Alex’s assertions of conservative hypocrisy on this issue sounds exactly like the pro-abortion indoctrination I got in undergrad and grad school. However, it doesn’t exactly hold water. In every successful abortion, and unique human being dies. As he said yesterday, it IS murder.
While I sit in an uncomfortable position of supporting early abortion rights, so the mother can have bodily autonomy, after the first 8-12 weeks, the choice to abortion is either because the mother doesn’t care enough about her own body to care if she’s carrying another life, or because mom doesn’t like diagnostics test results, which are often wrong, showing the child’s body is flawed.
I increasingly find myself questioning even early abortion. The “pro-choice” crew so often treats children like objects for manipulation, an annoyance, or worse. That’s terrifying.
I am also concerned that those fighting for abortion are often the same group that screams about the “climate change emergency,” advocates openly for child sterilization and genital mutilation, claims that children are community property, and promotes the idea that government and/ or corporations should get input on private medical decisions. As “safe, rare, and early” has given way to casual aborting of 2nd and even 3rd trimester human beings, I fear this crowd is but a small step away from forced abortions for “climate change” or “equity.”
Ultimately, because this was decided by courts and not more reasonable legislatures, we may be left with the choice between very limited abortion rights and legalization of infanticide (note CA extending the definition of allowable abortions beyond birth). I will choose the side of life. My young daughter can overcome having an unplanned and even unwanted child. Our society cannot survive the dismissive, indifferent, and out right cruel attitude the “pro-choice/ pro-abortion” crowd holds towards children, and other human beings generally.
Those who believes humans are nothing more than a disposable choice 6 months into life seem often to hold the belief that 6 year olds are community property with little regard for overtly and cruelly damaging them (note Covid), and increasingly 60 year olds who disagree with them should be dumped from participating in society.
If human life is disposable with no value at 4 or 5 or 6 month into life, at what point does that human being have value?
The individual human life has no value to leftist ideologues. If they don’t kill them in the womb, they kill their souls in childhood using the public education system.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your comments and I can see you working out philosophical weakness in your current position allowing for abortion up to 6-8 weeks.
Having travelled this same path I envision you eventually concluding that no abortion should be legal for all of the reasons you mentioned.
If you would like a resource to further explore this issue I highly recommend “Persuasive Pro-Life” by Trent Horn.
If you aren’t a big reader Trent also has many debates and podcasts in the issue. Just search his name and abortion or pro-life on Google and various apps and you will get results.
FYI, he is Catholic but his abortion arguments are not premised on anything to do with the Church.
Thank you for the reference. My husband and kids are Catholic, and we send them to a top conservative Christian school...... while I am not excessively religious, I have found more faith in the pandemic, and grown to appreciate the truth and foresight in Christianity.
My arguments sound more secular, because to some extent they are. Religion is where I find my own personal moral compass, but I need more than my personal moral compass to determine my political stance and morality to impose on others.
For instance, I believe in the Christian definition of marriage personally, but I have always support gay marriage in the eyes of the state as basic fairness because homosexuality, unlike gender delusions, is actually real and has always existed. Pedophilia has always existed too, but necessitates harming innocent children, so clearly existence alone is not a moral justification.
I’m not sure where I will end up. I am adamant about bodily autonomy, and see this as an incredible nuanced and complicated issue. I want some early choice, but I’m tired of the justifications that insinuate MONTHS are needed to assert bodily autonomy. Are women, even poor women, really so hapless they can’t be expected to assert bodily autonomy by 8 or 10 weeks? If not, how long does it take? I read on here about people claiming you can’t force a woman to carry a baby for nine months - OK, fine, but how on Earth does that assertion justify 15 week abortions? One is almost 4 months in at that point. Now consider that at “viability” of 21 or 22 weeks??? It’s illogical.
Where I have moved is examining the argument. No woman needs months to assert bodily autonomy, and the procedure becomes increasingly evil as the baby gets larger and actual torture a necessity in the process of murdering the child.
My daughter and son are adamantly pro life. My daughter for religious reasons, my son scientific. They are 10 and 8. At that age I was cool with late term abortions to the extent I thought about it. They do challenge me. I also realize my kids weren’t ever disposable. Not for a single moment in their life. Not even as a tiny clump of cells.
You strike me as a person who is very intellectually curious and willing to examine and challenge her own premises. That’s very rare these days.
You bring up a lot of things in your post that I would love to go more in depth on but, to keep it more focused, I’ll stick to abortion and bodily autonomy.
If you don’t want to engage with some random guy in a thread I totally understand.
If you do, I’m curious as to what moral difference you would assign to the human being in the womb at 10 weeks and 1 day versus 10 weeks? Why would a woman’s bodily autonomy override the right of the human being at that particular point? (I’m using the longer period of 10 weeks but I think the same question would apply at 8, so if you want to use that time period feel free)
Again, you can also say you are not interested i having this discussion and I’ll respect that decision.
I’m not interested in inflaming passions on the internet. We have plenty of that already.
Also I would say I’m uncomfortable in my position. I think I’m grounded in the reality of the world, but morally, it’s a crap.
I have no idea how I got so lucky with my children (at least thus far), they are amazing. They make me reflect. Like all of us, they started as a clump of cells. One was planned, one was an oops - an adorable oops with a disability/ deformity that is real, but doesn’t change he has unlimited potential in life and he’s far too adorable and smart for his own good (or maybe ours) and he has always an understated charisma and natural good character most adults never achieve. He is an amazing little boy who adds just as much light and good to this world as his planned and amazing big sister. Only a monster could kill him. I could never pin point a moment this became true, only moments I didn’t realize this was true........
I am so grateful to be witness to such amazing conversations. I don’t often comment, but I give a lot of thought to what I read here. Thank you for articulating much of what I’ve considered.
NC Mom, that was one of the most beautiful posts I've ever read, no hyperbole! I too love my kids and wonder why God blessed me with such great daughters (two).
I have a question more directed to the world I suppose, one that also brushes against your thoughtful comments on viability and Alex's statement on same: A child cannot survive on their own at age 3 month, 1 year, 2, etc. There isn't an overly dramatic difference between a mother who has a baby on one side of a uterine wall and a baby clutched tight in her loving arms at 6 months. As cold as this sounds: the mother is a baby carriage of sorts, albeit a fancy medical carriage, and as demeaning as that sounds, I am a father who carried my 1 week 2 week 3 week etc. old daughters in my arms for hours to show them the world, and one would've needed to kill me first before anyone gave them a mandated jab, or worse. But back to NCMom: such a beautiful post!
You hit on a really important point. We must examine our own selves and own capacity for morality. The morality of a body politic is at stake here. After all if a “monster” or dangerous adversary attacks our homes and families we ourselves - advocates of bodily autonomy - may deny someone else their bodily autonomy real quick.
I don’t ascribe more value to human life on 10 weeks 1 day than 10 weeks. It IS a human life with value as soon as it implants and can grow.
I think this is incredibly complex and nuanced. Its not as simple as “give unwanted babies to a family that does want them.”
For many reasons unwanted pregnancies happen, sometimes for cruel reasons. I believe in bodily autonomy of the woman so long as it is purely a right to bodily autonomy. I sit uncomfortably here, because the baby is innocent.
However, having an abortion at 3, 4, 5 months has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. By 6-8 weeks every woman can and should know if she’s pregnant. I do not support abortion for any reason beyond this phase of realizing there is a pregnancy, which is the only time the decision is solely about the woman’s bodily autonomy.
If the allowance of legal abortion is for bodily autonomy, then nothing about the baby’s body or development should be considered, and no additional burden or risk of pain and torture placed upon the innocent growing human being - not for a woman’s procrastination or refusal to make a decision in a timely manner or any other reason.
The right to claim bodily autonomy ends when the mom knows, or should know, a unique and valuable human is growing in her womb, and chooses to keep the baby for any period of time beyond that anyway. A woman has no right to knowingly (or when she should know) grow a human, then change her mind and have it tortured and murdered.
My position is based on balancing bodily autonomy for women with natural rights for all humans. As I’ve said, it’s uncomfortable. The line at 10 weeks is simply because there must be a reasonable line. I could go with 8 weeks as well. If a woman is going to assert bodily autonomy, then assert it.
Abortion after the point of realization one is pregnant with a couple days to schedule getting a prescription has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. Nothing. It has everything to do with the child, indifference to the child, or distain for the implications of that child’s life on the adults who created it. That’s not bodily autonomy. That’s murder.
I can see your logic in needing to set a line, as I follow the same logic and see needing to set a line.
Where I set it is fertilization because at that moment a unique and distinct human being comes into existence. I think once that takes place directly killing that human should be illegal.
To me, any other distinction or point seems arbitrary and one that can be moved on unsound philosophical grounds.
Does that make sense?
My argument could have weaknesses as well. What would you say those were.
