Slavery
24 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in The Big Picture Tags: abortion, fetus, morality, personhood, women's rights, zygote
I want to spell this out for you: I am anti abortion. I oppose the abuse of abortion. However, I am pro choice. I feel passionately that no woman should be forced to host a fetus in her body against her will. That is slavery. If a woman finds herself impregnated and that is not what she wants, she should be able to get a safe, legal abortion.
What is a slave? “A person who is the property of and wholly subject to another“. If a woman says: “I am not prepared to rent out my body and do the work of giving birth for this potential human in me,” and the response is: “Too bad,” then that woman is declared the property, the slave of the being in her uterus.
If the fetus could be removed and placed into another womb, or into an artificial womb, there would be no debate here. As it is, freeing the slave costs a life. Now the debate becomes hugely complicated. It is not straightforward, like ‘taking a knife and stabbing someone because you were angry with them is wrong’. Instead, we have no choice but to move into territory where fact gives way to opinion, and lofty super-intellectual debates stand in stark contrast to the very human dilemma faced by women impregnated against their will*. Like it or not, people disagree whether this:
…should be given priority over this:
We cannot find solid, indisputable answers here, it’s not possible. But we cannot force others to act according to our point of view. Society does not have a say in this, it simply has to be the choice of each individual woman. About 25 – 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. If we were faced with some disease that killed 25 – 50% of all born infants, the entire medical world would come to a screeching halt and throw every resource into combating this killer. But they don’t, because zygotes and fetuses are not the same as born babies. Our own behaviour doesn’t support the idea that abortion is murder.
It is, instead, a very difficult choice that each woman who faces it has to make for herself, and we all have to focus on providing NEUTRAL counselling (not an effort to influence her one direction or the other) and safe facilities.
Also, this guy is a dick:
Further reading: The Morality of Abortion - a neutral look at both sides of the debate.
And for those who argue women should be protected from abortion as it destroys them psychologically, that is questionable: Psychological Responses After Abortion
*A woman who becomes pregnant when she wasn’t intending to become pregnant, is pregnant against her will. Sometimes this is the result of irresponsibility, sometimes it’s the result of the failure of whatever precautions she took, sometimes it’s forcible. Whether she engaged in sexual intercourse willingly or was raped is not the issue here. Anyone who says: “Well, you can just refrain from sex, so if you have sex and you become pregnant, it’s your own fault” should be castrated (sorry, but I feel extremely strong about this, as usually those who take this nose-in-the-air stance are men, who can satisfy their biological needs, shrug and walk away). The sex urge is in many ways the foundation of our being, we are programmed in every way to reproduce. Saying: “Ah, well, just don’t have sex” is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life.
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