifty years ago, virtually all of the risk of an unwanted pregnancy fell on women. The costs were steep indeed and women were accordingly cautious. Today, through legislation and technological change this has been largely reversed whereby a great deal/majority of the risk is assumed by men without them having any choice in the matter. The reprecussions of this fundamental shift will take a generation or two to fully reveal themselves and are today certainly not well understood from what I can tell. My suspicion is, laws will need to be tweaked to place a bit more of the burden of responsibility back onto women in order to reflect their power to exercise choice and reduce the temptation of entrapping men.
No, at least for now, I don't think abortions should go away.