You bring up truly important points. Nothing in life is “perfect” - not ourselves, not our children, not our governments, societies, cultural realities, corporations or institutions. But as Albert Camus underscored in The Myth Of Sisyphus we become the human beings we are meant to be by accepting our perceived “failures” with our perceived achievements. Although I will not concede on the issue of bodily autonomy because it leads to so many truly horror filled places in reality we must accept our children as they in fact are. If we do believe our children and everyone who enters our lives did not appear for a reason then where does that leave us? Clearly it leaves us with insanity. Even though uncomfortable we must learn to draw the lines we do accept well short of the horrors of denying anyone true bodily autonomy.
I’m not sure if your comment was directed at me or someone else in this thread.
Whatever the case, I’ll put in another plug for anything pro-life related, (YouTube debates, podcasts or his book “Persuasive Pro-Life), really helped me better articulate and advocate for my position.
I don’t think you’d be disappointed by anything he does.
I was directing it to NC Mom - she also articulated my thoughts on same sex marriage as well and I think we even are of the same age and life stage and I often find myself not only agreeing with her thoughts but reading the tidbits she’s shared about herself and thinking OMG me too!!. That said, I am really glad you commented as I appreciate and agree with your points as well. I thank you for this resource as I’m newer in my anti-abortion beliefs and would like to be able to better articulate myself with them. Thank you!! I’ll most definitely check this out.
For the intellectually curious, but not big readers, maybe a movie on the subject would stimulate additional perspective. A start might be the movie called “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always. Next consider having discussions with impoverished, minority, enslaved in desperation people who don’t have the luxury of lounging around and enjoying this blog and the 600+ comments. Ask that growing populace their perspective. One might get an expanded view. Just saying.
You're correct - there's a betrayal at the heart of this. Unless we solve the greater, more fundamental, betrayals we are quite unlikely to solve this at all. In these gray areas we fail to be very intelligent at all. There's a bunch of articles here for someone to write.
I really enjoyed reading your view on this as a woman and as a Christian. I am a hardcore conservative, but I also believe that it is a nuanced and complicated issue. Your argument is very good. Some early choice is warranted but to insinuate that MONTHS are needed is ridiculous. Even in the case of rape and incest, months are not needed. I do think there is a potential for chemotherapy or radiation to save the life of the mother that would necessarily kill an unborn child past 15 weeks and those cases need to be analyzed very carefully and are exceedingly rare. Even then, I would hope that the oncologists would view the fetus as a human baby and consider waiting an additional 15 or 20 weeks. I would support late-term exceptions only in the most exceedingly rare and unusual cases (such as hypothetical one I mentioned). Like you said, this is a nuanced and complicated issue. It just brings me joy to know that a Christian mother could have such an even keeled and detailed viewpoint of abortion rather than just painting the picture black or white.
Thank you. I struggle with this. I try to be guided by what is most loving. The complete elimination of bodily autonomy, while morally justifiable for the sake of an innocent human life, does not feel loving to me. At the same time, the viability argument, while rooted firmly in bodily autonomy, allows for one human being to direct another innocent living human to be burned alive in saline or ripped apart limb by limb. It’s gruesome and cruel. That does not feel loving to me either.
My mom had a friend who was pregnant around the same time she was with me (I’m approaching 40). Her friend got whatever the disease from cat poop is that causes severe fetal abnormality. The doctors were also concerned the baby would die and the mom wouldn’t notice and the mom could die too as a result. I don’t know if this was legal then or now, though I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be if abortion at this stage/ for this reason is. Anyway, the mom and her husband insisted they could only induce labor. I’m not sure how far along she was - late second or very early 3rd trimester. She said she would absolutely not tolerate killing the baby first - she deserved at the very least to die in her parent’s arms. So that’s what they did. The degree of deformity was very upsetting. But the parents could plainly see their daughter would never have lived. They held her as she died just after birth, peacefully, in her mothers arms with her fathers hands also wrapped around her.
While their hearts were always broken for their lost child, they took great peace in knowing they comforted and cared for her until the very end. That is one of the most loving and heartbreaking stories I have ever heard around a heartbreaking and painful situation that is the rare case pro-abortion advocates use to justify the killing of any baby for any reason at any time in pregnancy (or even new borns in CA). The argument never explains why one must actively, cruelly, kill the child first.
On the other side my brother-in-law and his wife found out at 22 weeks their daughter was measuring only 18 weeks. When they got the genetic results which showed a rare mosaic trisomy, their doctor already had 3 physicians sign off on the abortion to schedule it right then and there. They had struggled to conceive for years. They had 2 viable eggs from IVF. Their son, 2 at the time, was the first. This was their last chance to have another child. They said absolutely not.
They prepared themselves for a still born or severely disabled child - which is what they were told to expect if they decided to “continue the pregnancy.” So they accepted it and hoped for the best.
My sister-in-law was induced at 33 weeks because of spiking blood pressure (something they were warned was likely to happen). Their daughter was born small, but otherwise healthy. She was breathing. She was healthy. She was totally normal. She left the NICU after only 2 weeks.
Today she is a completely normal, adorable, and insanely spunky 6 year old little girl. As it turns out the documentation of her mosaic trisomy is so rare no one actually knows much if anything about it. Based on the little girl at birth and beyond, it likely goes undiagnosed most of the time it happens. Had they not run the genetic testing to look for literally everything at such a late stage, all they would have known if she had in uterine growth restriction. To realize doctors err on the side of death without admitting they were giving the parents advice to kill their child based on an absolute worst case scenario in the basis of 5 document cases of this mosaic trisomy with a bad outcome worldwide is heartbreaking. It was only a couple of years after her birth that they found out just how flimsy the evidence was for the fear mongering the doctors engaged in.
Thanks for sharing the two stories. I think you understand that both of those stories are the rare exceptions, and even then, abortion was not the chosen answer. You also understand that sometimes abortion is warranted. And that's why I was so impressed with your first comment. When I listen to conservative talk radio, it seems that everything is hard right-wing. I sometimes listen or watch mainstream media, mostly for a laugh, and it's all hard left-wing. Lately, it seems that the left has gone far, far, far left -- so far that I wonder who actually watches CNN or reads the Washington Post. defund the police? late term abortions? cancel student loans? voting without an ID? No-bail laws? Guaranteed government income? Restricting political speech? (Pol speech would be deemed hate speech for the convenience of democrats). Yet, maybe conservative media has also gone a bit too far too, particularly on the topic of abortion. I love Charlie Kirk, Andrew Wilkow, Michael Berry, and others but not one conservative voice truly addresses the complexity and nuance of abortion.
I assume as a Christian conservative mother, people assume that you're just pro-life, against abortion in any scenario. Period. End of story. But people with conservative judeo-christian family values are just like any other group of people -- we're complex and we have a variety of opinions and we don't always get along.
In general, I believe that conservative Republicans with judeo-christian family values are on the right side of history -- mostly. I'm generalizing here, but kids raised in church in conservative households turn out better. I think that conservative Christian women make better wives and keep their husbands happier in more ways than just keeping a nice home, if you know what I mean. I think that conservative households are more likely to donate to charity (a proven fact). And if you have a flat tire, a conservative republican is about 20 times more likely to stop and help you fix it. That being said, that doesn't make all of our beliefs sacred and absolute.
I actually believe that most liberal democrats are actually against 2nd trimester and very much against 3rd trimester abortions. And I actually believe that more conservatives are sometimes OK with 1st trimester abortions than will admit to it. I think most conservatives, including myself, want to protect unborn children. In our zeal though, the movement to protect the unborn becomes so self-righteous that conservatives commonly get portrayed as being absolutely against abortion under any circumstance. Likewise liberals are so zealous in protecting abortion that they push to allow abortions even as the baby's head is crowning (or sadly even later). In reality, I don't think that the average conservative is completely anti abortion and I don't think the average liberal is pro-abortion up to the moment the baby pops out. If we could all agree on this, we might actually find that conservatives and liberals could mostly agree on abortion rights.
Really complex issue with many swamps to trap us. The stare decisis, precedent issue simply traps us in the double jeopardy where Roe vs. Wade left this. If I'm correct I believe the Roe Vs. Wade decision made it pretty impossible for States Rights to weigh in on this issue and change the law to fit the people's wishes.
Yes, this hot button, wedge issue is being used by both sides to try to distract us. I've been present at still births where the sacred nature of life is paramount and felt deeply.
Out of curiosity, what is your position on IVF? Those eggs that are fertilized and then frozen. Should a couple decide not to use all of their zygotes, would their destruction be akin to murder? Knowing this, should IVF be banned? For me, IVF has opened up Pandora’s box. What do you think?
