Abortion: 10 years as an atheist and I still don't get it

[The Grand Nudger]

Thought experiment.  Consider a fetus which, in your mind, would be better off aborted. Suppose we forgo the abortion. Now wind the clock forward 20 years.  Are you going to advise this person to commit suicide?  Because they are impoverished or severely disabled or deformed, would your sincere and most helpful form of advice be that they kill themselves? Because if that's not what you would advise, then you would have to agree that their state of life, however suboptimal, is better than nonexistence.  Which again funnels back to my point which you disagreed with: that abortion is (obviously) the worst case scenario for the fetus.

What I would or wouldn't advise a person to do often hinges on my own biases rather than whether or not that thing can be morally justified.  In abortion or suicide, that either can be morally justified doesn't amount to me thinking that it's a good idea, or thinking that it's a good idea to tell someone else to do them, or that it's any of my business to advise a person in either case.  If someone sought my opinion, and the reasons they gave for either weren't lucid, I'd pipe up and say as much, but if they were...I'd have to tell them that I understood, and that it was clearly a difficult decision - that..maybe, they should seek advise from someone more qualified than myself.  OFC I could tell them what I would or wouldn't do...but that's just me, there's always that caveat.  

Then again, maybe you would advise suicide. I don't know. To be consistent you'd pretty much have to. But I'm not the kind of person who would walk into a school for the disabled and blurt out something like, "Y'all shoulda been aborted, and y'all should kill yourselves."

I've found myself in situations where I definitely thought that a person should commit suicide while they still had the chance, situations where I would toy with the idea... but that's not the sort of thing I tell people even when I think it.  

As for me, I find self preservation to be a compelling drive. Maybe not everyone here feels the same way.  Preservation of offspring is certainly not a priority. I get the feeling some people here would be like, "Oh, what's that, doc? My baby has a wart on its face? K, let's just abort and start over."

Self preservation is certainly a compelling drive, as is the preservation of offspring, but that doesn't certify the drive as moral or rational.  I'm not really sure that a baby having warts is something that many expecting mothers lose sleep over and consider an abortion for.   

I'll give you an example of real life decisions.  My wife and I both love kids.  We wanted to have eight kids.  Unfortunately for us both, we didn't meet when she was 16.  She was in her late thirties, and had a family history of complications.  Every pregnancy was going to be high risk.  The first, our big girl...went south hard at delivery, the nerves in her right arm were severed from the spinal cord, and my wife nearly died in the process.  My daughter had to be resuscitated at delivery.  It was horrifying.  The OBGYN later described it as the worst delivery she'd ever been a part of.  

Thing is, we knew the risks going in.  We were made aware many months beforehand that something like this could happen if it even went to term, that every indicator was present.  We had to have the abortion conversation..and we even had to have the "if it goes south and it's me or her, what do we want" convo.  Can you imagine me responding to my wife with any of the prissy shit that you seem to think is relevant?  Both of us have ideological disagreements with abortion..but reality has a way of challenging prior commitments.  The sort of despair and uncertainty it took to get my wife to consider it and bring it up to me doesn't take a mind reader to work out - and it wouldn't be done with her after she had the baby.   

Our second went off without a hitch.  Our third was a gestational diabetes shitshow - but my first son!  Then we had two failures.  We considered calling it quits.  Three, however, is not eight...so we decided to give it another go.  Another boy...but this time, she was in her forties, with a family history of complications, one disabled child, gestational diabetes,  and a less than pristine body wrecked by three full pregnancies in 5 years and two miscarriages.  Nothing went right.  Again we knew months beforehand, and better than we realized the first time, how bad things could get.  We had to have the convo again, we went through with it again.  He spent the first month or so of his life under a hood, on a ventilator, ivs,  tube fed.  Couldn't even touch him.  We had to go back and forth to the hospital to visit him.  So..you know, we got fixed after that, couldn't take it anymore.

During all of this, for years.. we had been driving to and fro to Cinci to a research outfit for our first girl.  Huge arrays of needles prodding and sending charges into her not because there was anything they could do for her, or anything they would promise us, but because the data might one day help some kid.  Then there was the PT.  She never crawled, because she couldn't.  We didn't sleep for fear that she would roll over, and, unable to use her arm to right herself..suffocate beside us.  Our first physical therapist tried for about 6 months....then quit, in tears.  My wife lost her job for missed time.  Then we lost our car because we had to choose between paying medical bills and a note.  Then we couldn't pay rent.  We had to move in with friends in a different state, now we were both unemployed.  We went to food banks.  Eventually we couldn't burden her friend in good conscience and we moved 1k miles back down south to live with her family..but they're on a fixed income.  Then my family.   We were on foodstamps.  My brother loaned me his car.  I worked for minimum wage.  I couldn't pay my child support.  We'd lost everything we had between moves and sudden poverty. I was redeeming cds and I sold a gerber insurance policy that had been taken out when I was born just to stay above water and keep our kids clothed and fed. I sold property at firesale prices in a climate where no one had the money to buy and values had already tanked. The strain on our relationship is impossible to overstate.  My wife floated the idea of divorce, an incident that she still feels shame and cries about years later.  It took us years to dig our way back up and out of that hole...and it took the misery of others - I was constantly hovering over foreclosures. We became the worst and most predatory versions of ourselves, lol. I spent most of my time, even my free time, away from my family. The good ole bad days, I supplemented our income with less than legal™ activities. As you read all of the above, note that we started in a much more privileged place than the average pregnant couple. We could afford to make those trips, we could afford elective testing, pt, we had investments, we owned real estate, we had friends with big houses, we had family with big hearts, we possessed marketable skills, the safety net in florida is impressive compared to other states...it's hard to find a real cracker in florida to arrest for failure to pay in mass, and all of my friends and peers were well off enough to be more the blow types than the rock types. More dro than dirt. Pills, not meth.

-and all for the birth of children.  Or, you know, warts and shit.  So..what I'm trying to say, is shut the fuck up, lol.

Like I said, a warzone is a place where human wellbeing is hardly a consideration. So the wellbeing of a fetus is not a priority. In a situation where hundreds of people might die brutally in a span of 30 seconds, what the hell does an abortion matter?

Trailer parks and projects aren't exactly places where human wellbeing is given pride of place, either.  Why abortion would matter on a battlefield, or in a trailer park, or in a project..is something you'd have to ask those people to ascertain, and you'll have to give it actual consideration..rather than address any of these things with the sole intention to dismiss them in the silliest of ways.

Abortions are not a moral good in a warzone.  War is hell. Morality kindly fucks off when we're in war.  It's purely tactics. This is why we developed rules of war - because historically it has been so unspeakably terrible.

The only morally good option when it comes to war is to refuse to participate. Because just think about it. What would happen if everyone did that?

If you say so, nevertheless, a lucid and compelling case can be made in spite of your lazy absolutism in either regard.

You started this by asking how an abortion could be morally justified.  Is that actually what you wanted?

It's very often the case that an argument for both sides of any given coin, and many coins, exists - real world moral considerations are rarely binary. It's okay for you to be on one side of one coin, it's entirely another thing for you to insist that the coin only has the one side and is the only coin.