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Originally Posted by rstevens62
Thats an interesting stance to take...the young girl is pregnant due to a BAD choice she made...so when it comes to whether or not to terminate the pregnancy, 'her choice' should prevail?
Since she made a bad choice in getting pregnant, what makes you feel her choice to end it would be any better?
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Ending it if she doesn't want a kid will probably be a better choice than getting pregnant due to youthful carelessness because during most of the pregnancy the fetus has nothing to lose...which leads me to another understandable reason for abortions: it usually benefits the fetus.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the U.K. Fetuses likely won't have the equipment to experience pain before about 24 weeks, and likely won't feel it until the third trimester.
Some people wonder if pain can be felt in a meaningful way...a way that actually hurts, through more primitive parts of the body that develop earlier than the part of the brain those colleges believe is responsible for experiencing pain. However, the American one has, I've read, 58,000 members and appears to be a pretty respected organization.
If a fetus cannot feel pain, death is not a negative experience for it because it won't understand death enough to perceive it that way. It won't understand the future so death would not "steal" future goals away from it either. Death would, therefore, arguably, be either a neutral or positive experience for the fetus, due to allowing the fetus to avoid future harm at no cost to itself.
If the fetus had some kind of disorder, an early abortion essentially acts as a painless cure for that...because the mother could just have another child without the disorder later. She could have had one of two children, a child without a disorder, or a child with the disorder. In this scenario she had the child without the disorder and the child with the disorder never existed in any way that is really meaningful, so aborting the first fetus with the disorder isn't really different from curing the first fetus of the disorder then birthing it...except in the sense of what matters to the parents. We're not robots. Different people will have different, usually extremely influential, sorts of bonds to what they consider their "children" and a parent who wants to keep the fetus with Downe syndrome could very well love that kid enough that the kid could have a more wonderful life than most kids without Downe syndrome
But if a parent doesn't want to raise a kid with Downe syndrome and gets an early abortion, before the fetus can experience pain, the fetus isn't losing anything from that. However, if governments force mothers not to get abortions of fetuses with disorders before the fetuses can likely experience pain...that's basically the equivalent of the government injecting diseases into random children.
Even after fetuses can experience pain abortion is still more of a trade off than anything necessarily harmful. Most of the time when people get late abortions, when fetuses might experience pain, it's for some pretty large reasons that might effect the life of the fetus as much, or more, than most birth defects.
The abortion would essentially act as a cure for that with a side-effect of pain.
If we ignore all that though, really, a major reason why people say abortion is about a woman's rights over her own body is...I'm not sure we have any reason to believe abortion at any stage of pregnancy causes much more harm eating meat from factory farms. Both the fetus after achieving the ability to experience pain and meat animals have a lot of similarities. That's kind of an ugly thing to think about...but that's consistent with the way our society treats most forms of nonhuman life.
Humans are different from most animals because we can
A: have our future plans essentially "stolen" through death. Most animals don't understand the future well enough, or death well enough, to really lose things in that way.
B: fear death and
C: We are social organisms and each death of ours causes pain to people who knew us and
D: Human adults and older children, unlike fetuses, understand death enough to, more or less, know whether we want it or not. The concept of the future is totally beyond fetuses. They can't have opinions on it. Unlike humans, adults and at least older children, they lack the understanding to know they want to exist.
And finally E: Legalizing taking the lives of adult humans without their consent breaks the bonds of trust holding society together and collapses society. Allowing abortion doesn't do that, because it causes no one to fear their life ending unexpectedly.
Even 1 year old fetuses have many of those factors in common with fetuses. About the only difference is that they're able to experience pain and they've been awake and aware of their surroundings for considerably longer.
You could kind of argue, though, that maybe we should legalize the euthanasia of older children, for certain life-altering conditions, all the way up to the point where they are better, or as skilled, as than their parents at knowing whether they should exist or not. For far into their childhood they won't have a firm understanding of the nature of life either. You'd just see more negative ramifications building up the older you go...with kids getting scared of being euthanized because they're sick and having their dreams "stolen" by unexpected death.
The only definite age when taking human lives without our consent for our supposed benefit would clearly cause more harm than good would come when we're fairly old children who can clearly have a decent understanding of the difference between life and death, and understand enough to be made scared at the prospect of having their lives taken just for getting sufficiently sick.
That's the extreme branch of what the "pro-choice" movement might be, but never is. Nobody wants that sort of thing. But, as harsh-sounding as that is, at least it could, arguably, all be for the benefit of the child.
When people want to ban abortions before fetuses can feel pain though...I see that as worse than legalizing the euthanasia of three year olds with cancer, because banning abortions when fetuses can't feel pain definitely will harm the fetus in some instances, because the fetus wouldn't lose anything from death...whereas legalizing the euthanasia of three year olds with cancer would only harm them in a kind of debatable way, and will help them in another kind of debatable way.
Most people don't think about that though. I find it awe-inspiring just how motivated people are to run to their flimsy, fictional, imagined realities whenever they think of anything discomforting. People, usually, just pick whatever worldview feels best and totally ignore reality, even when their worldview dramatically skews that reality to the point of altering everything about their lives for basically no reason.
Pro-life mothers go through the pain of childbirth then give their kids up for adoption, when they could have had an early abortion, for basically no reason, just because it appeals to their imagined worldview. I've heard some pro-life mothers talk about how they nearly died from childbirth and still discourage abortion...not just late abortion. They talk about abortion in general. People maintaining their flimsy, fictional worldviews, oftentimes, appears to mean more to them than almost anything...more than what's best for their lives, or other people's lives too.
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