Believe these are crucial points and I believe the real dilemmas lie in the culture. Before there are sperm & eggs which meet to form a human there are far larger interdependent webs which we cannot exist without successfully for very long. This is why open, Socratic debates on things such as the Abortion issue give us hope but also engender such complex uncomfortable emotions. At the intersection of Medicine and Governance lie many interesting tie ins.
No. As I’ve said, a unique human forms at the moment of conception, but only begins life/ is living with implantation. The (not very effective) rhythm method is meant to time sex so any fertilized eggs don’t have time to implant before the woman’s next period begins. IUDs do the same thing - prevent implantation - with far greater success.
Abortion is killing a living human being. Plan B is not. IUDs are not. I don’t believe destroying unused fertilized eggs from IVF is either, though many parents who have been through that strongly disagree.
It is a complex area - loaded with land mines. Anybody with common sense and a bit of education or experience knows a viable baby should not be killed. The sticky point you address is at what point does a fetus deserve the same right to bodily autonomy we expect. And obviously in 2020-2022 bodily autonomy isn’t counting for much. I’ve seen live video of Joe Biden espousing anti-abortion rhetoric when it was politically advantageous for him to do so. Our family deliberations on abortion quickly merge into Constitutional law and the issues of bodily autonomy. These are fundamentally, urgently important.
Constitutional law arguments are where the argument should devolve. Our Founders realized that national dictates are rarely good which is why they wanted to use 13 laboratories to deal with varying opinions (10th amendment). Roe v Wade did violence to this by usurping the States prerogatives to act democratically.
Any one who thinks overturning Roe is not pro democratic, or pro constitution has no concept of Democracy and has not read the Constitution (or Alito's draft decision, for that matter), but when has the left acted affirmatively for Democracy?
I am a Catholic, but science and the common law form the basis for my opposition to abortion. It's an undisputed scientific fact that conception creates a human life apart from its mother. That it cannot sustain life on its own does not matter because we can all name instances where survival is dependent on another. None of those instances allow another individual to kill that person. At the common law, you were always entitled to use lethal force against another to prevent grave BODILY harm or death. Emotional, financial harm are not justifications. Abortion in the case of rape/incest is a trickier problem because generally you cannot be forced against your will to care for another. In consensual sex, however, the parties assume the risk of pregnancy.
That argument can be turned around - In most places you can use lethal force against any person that enters your home without consent, but not a woman’s uterus?
Given the choice between a restrictive law like a heartbeat bill, and a law that would allow 22 week old fetuses to be ripped apart limb by limb or burned alive in saline, I will choose the heartbeat law. It places a high burden of personal responsibility on women to be aware of what is happening in our bodies, but it does not entirely rob us of the ability to assert bodily autonomy over our reproduction, not only in the case of tragedies like rape, but also in the case of mistakes like drunken one night stands. I also choose the heartbeat bill because it strains credulity to claim it takes over 4 months to assert a pregnancy is unwanted, and abortions at this stage are cruel as it demands the literal torturing to death of another human being. In this case, I will fall to the side of greater personal responsibility for women.
Conversely, after looking into the LA abortion ban being considered, the extreme position of banning all abortions at every stage, even certain forms birth control like plan B and IUDs, based on “the science of when life begins at conception,” I will choose to allow abortion until viability because I can’t ignore there is a profound difference scientifically between an embryo and a developed fetus, and bans on preventing pregnancy via emergency contraception denies women the right to autonomy over her own reproduction. It demands she maintain any pregnancy, even one started in violence, without consent.
In the case of rape it is accurate to say the embryo committed no crime, but it is also accurate to say the victim committed no crime, and forcing her to carry the offspring of her and her rapist is cruel. I would extend this beyond rape to simply the reality that it is cruel to give any man’s sperm more rights to reproduction than a woman has to her own womb, which is the outcome of outlawing plan B and IUDs. It strains credulity to tell women their right to bodily autonomy ends when a man’s sperm enters her body, even if that occurs against her will. I will not vote to rob women of our most basic right to bodily autonomy over our reproduction simply because a barely fertilized egg is technically a “human life.” I cannot square valuing human life with believing that a living human women should not have any rights at all to her bodily autonomy over reproduction - particularly if she’s violated. We are all flawed humans and the “close your legs” argument feels sanctimonious, often hypocritically so.
Yes, life begins at conception, but bodily autonomy doesn’t end at puberty for women. While I respect valid opinions on all sides, I’ve come to an important realization for my own personal stance that demands I honestly consider both lives.
The ideological arguments “based in science,” exist on both sides. They both sound great in theory, but end up being cruel, to me, in practice.
While I can only speak for myself, I believe I live in the space of moderation where law is often ultimately decided.
Abortion is not top of mind for mid terms. However, there are likely to justifiable backlashes against both extremes in moderate places like NC. For me, it will become an issue if either party pursues a legal mandate for either extreme, and I will vote against the party pursuing either extreme. Upon honest reflection I realize that if that happens it will impact my vote in this fall’s election, and every future election.
Everything you wrote here is why Europe has far more restrictive abortion laws than America does—and none of the hysteria over the issue that periodically bubbles up on our continent. If I'm allowed to put inks in Substack comments, here's a short summation of Europe vs. US on this issue:
The left side of the political spectrum wants us to emulate Europe, which they consider far more sophisticated, in virtually every way. Except this one.
While the 28 day after birth rule is terrifying, some are now talking into the toddler years. Yep, you heard that right. When evil is allowed to creep in, like it was with early abortion, taking the next leap of evil is simple for society. No matter the subject, we have seen this with every leftist policy plan.
I like to think of myself in team reality and as such I look at abortion from a collective standpoint in practical terms as well as from a perspective of trauma.
There is a trauma to the mother: that she has to reconcile for herself in her life and her relationship with God. However, it is minimal compared to the trauma an unwanted child could suffer
Forcing someone to bring a child into the world, especially if they are young, without resources, incapable or resentful, will only further the cycle of trauma throughout the community for two lifetimes instead of one.
In my view this is really a Socio economic issue. Most people who get abortions are doing so because they feel they cannot afford children and/or they do not have the familial support that it takes to do so without going insane...
People with resources will find a way. They will get abortions unobstructed. This will only impact low-income people who conservatives don't want to pay for anyway.
It is the biggest, most emotionally taxing and stressful thing anyone will ever do, in my opinion, is to be a parent. It is a never-ending job and the bulk of the weight lands on the female, not the ejaculator. How do we reconcile that?
It is a choice that should not be taken lightly regardless and should by no means be forced on to anyone.
This comment paints with a very broad brush. I've mentioned before, and NCmom eludes to this reality in her comment, but my husband and I try to put our money where our mouth is by supporting two very effective pro-life charities which directly assist expectant and already mothers with financial, spiritual, and physical needs. I think you need to check some studies because it has been shown time and time again that people who identify as "conservative" (and in particular, religious conservative) tend to give the most to charitable organizations. My objection is having the government be the sole support for people because it is spectacularly incompetent at doing so.
Finally, you need to check the stats put out by the Guttmacher institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) which lists the reasons why women procure abortions - you might be surprised.
I'm sorry you see fathers as only "ejaculators." If that is your experience, it explains much of your comment.
I'm sorry that's what you took from my comment. What a seriously crazy-making issue.
I think hard-line pro-lifers are some of the most hopeful and starry-eyed about people. Must be. I've met some real scumbags in my life but I like people and am generally hopeful.
Your assertion: “This will only impact low-income people who conservative don’t want to pay for anyway”
Actual reality: Room at the inn, and other organizations like it, are funded solely by pro-life people to help low income women in need. Moreover, conservatives are more likely to donate to charities than liberals, and more likely to volunteer their time to actually help the needy.
Who locked low income kids out of school while forcing their “essential worker” parents to go to work in person again?
In addition, there is a years long waiting list for childless couples to adopt an infant. There are families longing and waiting for a child, who would be blessed by a mom willing to carry to term and place her baby in a good home.
Thank you, NCMom. Love Life America, founded in Charlotte, will meet every need of a mom in crisis. I have friends who are mentors walking alongside moms and I volunteer at Habitat for Humanity to help one of them earn her hours to build her home.
I thought I was replying to the comment that pro-lifers are only pro-birth. Not the sociology-economic comment.
I agree there will be disparity in access. I think that is a sad reality of our current political state, and applies to far more than this debate. Inequality has and will always exist in every human society, and in nature, but the issue is being exacerbated terribly by our current political leadership to heartbreaking levels in the last 12 months. Poor mothers apparently need to cross the border illegally if they want to find safe formula for their babies.
Families wanting their already immune 5 year olds spared dangerous experimental injections with unknowable long term consequences that don’t protect anyone from anything might need to move out of CA if they want their kids to attend school in person. The lack of options for their child’s bodily autonomy there will fall disproportionately on the poor, but they’ll be able to have abortions or commit infanticide legally. Deep blue cities correlate to the greatest academic achievement gaps. Only parents of means can provide their kids an actual education and opportunity in life in most blue urban cities with enormous academic achievement gaps as leadership in most of those places opposes school choice that would give poor kids more options and opportunities.
