Why Pro-Lifers Are Dead Wrong: From a Former Anti-Abortionist

I used to be opposed to abortion because a fetus is a basically a less developed baby and does being in a womb mean there is no right to life? Ridiculous. But over time a series of good arguments have led me to reverse my position.

Separation of Church and State

Many people oppose abortion because their church or religion tells them it is wrong. Now you can have the personal religious beliefs that you want but is it really fair to force all of society to live by your religious rules and be a theocracy? How would you like it if you had to live under Sharia Islamic law? So in order to make your religious belief the law you will need a rational non-religious reason for abortion being wrong.

Dogmatic Code vs Utilitarian Pragmatism

People often oppose abortion because they have a moral that killing of humans is wrong except in rare exceptions but by itself is a dogmatic belief and if unsupported by evidence that it is overall harmful it is an unproven dogmatic belief and why should you force society to live by your dogmatic belief? So if you want to make your opposition to abortion more than just a personal belief and a law for everyone you need actual evidence that it is harmful to society. People also make exceptions for murders and war for their no killing rule but maybe there are other exceptions as well based on pragmatic reasoning.

Fetus Rights

Many pro-lifers assume fetuses have the same rights as born humans but humans don't have rights just because we have human DNA. Tumors, sperm cells, and white blood cells also have human DNA but that doesn't mean they have the same rights. Also if we find intelligence life does that mean they don't have rights because they aren't human? Of course not. What gives us rights is our attributes like intelligence, features, personalities, consciousness, and the like.

Lets take the exact moment a sperm united with an egg making the first cell of a new fetus. How can it have the same rights as a full human when its just a little cell and more rights than an animal when it has vastly less in common physically than animals do? Since it doesn't have the attributes of a full human its not a real person yet and just a cell with human DNA. Also, since a sperm cell and eggs are also earlier versions of a human is disposing of these murder? Ridiculous.

So the level of personness build up during the pregnancy as the fetus becomes more of a person. Early on the fetus isn't even sentient which means it is as self-aware as a rock, thats not a person. It does gain a beating heart and the ability to feel pain but do these really make one human? At the very least one can only really argue its anything close to a human in the last 1/3 of the pregnancy.

Women's Bodies

A pregnancy has major effects on a woman's body and has the affect of having a major illness for 9 months. Pregnancies are still dangerous and carrying a baby can be highly painful and uncomfortable and after something has just been ripped through your vagina it takes a long time to recover. Sometimes the pregnancy goes wrong requiring a c-section which is slicing the belly to extract the baby and is a surgery that has perminant scars. Pregnancy also leads to a very different body and major weight gain and never being able to be as skinny ever again. For some women it can even create temporary diabetes and other conditions.

Also raising a child is extremely expensive and is a major problem if forced on women. Raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, can inhibit your career, education, and just having an enjoyable youth. Also raising a child can be very stressful and unhappy especially when you don't really want to. Now you might just say adoption but a lot of mothers who want to adopt when pregnant choose to keep the baby because they naturally have that maternal instinct and feel shame and remorse for abandoning their child.

People have the right to what happens to their own bodies and it is wrong to force people to do things to their own bodies they don't want. What if I was dying from kidney failure. would it be right for you to use the law to force me to give up my kidney because the right to life comes before right to ones body? So why should women be forced to give up their right to body for a life of a fetus?

Population Control and Improvement

Abortion has some good impacts for society in general. First off the world is quickly becoming over-populated and our population is quickly reaching 10 billion people. Food prices are going to rise, there will be water shortages and economists have found that there are not enough resources for the entire world to become 1st world countries. Traffic jams and rising housing costs are another result. This over-population is leading to a lot of destruction of forests, trash being dumped everywhere, and depletion of natural resources like fish.

There have been 60 million abortions in the US and 1.4 billion in the world and without them the US would already have over 400 million people when adding them plus any children from them. This would make our country heavily over-populated and a huge economic burden supporting all these extra children. The world would have 9 billion by now and its just the reality that the only way to really have controlled populations is a combination of voluntary birth control and abortion. Without them populations will explode and it will be starvation, poverty, and disease that controls populations.

Also abortion has allowed major reductions in down syndrome because of screenings that allow parents to abort these children. With abortion we save massive amounts of money supporting mentally challenged people and remove the burden of many parents of having to support someone not just 18 years but their entire lives. This improvement to the gene pool will result in higher intelligence and a better population and better humans mean better economic advanced and a better society.

 

Additional Arguments

Teens and Rape

If abortion is wrong then what happens if a woman is raped? Should she be forced to carry the baby of her rapist simply because it has a right to life? What if she didn't get to Plan B in time or changed her mind a few days later, a bit too late for it? Also is Plan B wrong because it kills a very early human? How is it right to add to the trauma of rape with forcing a woman to have a child?

