(December 16, 2013 at 8:36 pm)Polaris Wrote: Not talking from a medical perspective where the life of the mother/unborn child is in danger, I can't justify standing against both war and death sentences yet turn around and support abortions.
Do you support a person's right to defend themselves if they come under an attack?
The best analogy I've heard on the bodily rights argument is this: You choose to work in a psychiatric hospital knowing that there are patients in that hospital that suffer from violent tendencies and that you might become the target of their violent aggressions. One day a patient attacks you. Do you have a right to defend yourself from that attack? Or do you have to curl up in a ball and let them kick the shit out of you because you consented to working in an environment knowing that being the victim of a violent assault was a possibility?
Consenting to working in the psychiatric hospital is equivalent to consenting to sex. Being attacked by the patient is equivalent to getting pregnant.
No woman should be forced to endure the risks of pregnancy against her will (getting the shit beaten out of her by the patient) because she consented to having sex (or working in that hospital).
And pregnancy is very risky. It is inherently risky. You cannot divorce the medical repercussions of pregnancy from the argument because every pregnancy, EVERY SINGLE PREGNANCY, puts the mother's life and health at risk:
http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/ma...ations.htm
[I am listing the complications here, go to the link above for more information on these risks]
CDC.gov's list of pregnancy complications Wrote:The following are some common maternal health conditions or problems a woman may experience during pregnancy—
Anemia
UTIs
Mental Health Conditions
Hypertension
Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
Obesity and weight gain
Hyperemesis Gravidarum
http://www.thelizlibrary.org/site-index/...iz/004.htm
The Liz Library Wrote:What women are "at risk" for complications?
ALL of them.
Every minute of every day, somewhere in the world, most often in a developing nation, a woman dies from complications related to
pregnancy or childbirth.
And that's just talking about the immediate physical repercussions.
Below is a partial list of the physical effects and risks of pregnancy. This list does not include the many non-physical effects and risks a woman faces in reproducing, such as the economic investment of work interruptions from pregnancy and breastfeeding, or time lost from career and other opportunity costs involved in pregnancy and later child rearing (mothers comprise 90+% of primary parents), or the emotional trauma of problem pregnancies, or the numerous economic and lifestyle repercussions that pregnancy and motherhood will have on the remainder of a mother's life.
This page was written in response to the popular, but mother-denigrating and nonsensical notion that, absent a substantial investment of some other sort, i.e. absent committed emotional and financial support of the mother of his child through pregnancy and beyond, and a familial relationship with both of them in fact, a "father" is, without anything more, a father, let alone an "equal parent."
We have been culturally conditioned to accept some incredible and false ideas. But it is offensive to assert that pregnancy impacts men in any way equivalent to its impact on women; that fathers and mothers have comparable experiences or feelings in connection with pregnancy or their babies; that nonresident unwed fathers, based on DNA, ipso facto "should" have "rights;" that, from the standpoint of family laws or women's choices regarding abortion, pregnancy should be viewed as nothing more than an "inconvenience"; or that the riskiest "jobs" in this world all are performed by men. (Compare the percentages of women carrying the scars of pregnancy with the percentages of men who carry the scars of battle.)
Normal, frequent or expectable temporary side effects of pregnancy:
Normal, expectable, or frequent PERMANENT side effects of pregnancy:
Occasional complications and side effects:
Less common (but serious) complications:
More permanent side effects:
Care for more? How about these factoids?
The Liz Library some more Wrote:
Abortion is not like the death sentence. With the death sentence no one else's life is necessarily at risk based on whether that inmate lives or dies. With pregnancy, the mother's life is ALWAYS at risk regardless of whether she gives birth to a live baby or a stillborn.
In a way, though, abortion is a little like war, only not in the way you are thinking, Polaris, because the baby is the aggressor, and the mother has every right to defend herself from that aggressor.
A woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy if she is unwilling to accept the risks of pregnancy and regardless of whether she was a consenting sexual partner or not.
Is abortion regrettable? Yes.
Do I wish that it didn't have to happen? Absolutely. In a perfect world every pregnancy would be wanted and every woman who didn't want to become pregnant would never have to worry about that possibility.
Do I think it's right to conscript women into enduring a pregnancy against their will? Absolutely not.
So regardless of whether I think abortion is right or wrong or sad or regrettable or anything else, and regardless of how I feel about war or the capital punishment, I have to be pro-choice because I think it's wrong to force someone to endure something that they don't consent to.
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.