Those situations certainly exist more than any of us would prefer and they are heartbreaking and difficult.
If someone ask you what young woman abandoned by her husband and left her destitute, without familial support and under immense mental and physical pressures should do with her toddler what would you advise?
It's not the same thing, at all. Not one bit. An aborted baby at 4 weeks literally looks like a cotton ball. Or a spider web with a thick middle. That's the physical reality.
How do socio-economic concerns change the fundamental nature of a human? Are poor people less human than rich people?
Through the lens of valuing all human life as equal in value by nature of each individual’s status as a human questions about the mother or father’s desire or ability to provide for that human is immaterial.
It's only immaterial from a philosophical perspective of potential. But human life outcomes are weighed heavily on parental ability to provide both physically & emotionally. Socioeconomic stressors are too often abuse and trauma. So.
When I am at the DMV with my 7 month old, and the man sitting next to me is easily 10 years my junior, there with a woman who may be one of his 7 children from 6 different mothers, or his current "piece" (I cannot tell and obviously do not inquire), is he a father of which you speak? Or is he an irresponsible ejaculator leaving many fatherless children to grow up in a stress-filled life with dubious potential outcomes likely to continue the cycle of abuse?
I do not know what the right answer is. I simply choose to know that abortion is sad, it harms many women & families, and I am not one without sin to force my will on to others.
knowing how God values human life and forcing that "knowing" on to others is the issue. women have been aborting babies since B.C. and will continue to do so regardless of your ideology or governmental restrictions.
Valuable to who? Not valuable to we the people unless there is a bunch of thieves in place to take these from us. Guess there's always wampum beads and/or trade and a government of fire circles. Or maybe the fine old traditions of gambling - real gambling not Las Vegas style.
Apparently, Alex actually believes that the baby's body is just an extension of the mother's body. If that's the case, Alex, when the baby is killed, why doesn't the mother die, too?
Here's the ACTUAL relevance: The reason we have so many doctors today who are willing to administer deadly drugs like Remdezivir and dangerous vaccines like mRNA while withholding life-saving treatments like HCQ and Ivermectin is because most doctors today are whores. They will do anything they are asked to do as long as it comes with a big fat paycheck. This trend started with abortion. It continued with countless deadly and addictive drugs, including opioids, amphetamines, and benzos. It persists to the present day with our "Covid response." The medicalization of abortion fueled an industry of doctors with ZERO ethics.
Gosh, that's really hard to acknowledge, but my respect for medical professionals has really plummeted the last 2 years. Your analysis rings true. What a sad state we're in.
Yes, we must learn to draw lines - sometimes uncomfortable ones - at bodily autonomy. If we fail at this it leaves too many opportunities for rank opportunists of the first order to serially abuse us, our families, our nations, cultures, corporations, institutions, our planet. As our revolutionary ancestors did understand and set forth pretty capably except for some glaring trade offs it is up to us to remedy the answers lie in being willing to become more fully human.
I confess to not reading this whole post and just want to jump in and say that the non-hypocritical link is to say that anti-vaxx and anti-abortion are both stances against killing people. Hence, both are consistently Pro-life.
...then there is also being against the profit motive for killing people; the cultural coercion to kill people; the censorship around alternatives to killing people (see Big Tech esp)...gee I think I see a pattern emerging...
Killing is killing. Think we may have evolved past believing killing is an answer to anything? Then again some have warned there is simply no way to build that many prisons or guillotines.
They are Pro-life and consistently so. To have linked these two things to conservatives and to simple, crass political expediency is a glaring hypocritical error and the first thing I noticed too.
Theoretically this isn’t a great comparison. An innocent new human being shouldn’t be equated to a human convicted of monstrously taking the life of other humans. My opposition to the death penalty personally has nothing to do with equating humans who choose to be monsters with innocent humans who have committed zero crimes. My opposition is that we have a legal system that I believe in on the whole, but recognize major weaknesses in as well. Humans aren’t very good at playing God, and I can’t support the death penalty because miscarriages of “justice” are too common in our flawed human system.
That said, my position on abortion didn’t change when I had an ooppsy who is now an amazing 8 year old boy, and wouldn’t change if my daughter found herself with an unwanted pregnancy. (My position is based in very early bodily autonomy for the mom, and protection of life after the first 8-10 weeks).
If my husband or one of our children were brutally murdered, I accept it’s likely I’d want the death penalty if I felt confident the right person was charged and convicted by a jury..... so there’s that too.
I would expand my comment to add: or sometimes too lazy. There is the im-famous Texas case of Michael Morton who was falsely imprisoned for 25 years for the murder of his wife in part because law enforcement didn't follow up leads that conflicted with their theory of the crime. DNA evidence finally cleared him, but not until the actual murderer killed another victim. Thank goodness he did not get the death penalty.
When we study the law we quickly encounter rightful laws which err in the interpretation of these laws. It is up to we the people to ever reinterpret the law to meet our ever expanding understanding. If we the people fail at this there will be plenty of abusive, rank opportunists who will do it for us.
Alex operates in a strictly materialist frame of mind- only what he can see,taste,handle,has meaning for him.His is the viewpoint that the laws of a supernatural realm can’t have real validity in the material world.And,if there is no God,then Alex’ analysis is a reasonable one.But if there is a God,and He is the God of Abraham,Isaac,and Jacob,oy such a problem he has…
Agree.. I am a christian, but acknowledge that christian beliefs should have nothing to do with abortion. Abortion is a worldly act, and the killing of a baby in the womb is a vile and heinous and inhumane act - with or without religion. Pro life has (or should have) nothing to do with religion and should separate itself from it....
Totally on board with the 5th and all of the Commandments. However, I don't need the Commandments to know that murder is wrong. Murder is wrong with or without religion..
Alex has a continuing dilemma: truth is unitary. Truth is indivisible. If the materialist weltanschauung is untrue, then his pursuit of truth is corrupted. It is constantly polluted with falsity. Truth is the alchemist's end. The truth about matter. We will never understand the truth about matter without understanding the truth about matter's creator.
God is a spirit - yet we material creatures are created in His image. The unitary nature of truth is bound up in the unitary nature of God. "Thy Word is truth" The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth, and that one Man who dares to imagine He is the truth.
St.Augustine wrote,in DE TRINITATE,that when he reflected on the image of God in man,he came to believe that the image must be tripartite,as God Himself is,and that this image must exist in the mind of man,not his body.Further,in meditating on God’s image in the mind,he came to believe that it consisted in the Memory,the understanding,and the will.Memory,the image of the Father,for He knows all,understanding,the image of the Son,the divine Logos who spoke the world into being,and the will,image of the Holy Spirit which desires the things of God.
I am also Jewish. You are asking a religious question. We don’t have the same foundation and fundamental principals as say Catholics. As has been quipped many times by my fellow Jews: “Jews don’t consider any fetus to be viable until it graduates medical school. 😝🤦♂️😂
Lots of people are Jewish and here’s some discourses from the intellectual bastions of YouTube this morning on the possible existence of hypocrisy amongst those who are moral, upstanding citizens:
Exalting reproductive choice enables the prenatal killing based on sex and disability, plus embryo selection--central to IVF--gamete sales, cloning and genetic engineering.
These measures commodify human life are already causing, and will cause more, social harm via genetic inequality and alienation than drugs ever could.
Also, abortion is an exercise of sovereignty over another, second human being, that lies within a woman's body.</
Yes. Because preventing the murder of a child is the same as forcing someone to take a drug. These two issues are only superficially similar.
Alex’s assertions of conservative hypocrisy on this issue sounds exactly like the pro-abortion indoctrination I got in undergrad and grad school. However, it doesn’t exactly hold water. In every successful abortion, and unique human being dies. As he said yesterday, it IS murder.
While I sit in an uncomfortable position of supporting early abortion rights, so the mother can have bodily autonomy, after the first 8-12 weeks, the choice to abortion is either because the mother doesn’t care enough about her own body to care if she’s carrying another life, or because mom doesn’t like diagnostics test results, which are often wrong, showing the child’s body is flawed.
I increasingly find myself questioning even early abortion. The “pro-choice” crew so often treats children like objects for manipulation, an annoyance, or worse. That’s terrifying.
I am also concerned that those fighting for abortion are often the same group that screams about the “climate change emergency,” advocates openly for child sterilization and genital mutilation, claims that children are community property, and promotes the idea that government and/ or corporations should get input on private medical decisions. As “safe, rare, and early” has given way to casual aborting of 2nd and even 3rd trimester human beings, I fear this crowd is but a small step away from forced abortions for “climate change” or “equity.”