Also if a teen becomes pregnant that will greatly ruin their childhoods and their lives and just removing the fetus will make everything go back to normal instead of turning their lives upside down.

Bad Choices

People don't always make good choices and sex is a powerful biological drive that results in people making bad choices and its crazy to force these bad choices to turn their lives upside down.

People have sex when they are not supposed to, its going to happen. People will fail to take Plan B. People will decide to keep the baby instead of adoption because of their instinct. People will fail to use condoms and protection because of this drive, the inconvenience or lack of pleasure. Sometimes people especially teens don't really fully understand sex and make bad choices. Sometimes the condom breaks or the birth control fails.

Should this turn lives up side down? Abortion allows people to set their lives back to normal and plan and have the best lives possible.

Existing Restrictions

Many pro-lifers don't know this but most states in the US ban abortion in the third trimester where the fetus are mostly like babies and this type of abortion when legal is extremely rare because most women who have plan to carry their baby for 6 months almost always end up delivering.

Also many pro-abortion countries also have even harsher restrictions than the US and have an even lower line on when abortion is illegal. When it is legal they often also require counseling first to make sure the parents are informed of their choices.

Illegalization Impacts

On top of all this think of the other impacts of making abortion illegal. Before it was illegal women would resort to risky painful illegal procedures to have an abortion because they simply didn't want to carry a baby. This resulted in a lot of loss of life.

In addition if a fetus is a full human with rights and it should be illegal to kill it then that means that women who have it aborted are guilty of first degree murder and should be either executed or put in prison with hardened criminals. How can you really support teenages and rape victims being jailed for life with hardened criminals?

 

Good posts....shows some thought....I wish Anti- Choicers would apply thought instead of emotion and hyperbole......

 

in other words, find a good reason for an innocent human life to be snuffed out

 

A fetus is not a human being, not an innocent child.

 

Yeah, having to use logic and reasoning, facts and science, that's really a bitch isn't it?

 

None of those are the fundamental issue - is the fetus a human being or not? It is clearly a human at 9 months, the medical community recognizes it as a human at 21-24 weeks (depending upon the medical facility). Sometime between conception and 24 weeks, it becomes a human being. When?

 

War mongers and the Pentagon do.

 

As you have been told many times a human fetus is human, no one says it isn't.

It is NOT A human BEING as in "person with rights".


NO, it does NOT become A human being until birth....before birth it is only human.

The medical community recognizes it as human at conception....it recognizes it as VIABLE at 23 weeks.


See what happens when emotions and hyperbole are your only defense?

Facts are all that count.

The fundamental issue is that women have the right to their own bodies.

 

You are essentially relying on an argument from authority but I don't think that society has abortion totally figured out yet and doctors aren't experts in legal and moral issues. Being a human being medically isn't the same as being a human person morally and legally.

 

Perhaps we can have our militarized police take out these fetuses.

 

Actually it happens all the time. Your sperm are technically "life" and they get killed all the time. And there are sometimes good reasons to kill humans, look at war and punishment. In war you end up shooting perfectly nice people who happen to be on the other side for the benefit of our society.

 

Abortion is a medical procedure so lets leave it to doctors not police and lawmakers. I am pro-choice and my whole point is to get Washington out of women's vaginas.

 

Meh, all that is required is an endless wedge with which to incite the rabble against one another. Same as it ever was.

 

Don't get too cynical. Peace!

 

Understand your power structure, peace is not what they are about.

 

Yep. Even if the woman just wants to for shits and giggles even...

 

Crying isn't an argument..

 

Irrelevent... the woman has every right to abort.

 

The medical community is driven by the legal aspects. That's why the medical community assumes its a human being at 24 weeks and they treat it as a person - otherwise they get taken to court.

 

Yes, and the legal aspect should be driven by logic and reason. I am mostly fine with our existing abortion laws in the West.

 

NO, they do not treat it as a person, not a legal person. It isn't until it's BORN.

The "medical community" knows it's a human from conception and a human being at birth.


The "medical community" knows the fetus is viable at 23 weeks, they do NOT "assume it's a human being" at 23 weeks..

 

It is driven by logic and reason - that's why the medical community came up with the 24 week rule. Medical science has determined its obviously a human at 24 weeks, backed up by the legal opinion (perhaps you don't realize that even Roe allows regulation of abortion and protection of the baby in the 3rd trimester).

 

But its being a human being not simply a person that allows you to have rights. We need a timeline more relevant to this moral issue not just some medical term.

 

In other words, you want a criteria that allows abortion. The medical community and legal community has decided that 24 weeks is the latest time at which the baby is a human being requiring the medical care any human being would receive. Because that runs counter to your bias, you want to reject it.