Ultimately, because this was decided by courts and not more reasonable legislatures, we may be left with the choice between very limited abortion rights and legalization of infanticide (note CA extending the definition of allowable abortions beyond birth). I will choose the side of life. My young daughter can overcome having an unplanned and even unwanted child. Our society cannot survive the dismissive, indifferent, and out right cruel attitude the “pro-choice/ pro-abortion” crowd holds towards children, and other human beings generally.
Those who believes humans are nothing more than a disposable choice 6 months into life seem often to hold the belief that 6 year olds are community property with little regard for overtly and cruelly damaging them (note Covid), and increasingly 60 year olds who disagree with them should be dumped from participating in society.
If human life is disposable with no value at 4 or 5 or 6 month into life, at what point does that human being have value?
The individual human life has no value to leftist ideologues. If they don’t kill them in the womb, they kill their souls in childhood using the public education system.
Absolutely correct!
I think you hit the nail on the head with your comments and I can see you working out philosophical weakness in your current position allowing for abortion up to 6-8 weeks.
Having travelled this same path I envision you eventually concluding that no abortion should be legal for all of the reasons you mentioned.
If you would like a resource to further explore this issue I highly recommend “Persuasive Pro-Life” by Trent Horn.
If you aren’t a big reader Trent also has many debates and podcasts in the issue. Just search his name and abortion or pro-life on Google and various apps and you will get results.
FYI, he is Catholic but his abortion arguments are not premised on anything to do with the Church.
Thank you for the reference. My husband and kids are Catholic, and we send them to a top conservative Christian school...... while I am not excessively religious, I have found more faith in the pandemic, and grown to appreciate the truth and foresight in Christianity.
My arguments sound more secular, because to some extent they are. Religion is where I find my own personal moral compass, but I need more than my personal moral compass to determine my political stance and morality to impose on others.
For instance, I believe in the Christian definition of marriage personally, but I have always support gay marriage in the eyes of the state as basic fairness because homosexuality, unlike gender delusions, is actually real and has always existed. Pedophilia has always existed too, but necessitates harming innocent children, so clearly existence alone is not a moral justification.
I’m not sure where I will end up. I am adamant about bodily autonomy, and see this as an incredible nuanced and complicated issue. I want some early choice, but I’m tired of the justifications that insinuate MONTHS are needed to assert bodily autonomy. Are women, even poor women, really so hapless they can’t be expected to assert bodily autonomy by 8 or 10 weeks? If not, how long does it take? I read on here about people claiming you can’t force a woman to carry a baby for nine months - OK, fine, but how on Earth does that assertion justify 15 week abortions? One is almost 4 months in at that point. Now consider that at “viability” of 21 or 22 weeks??? It’s illogical.
Where I have moved is examining the argument. No woman needs months to assert bodily autonomy, and the procedure becomes increasingly evil as the baby gets larger and actual torture a necessity in the process of murdering the child.
My daughter and son are adamantly pro life. My daughter for religious reasons, my son scientific. They are 10 and 8. At that age I was cool with late term abortions to the extent I thought about it. They do challenge me. I also realize my kids weren’t ever disposable. Not for a single moment in their life. Not even as a tiny clump of cells.
You strike me as a person who is very intellectually curious and willing to examine and challenge her own premises. That’s very rare these days.
You bring up a lot of things in your post that I would love to go more in depth on but, to keep it more focused, I’ll stick to abortion and bodily autonomy.
If you don’t want to engage with some random guy in a thread I totally understand.
If you do, I’m curious as to what moral difference you would assign to the human being in the womb at 10 weeks and 1 day versus 10 weeks? Why would a woman’s bodily autonomy override the right of the human being at that particular point? (I’m using the longer period of 10 weeks but I think the same question would apply at 8, so if you want to use that time period feel free)
Again, you can also say you are not interested i having this discussion and I’ll respect that decision.
I’m not interested in inflaming passions on the internet. We have plenty of that already.
Also I would say I’m uncomfortable in my position. I think I’m grounded in the reality of the world, but morally, it’s a crap.
I have no idea how I got so lucky with my children (at least thus far), they are amazing. They make me reflect. Like all of us, they started as a clump of cells. One was planned, one was an oops - an adorable oops with a disability/ deformity that is real, but doesn’t change he has unlimited potential in life and he’s far too adorable and smart for his own good (or maybe ours) and he has always an understated charisma and natural good character most adults never achieve. He is an amazing little boy who adds just as much light and good to this world as his planned and amazing big sister. Only a monster could kill him. I could never pin point a moment this became true, only moments I didn’t realize this was true........
I am so grateful to be witness to such amazing conversations. I don’t often comment, but I give a lot of thought to what I read here. Thank you for articulating much of what I’ve considered.
NC Mom, that was one of the most beautiful posts I've ever read, no hyperbole! I too love my kids and wonder why God blessed me with such great daughters (two).
I have a question more directed to the world I suppose, one that also brushes against your thoughtful comments on viability and Alex's statement on same: A child cannot survive on their own at age 3 month, 1 year, 2, etc. There isn't an overly dramatic difference between a mother who has a baby on one side of a uterine wall and a baby clutched tight in her loving arms at 6 months. As cold as this sounds: the mother is a baby carriage of sorts, albeit a fancy medical carriage, and as demeaning as that sounds, I am a father who carried my 1 week 2 week 3 week etc. old daughters in my arms for hours to show them the world, and one would've needed to kill me first before anyone gave them a mandated jab, or worse. But back to NCMom: such a beautiful post!
You hit on a really important point. We must examine our own selves and own capacity for morality. The morality of a body politic is at stake here. After all if a “monster” or dangerous adversary attacks our homes and families we ourselves - advocates of bodily autonomy - may deny someone else their bodily autonomy real quick.
I don’t ascribe more value to human life on 10 weeks 1 day than 10 weeks. It IS a human life with value as soon as it implants and can grow.
I think this is incredibly complex and nuanced. Its not as simple as “give unwanted babies to a family that does want them.”
For many reasons unwanted pregnancies happen, sometimes for cruel reasons. I believe in bodily autonomy of the woman so long as it is purely a right to bodily autonomy. I sit uncomfortably here, because the baby is innocent.
However, having an abortion at 3, 4, 5 months has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. By 6-8 weeks every woman can and should know if she’s pregnant. I do not support abortion for any reason beyond this phase of realizing there is a pregnancy, which is the only time the decision is solely about the woman’s bodily autonomy.
If the allowance of legal abortion is for bodily autonomy, then nothing about the baby’s body or development should be considered, and no additional burden or risk of pain and torture placed upon the innocent growing human being - not for a woman’s procrastination or refusal to make a decision in a timely manner or any other reason.
The right to claim bodily autonomy ends when the mom knows, or should know, a unique and valuable human is growing in her womb, and chooses to keep the baby for any period of time beyond that anyway. A woman has no right to knowingly (or when she should know) grow a human, then change her mind and have it tortured and murdered.
My position is based on balancing bodily autonomy for women with natural rights for all humans. As I’ve said, it’s uncomfortable. The line at 10 weeks is simply because there must be a reasonable line. I could go with 8 weeks as well. If a woman is going to assert bodily autonomy, then assert it.
Abortion after the point of realization one is pregnant with a couple days to schedule getting a prescription has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. Nothing. It has everything to do with the child, indifference to the child, or distain for the implications of that child’s life on the adults who created it. That’s not bodily autonomy. That’s murder.
I can see your logic in needing to set a line, as I follow the same logic and see needing to set a line.
Where I set it is fertilization because at that moment a unique and distinct human being comes into existence. I think once that takes place directly killing that human should be illegal.
To me, any other distinction or point seems arbitrary and one that can be moved on unsound philosophical grounds.
Does that make sense?
My argument could have weaknesses as well. What would you say those were.
You bring up truly important points. Nothing in life is “perfect” - not ourselves, not our children, not our governments, societies, cultural realities, corporations or institutions. But as Albert Camus underscored in The Myth Of Sisyphus we become the human beings we are meant to be by accepting our perceived “failures” with our perceived achievements. Although I will not concede on the issue of bodily autonomy because it leads to so many truly horror filled places in reality we must accept our children as they in fact are. If we do believe our children and everyone who enters our lives did not appear for a reason then where does that leave us? Clearly it leaves us with insanity. Even though uncomfortable we must learn to draw the lines we do accept well short of the horrors of denying anyone true bodily autonomy.
I have so many of the same views as you and feel like I’m reading my own thoughts but can’t articulate them like this.
C Marie,
I’m not sure if your comment was directed at me or someone else in this thread.
Whatever the case, I’ll put in another plug for anything pro-life related, (YouTube debates, podcasts or his book “Persuasive Pro-Life), really helped me better articulate and advocate for my position.
I don’t think you’d be disappointed by anything he does.
Lance
I was directing it to NC Mom - she also articulated my thoughts on same sex marriage as well and I think we even are of the same age and life stage and I often find myself not only agreeing with her thoughts but reading the tidbits she’s shared about herself and thinking OMG me too!!. That said, I am really glad you commented as I appreciate and agree with your points as well. I thank you for this resource as I’m newer in my anti-abortion beliefs and would like to be able to better articulate myself with them. Thank you!! I’ll most definitely check this out.
For the intellectually curious, but not big readers, maybe a movie on the subject would stimulate additional perspective. A start might be the movie called “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always. Next consider having discussions with impoverished, minority, enslaved in desperation people who don’t have the luxury of lounging around and enjoying this blog and the 600+ comments. Ask that growing populace their perspective. One might get an expanded view. Just saying.
You're correct - there's a betrayal at the heart of this. Unless we solve the greater, more fundamental, betrayals we are quite unlikely to solve this at all. In these gray areas we fail to be very intelligent at all. There's a bunch of articles here for someone to write.
I really enjoyed reading your view on this as a woman and as a Christian. I am a hardcore conservative, but I also believe that it is a nuanced and complicated issue. Your argument is very good. Some early choice is warranted but to insinuate that MONTHS are needed is ridiculous. Even in the case of rape and incest, months are not needed. I do think there is a potential for chemotherapy or radiation to save the life of the mother that would necessarily kill an unborn child past 15 weeks and those cases need to be analyzed very carefully and are exceedingly rare. Even then, I would hope that the oncologists would view the fetus as a human baby and consider waiting an additional 15 or 20 weeks. I would support late-term exceptions only in the most exceedingly rare and unusual cases (such as hypothetical one I mentioned). Like you said, this is a nuanced and complicated issue. It just brings me joy to know that a Christian mother could have such an even keeled and detailed viewpoint of abortion rather than just painting the picture black or white.
Thank you. I struggle with this. I try to be guided by what is most loving. The complete elimination of bodily autonomy, while morally justifiable for the sake of an innocent human life, does not feel loving to me. At the same time, the viability argument, while rooted firmly in bodily autonomy, allows for one human being to direct another innocent living human to be burned alive in saline or ripped apart limb by limb. It’s gruesome and cruel. That does not feel loving to me either.
My mom had a friend who was pregnant around the same time she was with me (I’m approaching 40). Her friend got whatever the disease from cat poop is that causes severe fetal abnormality. The doctors were also concerned the baby would die and the mom wouldn’t notice and the mom could die too as a result. I don’t know if this was legal then or now, though I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be if abortion at this stage/ for this reason is. Anyway, the mom and her husband insisted they could only induce labor. I’m not sure how far along she was - late second or very early 3rd trimester. She said she would absolutely not tolerate killing the baby first - she deserved at the very least to die in her parent’s arms. So that’s what they did. The degree of deformity was very upsetting. But the parents could plainly see their daughter would never have lived. They held her as she died just after birth, peacefully, in her mothers arms with her fathers hands also wrapped around her.
While their hearts were always broken for their lost child, they took great peace in knowing they comforted and cared for her until the very end. That is one of the most loving and heartbreaking stories I have ever heard around a heartbreaking and painful situation that is the rare case pro-abortion advocates use to justify the killing of any baby for any reason at any time in pregnancy (or even new borns in CA). The argument never explains why one must actively, cruelly, kill the child first.
On the other side my brother-in-law and his wife found out at 22 weeks their daughter was measuring only 18 weeks. When they got the genetic results which showed a rare mosaic trisomy, their doctor already had 3 physicians sign off on the abortion to schedule it right then and there. They had struggled to conceive for years. They had 2 viable eggs from IVF. Their son, 2 at the time, was the first. This was their last chance to have another child. They said absolutely not.
They prepared themselves for a still born or severely disabled child - which is what they were told to expect if they decided to “continue the pregnancy.” So they accepted it and hoped for the best.
My sister-in-law was induced at 33 weeks because of spiking blood pressure (something they were warned was likely to happen). Their daughter was born small, but otherwise healthy. She was breathing. She was healthy. She was totally normal. She left the NICU after only 2 weeks.
Today she is a completely normal, adorable, and insanely spunky 6 year old little girl. As it turns out the documentation of her mosaic trisomy is so rare no one actually knows much if anything about it. Based on the little girl at birth and beyond, it likely goes undiagnosed most of the time it happens. Had they not run the genetic testing to look for literally everything at such a late stage, all they would have known if she had in uterine growth restriction. To realize doctors err on the side of death without admitting they were giving the parents advice to kill their child based on an absolute worst case scenario in the basis of 5 document cases of this mosaic trisomy with a bad outcome worldwide is heartbreaking. It was only a couple of years after her birth that they found out just how flimsy the evidence was for the fear mongering the doctors engaged in.
Thanks for sharing the two stories. I think you understand that both of those stories are the rare exceptions, and even then, abortion was not the chosen answer. You also understand that sometimes abortion is warranted. And that's why I was so impressed with your first comment. When I listen to conservative talk radio, it seems that everything is hard right-wing. I sometimes listen or watch mainstream media, mostly for a laugh, and it's all hard left-wing. Lately, it seems that the left has gone far, far, far left -- so far that I wonder who actually watches CNN or reads the Washington Post. defund the police? late term abortions? cancel student loans? voting without an ID? No-bail laws? Guaranteed government income? Restricting political speech? (Pol speech would be deemed hate speech for the convenience of democrats). Yet, maybe conservative media has also gone a bit too far too, particularly on the topic of abortion. I love Charlie Kirk, Andrew Wilkow, Michael Berry, and others but not one conservative voice truly addresses the complexity and nuance of abortion.
I assume as a Christian conservative mother, people assume that you're just pro-life, against abortion in any scenario. Period. End of story. But people with conservative judeo-christian family values are just like any other group of people -- we're complex and we have a variety of opinions and we don't always get along.
In general, I believe that conservative Republicans with judeo-christian family values are on the right side of history -- mostly. I'm generalizing here, but kids raised in church in conservative households turn out better. I think that conservative Christian women make better wives and keep their husbands happier in more ways than just keeping a nice home, if you know what I mean. I think that conservative households are more likely to donate to charity (a proven fact). And if you have a flat tire, a conservative republican is about 20 times more likely to stop and help you fix it. That being said, that doesn't make all of our beliefs sacred and absolute.
I actually believe that most liberal democrats are actually against 2nd trimester and very much against 3rd trimester abortions. And I actually believe that more conservatives are sometimes OK with 1st trimester abortions than will admit to it. I think most conservatives, including myself, want to protect unborn children. In our zeal though, the movement to protect the unborn becomes so self-righteous that conservatives commonly get portrayed as being absolutely against abortion under any circumstance. Likewise liberals are so zealous in protecting abortion that they push to allow abortions even as the baby's head is crowning (or sadly even later). In reality, I don't think that the average conservative is completely anti abortion and I don't think the average liberal is pro-abortion up to the moment the baby pops out. If we could all agree on this, we might actually find that conservatives and liberals could mostly agree on abortion rights.
Really complex issue with many swamps to trap us. The stare decisis, precedent issue simply traps us in the double jeopardy where Roe vs. Wade left this. If I'm correct I believe the Roe Vs. Wade decision made it pretty impossible for States Rights to weigh in on this issue and change the law to fit the people's wishes.
Yes, this hot button, wedge issue is being used by both sides to try to distract us. I've been present at still births where the sacred nature of life is paramount and felt deeply.
Out of curiosity, what is your position on IVF? Those eggs that are fertilized and then frozen. Should a couple decide not to use all of their zygotes, would their destruction be akin to murder? Knowing this, should IVF be banned? For me, IVF has opened up Pandora’s box. What do you think?
Believe these are crucial points and I believe the real dilemmas lie in the culture. Before there are sperm & eggs which meet to form a human there are far larger interdependent webs which we cannot exist without successfully for very long. This is why open, Socratic debates on things such as the Abortion issue give us hope but also engender such complex uncomfortable emotions. At the intersection of Medicine and Governance lie many interesting tie ins.
No. As I’ve said, a unique human forms at the moment of conception, but only begins life/ is living with implantation. The (not very effective) rhythm method is meant to time sex so any fertilized eggs don’t have time to implant before the woman’s next period begins. IUDs do the same thing - prevent implantation - with far greater success.
Abortion is killing a living human being. Plan B is not. IUDs are not. I don’t believe destroying unused fertilized eggs from IVF is either, though many parents who have been through that strongly disagree.
It is a complex area - loaded with land mines. Anybody with common sense and a bit of education or experience knows a viable baby should not be killed. The sticky point you address is at what point does a fetus deserve the same right to bodily autonomy we expect. And obviously in 2020-2022 bodily autonomy isn’t counting for much. I’ve seen live video of Joe Biden espousing anti-abortion rhetoric when it was politically advantageous for him to do so. Our family deliberations on abortion quickly merge into Constitutional law and the issues of bodily autonomy. These are fundamentally, urgently important.
Constitutional law arguments are where the argument should devolve. Our Founders realized that national dictates are rarely good which is why they wanted to use 13 laboratories to deal with varying opinions (10th amendment). Roe v Wade did violence to this by usurping the States prerogatives to act democratically.
Any one who thinks overturning Roe is not pro democratic, or pro constitution has no concept of Democracy and has not read the Constitution (or Alito's draft decision, for that matter), but when has the left acted affirmatively for Democracy?
Taking advantage of a weakness in our body politic? Stare decisis?
Beautiful
Trent Horn is great!
Exactly. Life is liberty for the child and the mother. We are fooling ourselves that any other option is a solution.
I am a Catholic, but science and the common law form the basis for my opposition to abortion. It's an undisputed scientific fact that conception creates a human life apart from its mother. That it cannot sustain life on its own does not matter because we can all name instances where survival is dependent on another. None of those instances allow another individual to kill that person. At the common law, you were always entitled to use lethal force against another to prevent grave BODILY harm or death. Emotional, financial harm are not justifications. Abortion in the case of rape/incest is a trickier problem because generally you cannot be forced against your will to care for another. In consensual sex, however, the parties assume the risk of pregnancy.
Archbishop Sycamore,
Is your football team going to be better this year?😉
Lance
That argument can be turned around - In most places you can use lethal force against any person that enters your home without consent, but not a woman’s uterus?
Given the choice between a restrictive law like a heartbeat bill, and a law that would allow 22 week old fetuses to be ripped apart limb by limb or burned alive in saline, I will choose the heartbeat law. It places a high burden of personal responsibility on women to be aware of what is happening in our bodies, but it does not entirely rob us of the ability to assert bodily autonomy over our reproduction, not only in the case of tragedies like rape, but also in the case of mistakes like drunken one night stands. I also choose the heartbeat bill because it strains credulity to claim it takes over 4 months to assert a pregnancy is unwanted, and abortions at this stage are cruel as it demands the literal torturing to death of another human being. In this case, I will fall to the side of greater personal responsibility for women.
Conversely, after looking into the LA abortion ban being considered, the extreme position of banning all abortions at every stage, even certain forms birth control like plan B and IUDs, based on “the science of when life begins at conception,” I will choose to allow abortion until viability because I can’t ignore there is a profound difference scientifically between an embryo and a developed fetus, and bans on preventing pregnancy via emergency contraception denies women the right to autonomy over her own reproduction. It demands she maintain any pregnancy, even one started in violence, without consent.
In the case of rape it is accurate to say the embryo committed no crime, but it is also accurate to say the victim committed no crime, and forcing her to carry the offspring of her and her rapist is cruel. I would extend this beyond rape to simply the reality that it is cruel to give any man’s sperm more rights to reproduction than a woman has to her own womb, which is the outcome of outlawing plan B and IUDs. It strains credulity to tell women their right to bodily autonomy ends when a man’s sperm enters her body, even if that occurs against her will. I will not vote to rob women of our most basic right to bodily autonomy over our reproduction simply because a barely fertilized egg is technically a “human life.” I cannot square valuing human life with believing that a living human women should not have any rights at all to her bodily autonomy over reproduction - particularly if she’s violated. We are all flawed humans and the “close your legs” argument feels sanctimonious, often hypocritically so.
Yes, life begins at conception, but bodily autonomy doesn’t end at puberty for women. While I respect valid opinions on all sides, I’ve come to an important realization for my own personal stance that demands I honestly consider both lives.
The ideological arguments “based in science,” exist on both sides. They both sound great in theory, but end up being cruel, to me, in practice.
While I can only speak for myself, I believe I live in the space of moderation where law is often ultimately decided.
Abortion is not top of mind for mid terms. However, there are likely to justifiable backlashes against both extremes in moderate places like NC. For me, it will become an issue if either party pursues a legal mandate for either extreme, and I will vote against the party pursuing either extreme. Upon honest reflection I realize that if that happens it will impact my vote in this fall’s election, and every future election.
Everything you wrote here is why Europe has far more restrictive abortion laws than America does—and none of the hysteria over the issue that periodically bubbles up on our continent. If I'm allowed to put inks in Substack comments, here's a short summation of Europe vs. US on this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHrihwWJv8o
Transcript and Facts & Sources available here: https://www.prageru.com/video/whos-more-pro-choice-europe-or-america
The left side of the political spectrum wants us to emulate Europe, which they consider far more sophisticated, in virtually every way. Except this one.
Well said!
While the 28 day after birth rule is terrifying, some are now talking into the toddler years. Yep, you heard that right. When evil is allowed to creep in, like it was with early abortion, taking the next leap of evil is simple for society. No matter the subject, we have seen this with every leftist policy plan.
Thank you for this insightful comment, NCMom
So well said
I like to think of myself in team reality and as such I look at abortion from a collective standpoint in practical terms as well as from a perspective of trauma.
There is a trauma to the mother: that she has to reconcile for herself in her life and her relationship with God. However, it is minimal compared to the trauma an unwanted child could suffer
Forcing someone to bring a child into the world, especially if they are young, without resources, incapable or resentful, will only further the cycle of trauma throughout the community for two lifetimes instead of one.
In my view this is really a Socio economic issue. Most people who get abortions are doing so because they feel they cannot afford children and/or they do not have the familial support that it takes to do so without going insane...
People with resources will find a way. They will get abortions unobstructed. This will only impact low-income people who conservatives don't want to pay for anyway.
It is the biggest, most emotionally taxing and stressful thing anyone will ever do, in my opinion, is to be a parent. It is a never-ending job and the bulk of the weight lands on the female, not the ejaculator. How do we reconcile that?
It is a choice that should not be taken lightly regardless and should by no means be forced on to anyone.
This comment paints with a very broad brush. I've mentioned before, and NCmom eludes to this reality in her comment, but my husband and I try to put our money where our mouth is by supporting two very effective pro-life charities which directly assist expectant and already mothers with financial, spiritual, and physical needs. I think you need to check some studies because it has been shown time and time again that people who identify as "conservative" (and in particular, religious conservative) tend to give the most to charitable organizations. My objection is having the government be the sole support for people because it is spectacularly incompetent at doing so.
Finally, you need to check the stats put out by the Guttmacher institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) which lists the reasons why women procure abortions - you might be surprised.
I'm sorry you see fathers as only "ejaculators." If that is your experience, it explains much of your comment.
NAB, NCmom, you are nailing it about conservatives and charity (and abortion). Thanks!
Thank you for this comment; I’m unable to “like” it for some reason but I agree with you.
I am happily married with two children.
I'm sorry that's what you took from my comment. What a seriously crazy-making issue.
I think hard-line pro-lifers are some of the most hopeful and starry-eyed about people. Must be. I've met some real scumbags in my life but I like people and am generally hopeful.
Your assertion: “This will only impact low-income people who conservative don’t want to pay for anyway”
Actual reality: Room at the inn, and other organizations like it, are funded solely by pro-life people to help low income women in need. Moreover, conservatives are more likely to donate to charities than liberals, and more likely to volunteer their time to actually help the needy.
Who locked low income kids out of school while forcing their “essential worker” parents to go to work in person again?
So much for your assertion you are team reality.
In addition, there is a years long waiting list for childless couples to adopt an infant. There are families longing and waiting for a child, who would be blessed by a mom willing to carry to term and place her baby in a good home.
Thank you, NCMom. Love Life America, founded in Charlotte, will meet every need of a mom in crisis. I have friends who are mentors walking alongside moms and I volunteer at Habitat for Humanity to help one of them earn her hours to build her home.
I was with you until your last sentence.
As I agree with you on your points of charity, it doesn't change the fact that people of means will still get abortions if they want them.
And people of need have to be savvy, informed and hopeful enough to seek out the help.
I thought I was replying to the comment that pro-lifers are only pro-birth. Not the sociology-economic comment.
I agree there will be disparity in access. I think that is a sad reality of our current political state, and applies to far more than this debate. Inequality has and will always exist in every human society, and in nature, but the issue is being exacerbated terribly by our current political leadership to heartbreaking levels in the last 12 months. Poor mothers apparently need to cross the border illegally if they want to find safe formula for their babies.
Families wanting their already immune 5 year olds spared dangerous experimental injections with unknowable long term consequences that don’t protect anyone from anything might need to move out of CA if they want their kids to attend school in person. The lack of options for their child’s bodily autonomy there will fall disproportionately on the poor, but they’ll be able to have abortions or commit infanticide legally. Deep blue cities correlate to the greatest academic achievement gaps. Only parents of means can provide their kids an actual education and opportunity in life in most blue urban cities with enormous academic achievement gaps as leadership in most of those places opposes school choice that would give poor kids more options and opportunities.
Lady chuck,
Those situations certainly exist more than any of us would prefer and they are heartbreaking and difficult.
If someone ask you what young woman abandoned by her husband and left her destitute, without familial support and under immense mental and physical pressures should do with her toddler what would you advise?
It's not the same thing, at all. Not one bit. An aborted baby at 4 weeks literally looks like a cotton ball. Or a spider web with a thick middle. That's the physical reality.
So what a human being looks like determines the value of a human and legal what rights and protections they have?
I think we know the results of that thinking.
No. That is a false equivalency argument.
Nice description of a father. Ejaculator?
How do socio-economic concerns change the fundamental nature of a human? Are poor people less human than rich people?
Through the lens of valuing all human life as equal in value by nature of each individual’s status as a human questions about the mother or father’s desire or ability to provide for that human is immaterial.
It's only immaterial from a philosophical perspective of potential. But human life outcomes are weighed heavily on parental ability to provide both physically & emotionally. Socioeconomic stressors are too often abuse and trauma. So.
When I am at the DMV with my 7 month old, and the man sitting next to me is easily 10 years my junior, there with a woman who may be one of his 7 children from 6 different mothers, or his current "piece" (I cannot tell and obviously do not inquire), is he a father of which you speak? Or is he an irresponsible ejaculator leaving many fatherless children to grow up in a stress-filled life with dubious potential outcomes likely to continue the cycle of abuse?
I do not know what the right answer is. I simply choose to know that abortion is sad, it harms many women & families, and I am not one without sin to force my will on to others.
You don’t have to be without sin to know how God values human life.
knowing how God values human life and forcing that "knowing" on to others is the issue. women have been aborting babies since B.C. and will continue to do so regardless of your ideology or governmental restrictions.
It's just the reality.
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Thank you for writing what I intended to reply. 😔.
Great post, NCmom!
Beautifully articulated. Thank you.
Excellent.
It’s not valuable unless it provides votes and cash.
Valuable to who? Not valuable to we the people unless there is a bunch of thieves in place to take these from us. Guess there's always wampum beads and/or trade and a government of fire circles. Or maybe the fine old traditions of gambling - real gambling not Las Vegas style.
Apparently, Alex actually believes that the baby's body is just an extension of the mother's body. If that's the case, Alex, when the baby is killed, why doesn't the mother die, too?
Here's the ACTUAL relevance: The reason we have so many doctors today who are willing to administer deadly drugs like Remdezivir and dangerous vaccines like mRNA while withholding life-saving treatments like HCQ and Ivermectin is because most doctors today are whores. They will do anything they are asked to do as long as it comes with a big fat paycheck. This trend started with abortion. It continued with countless deadly and addictive drugs, including opioids, amphetamines, and benzos. It persists to the present day with our "Covid response." The medicalization of abortion fueled an industry of doctors with ZERO ethics.
Gosh, that's really hard to acknowledge, but my respect for medical professionals has really plummeted the last 2 years. Your analysis rings true. What a sad state we're in.
So true, Darby!
Yes, we must learn to draw lines - sometimes uncomfortable ones - at bodily autonomy. If we fail at this it leaves too many opportunities for rank opportunists of the first order to serially abuse us, our families, our nations, cultures, corporations, institutions, our planet. As our revolutionary ancestors did understand and set forth pretty capably except for some glaring trade offs it is up to us to remedy the answers lie in being willing to become more fully human.
I confess to not reading this whole post and just want to jump in and say that the non-hypocritical link is to say that anti-vaxx and anti-abortion are both stances against killing people. Hence, both are consistently Pro-life.
Right
...then there is also being against the profit motive for killing people; the cultural coercion to kill people; the censorship around alternatives to killing people (see Big Tech esp)...gee I think I see a pattern emerging...
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Killing is killing. Think we may have evolved past believing killing is an answer to anything? Then again some have warned there is simply no way to build that many prisons or guillotines.
Killing is an answer to the threat of being killed.
An uncomfortable reality we must accept as we work out the definition of bodily autonomy?
They are Pro-life and consistently so. To have linked these two things to conservatives and to simple, crass political expediency is a glaring hypocritical error and the first thing I noticed too.
What’s your stance on the death penalty?
that our legal system is too corrupt to implement it
Nailed it.
Theoretically this isn’t a great comparison. An innocent new human being shouldn’t be equated to a human convicted of monstrously taking the life of other humans. My opposition to the death penalty personally has nothing to do with equating humans who choose to be monsters with innocent humans who have committed zero crimes. My opposition is that we have a legal system that I believe in on the whole, but recognize major weaknesses in as well. Humans aren’t very good at playing God, and I can’t support the death penalty because miscarriages of “justice” are too common in our flawed human system.
That said, my position on abortion didn’t change when I had an ooppsy who is now an amazing 8 year old boy, and wouldn’t change if my daughter found herself with an unwanted pregnancy. (My position is based in very early bodily autonomy for the mom, and protection of life after the first 8-10 weeks).
If my husband or one of our children were brutally murdered, I accept it’s likely I’d want the death penalty if I felt confident the right person was charged and convicted by a jury..... so there’s that too.
I would expand my comment to add: or sometimes too lazy. There is the im-famous Texas case of Michael Morton who was falsely imprisoned for 25 years for the murder of his wife in part because law enforcement didn't follow up leads that conflicted with their theory of the crime. DNA evidence finally cleared him, but not until the actual murderer killed another victim. Thank goodness he did not get the death penalty.
When we study the law we quickly encounter rightful laws which err in the interpretation of these laws. It is up to we the people to ever reinterpret the law to meet our ever expanding understanding. If we the people fail at this there will be plenty of abusive, rank opportunists who will do it for us.
Go easy on Alex. He’s a Yale man and they have a hard time understanding this.
Alex operates in a strictly materialist frame of mind- only what he can see,taste,handle,has meaning for him.His is the viewpoint that the laws of a supernatural realm can’t have real validity in the material world.And,if there is no God,then Alex’ analysis is a reasonable one.But if there is a God,and He is the God of Abraham,Isaac,and Jacob,oy such a problem he has…
I don't think there is a God. And I am 100% against killing babies.
Agree.. I am a christian, but acknowledge that christian beliefs should have nothing to do with abortion. Abortion is a worldly act, and the killing of a baby in the womb is a vile and heinous and inhumane act - with or without religion. Pro life has (or should have) nothing to do with religion and should separate itself from it....
How would you feel if your 5 year old child was murdered? The 5th commandment was pretty specific.
Totally on board with the 5th and all of the Commandments. However, I don't need the Commandments to know that murder is wrong. Murder is wrong with or without religion..
Good for you and no /s intended.
Alex has a continuing dilemma: truth is unitary. Truth is indivisible. If the materialist weltanschauung is untrue, then his pursuit of truth is corrupted. It is constantly polluted with falsity. Truth is the alchemist's end. The truth about matter. We will never understand the truth about matter without understanding the truth about matter's creator.
Who loves matter- He created it…
God is a spirit - yet we material creatures are created in His image. The unitary nature of truth is bound up in the unitary nature of God. "Thy Word is truth" The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth, and that one Man who dares to imagine He is the truth.
St.Augustine wrote,in DE TRINITATE,that when he reflected on the image of God in man,he came to believe that the image must be tripartite,as God Himself is,and that this image must exist in the mind of man,not his body.Further,in meditating on God’s image in the mind,he came to believe that it consisted in the Memory,the understanding,and the will.Memory,the image of the Father,for He knows all,understanding,the image of the Son,the divine Logos who spoke the world into being,and the will,image of the Holy Spirit which desires the things of God.
Whoever claimed politics wasn't intertwined with philosophy?
He's an observant Jew I thought. Not sure how he can reconcile that with turning a blind eye to 800k abortions a year in the US alone.
There is a difference between observing and believing.This may be what it looks like…
I am also Jewish. You are asking a religious question. We don’t have the same foundation and fundamental principals as say Catholics. As has been quipped many times by my fellow Jews: “Jews don’t consider any fetus to be viable until it graduates medical school. 😝🤦♂️😂
Tough audience😄
I appreciate good self-deprecation :)
Lots of people are Jewish and here’s some discourses from the intellectual bastions of YouTube this morning on the possible existence of hypocrisy amongst those who are moral, upstanding citizens:
https://youtu.be/SlcLlH49mCY
Existential?
Ultimately
Hey,you stole my handle😄
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Exalting reproductive choice enables the prenatal killing based on sex and disability, plus embryo selection--central to IVF--gamete sales, cloning and genetic engineering.
These measures commodify human life are already causing, and will cause more, social harm via genetic inequality and alienation than drugs ever could.
Also, abortion is an exercise of sovereignty over another, second human being, that lies within a woman's body.</